Snapshots of reality (not)

Today was unreal. It started with this crazy pilates class organized by my rowing team, at 7am. Ugh. It was a hard class, and being up and sweaty that early brought unwelcome flashbacks of rowing, and the class was run by a tiny American woman named Babs who had a really loud voice and no sense of what it might be like to not be in incredible shape like she is. When it finally ended, my friend Chrissie and I went for coffee and discussed the U.S. midterm elections. ?! I just love that my dear friend, a German-born, Welsh-educated, 27-year-old Cambridge grad student in classics, knows all about the U.S. Congress, Christine O'Donnell, and the dire predictions of what's going to happen to the Democrats.
Then I went home and got back in bed with a pile of student essays and my landlord's cat. (This cat is huge and striped and looks like he should be scary, but he's desperate for attention and purrs just when you let him hang out near you.) Then, very symbolically, my favorite marking pen ran out of ink. Following my mom's view of pedagogy, I use colored pens to mark essays, so my writing stands out from the printed words. But my mom does NOT use red pens, because red can suggest a negative connotation for her comments when they may not be negative at all, and they also may not be the best or the only possible comment to be made about that essay. Anyway, in line with this expert advice I bought a green pen last fall when I first started supervising undergrads, and it had an ink cartridge with about 3 inches' worth of green ink. Now, a year in, it's totally empty! Does that mean my students write essays that deserve a lot of my ink? or just that I've marked a lot of essays in the past year? Hmmm.
Day full of seminar, marking essays, writing crappy ideas about the role of museum volunteers in modern scientific practice, loading the department's little dishwasher with people's coffee cups just because it's so satisfying, and having a typically infuriating interaction with the University Library's policy of not letting people read their books. Postdocs in my department are planning to go to a national demonstration against the planned humongus funding cuts to British universities, and they're recruiting PhD students. Ironically, most of us can't afford to go, either time-wise or money-wise. But how nice to be part of a community that's going to demonstrate. Can I be politically active in a country where I can't vote? I also found myself in the "Magic and the Occult" section of my department's library, looking for a book about alchemy to show my students tomorrow. ?! Too bad Halloween is over. Then I walked through gorgeous Kings College, with evensong coming from the chapel, on my way to yoga class #2 (rough life I lead, right?). This one was much more fun, especially when we learned "corpse" pose and the instructor (a student who just likes yoga and isn't actually an instructor) said "your arms and legs are heavy, let them sink into the ground..." Halloween is everywhere! Then dinner at Clare Hall with my friend Geoff and a Clare Hall Fellow from Australia who invited me to speak at her department's seminar - cool! We totally don't know each other but anyone is a friend at college dinners, I guess. Then Geoff and I strolled home through the streetlight-free, twisty streets in the crazy way-too-darkness caused by the end of daylight savings time on Sunday. It's the time of year when the grass is still green and the leaves are every color and HUGE and Cambridge is just beautiful. Unreal, but beautiful.
Now if only I can please wake up tomorrow to my country not laden with a red-state Congress??