Sleeping in

I was so phenomenally tired last night that I accidentally fell asleep from 6pm to 9pm with the lights on and 2 cats sprawled beside me on the bed. Then I couldn't sleep till late, maybe 2am: but it was clear when the alarm went off at 8:45 that I was not really ready to get up, despite the pull of my beloved 10am spin class. Messaged the teacher to let her know I wouldn't be there, then went back to bed. It was the right choice - I feel much more functional now, and will go out for an easy 90-minute run in another hour or so (it is 40 degrees and sunny!).

Saw a very poor play by Brecht on Wednesday (not recommended, though there are some funny bits and the production's not bad); good grilled ham and cheese sandwich afterwards with G. at Linen Hall.

Saw an amazing film called The Unseen Sequence yesterday at Lincoln Center with friends. Particularly mesmerizing are the teaching sequences, but really the whole thing was incredibly worthwhile (and with some lovely music also). A treat afterwards - their friend who works at the Met gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes tour, including the "dome" (little box up at the very top above the chandelier) and the hydraulic lift - gigantic pistons! - used to bring up enormous scenery from the bowels of the complex to the stage. Then another grilled cheese sandwich, this time with tomato soup (I had rushed straight from a long morning meeting to the movie, it was 3:30 and I was dropping from fatigue and hunger!), at the Alice Tully cafe.

I am much enjoying this semester so far, but it has a very different work rhythm than my usual - the committee load is extremely heavy (it is fascinating work, though, and very well-suited to my inclinations and abilities - basically reading and synthesizing huge amounts of material across a wide range of fields), with deadlines on Wednesday morning for report-writing and Friday morning for the meeting itself, and my class is Thursday afternoon. Won't have much time for leisure reading, but it is a worthwhile tradeoff (confidentiality prevents me from linking to either of the 2 books I read this week, or to any of the four candidates for tenure we discussed at our meeting yesterday). The weekend feels more relaxed because of not teaching on Mondays, but I have to make it through to the end of the week intact, rather than collapsing happily on Wednesday evening when I am mostly done.

Light reading around the edges: a comfort reread of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals (can't remember now what reminded me of this - it is a book I read many many times as a child, I loved it, I practically know it by heart - but I bought this copy for B., who doesn't know it, and then couldn't resist rereading it myself first); and I am well dug in on Rebecca Mead's absolutely lovely My Life in Middlemarch, which is gloriously good. I have been thinking a lot about what books I want to write next, and I think I am on a Rebecca Mead-Geoff Dyer-Francis Spufford axis of writing about reading, though with more similarities I think to Spufford than to either of the other two....