Finally, in more ways than one.

Thus ends the semester and my life comes back to me. A few friends have asked after me this past week, especially with a certain anniversary placed last Friday, and I finally feel capable of answering. After making veggie lasagna with homemade everything, listening to wonderful music, and savoring certain fine company, I slept in until nine in the morning. Nine in the morning: The latest I have slept since starting at the bakery. Even the nights I was up until four or so, I woke up around eight. Surely, I am living a new life as of this morning with the ability to sleep in so luxuriously.

Papers were handed in by email Thursday morning or by hand (my roommate Tim's, to be exact) on Sunday. Their subjects plagued my mind through the previous month and given an appropriate reprieve, I look forward to reading them over and savoring that work. For the moment, though, I am occupied by comic books, housecare, cooking, video games, and attending to those pleasures like Philosophy that Bakes Bread. Last night's quiet evening was spent lounging and listening to Bill Callahan, Bon Iver, some Bill Withers (the album gets a little too synthy halfway through), Neko Case, The Kinks (new purchase from the freshly reopened Bookman's where I also bought comics), and the reassuringly rich selections on Alela Diane radio on Last.fm. I doubt very much I could have had a similar evening any time since classes began with the slight exception of Thanksgiving weekend in Lincoln. (Sidenote, I slept in until nine in Lincoln, but my bodyclock was on Rocky Mountain time, so it doesn't really count.)

I think about food all the time again. Pre-dawn breakfast on Thursday was hashbrowns with onions and chard; last weekend's dinner party was bruschetta on baguettes for hors d'oeuvre and vegetarian paella that was immensely well-received, followed by maple-pumpkin muffin-cookies (accidentally muffin-y) for dessert as well as tasty additions from Miss Nina Porter and her company; I broiled and sautéed veggies and sweet potatoes the other day for a mid-afternoon lunch with happy results; a study-time dinner took leftover bruschetta and dressed a toasted sandwich with spinach, radish, and Asiago cheese on a baguette (also leftover from the dinner party); and have even begun adding sliced apples and pears to just about any piece of bread with peanut butter on it. My brother's gift of a kefir starter is well-received and I look forward to culturing some when I return from Lincoln; hopefully I can lift some recently expired milk from the bakery for the task.

Over Thanksgiving I decided I wasn't going to purchase more alcohol over Advent (the Catholic season that precedes Christmas), which has failed absurdly. Besides last weekend, which called for especially enthusiastic celebrations, I have not overindulged; that said, paper-writing, reading and rereading notes, constructive reflections, and the overall rigor of finals has been made that much easier by a beer or glass of wine - more often a beer - by my side. Perhaps it was an intoxicating endeavor to provide myself some calm in the absence of the real thing, or I may have also been taking Professor Doug Huff's advice to heart, or I may even have been hankering for the delightful evenings of senior year spent in fine company over books and computers with drink near at hand. It isn't something I feel guilty about, especially with the other fasts I have imposed on myself for the season, but a little surprising given how successful my prohibition on snacking and sweets has been.

Sleeping regularly and unperturbed by bothersome dreams - not nightmares in the sense I am used to, but stressful or heckling in their own way - even just one night has its own recuperative qualities. The experience seems to reflect forward, a notion I considered in papers and now think of more, into what will be for a while. A classmate once described how she preferred having the winter holiday between classes and finals, but now the notion seems especially absurd. My classwork, studies, and reflection are valuable to me, producing critical work that always feels unfinished in the best of ways; but having them over makes even my eyelids feel a little lighter. Or, I might add, feeling satisfyingly heavy when I have the time to sleep as was the case last night after reading Doom Patrol comics (Rachel Pollack's run that immediately follows Morrison's). I sense a richness in the scents of the world: a clean house, a bustling coffeeshop, cooking food, hot tea, chocolate undertones in ales and stouts, the sweetness of softly biting red wines, and more intimate aromas of hair and skin and active bodies; I feel them prickling over the surface of my skin.

Strange and a tidbit funny. I think of Mr Smith's (Hugo Weaving) oratory on the "smell" of being a program in the Matrix, the human smell. He says its saturates him, and that he feels infected by it. I have not thought too greatly on this description, at least not since high school, but it comes back to me know. The smells and tastes and textures of the world, I want them to saturate me, to fill and surround me. I have been washing great swathes of dishes from the cooking endeavors of late and think of the dish, filling over with warm water and how it rises around it; or how I submerge a dish into the water to fill it up. Being that dish, that bowl or glass, and letting myself succumb to the earthen gravity of this place, its tidal thickness, its picturesque fat-flaked snowfall.

I am returning again to a state of general happiness. It was lost to me for a spell - four, six, maybe eight weeks - while I lacked the time and energy to savor my labors. Since Thanksgiving, I think the state has been returning to me, gradually; my baseline rising as the day shortens and my obligations become more specific and, in that way and others, less demanding. I have stacks of books, comics, movies to attend to; friends near and far to call, write to, thank; and the warmth of familiarity both new and old dawning. Temporality is increasingly vague, my sense of self pleasantly unhinged in time but increasingly bound to place or places. I sense myself-in-the-world in a different way. A paper I wrote for Professor Deane Curtin on the characterological virtues of the landscape comes back to me, perhaps expecting revisions and additions. I want to be open to a landscape that, I feel, is increasingly open to me, welcoming with its own austere sacredness.

I looked out on San Francisco Peak earlier, its summit shrouded in rich white and gray cloud cover, and its body blanketed in stolid pines and snow. Its beauty played pleasurably on my heart, my eyes; and I hope that, if it were given the appropriate form, it might find pleasure in what I have written lately.