winter

Wow, winter has arrived, and with a vengeance. That wind is so strong that, with a hefty dose of sea spray and the temperature cranked up to something positive, it would remind me of home. lzh ordered the change to heavy mid-winter jackets, and I suspect I’ll have to dig out the thick longjohns if I want to get home from tomorrow morning’s class without my knees shattering. And my hat. Where is my hat? I’m surprised I still have ears, having been running around hat-less all day.

At least, though, it’s left me feeling a bit more alive than I’ve felt so far this week. Tired, but alive. I suspect my body is starting that end-of-semester wind-down a little early. I’ve still got a month to go until the holiday. Still, an early Spring Festival does mean an earlier (and hopefully longer) holiday. First year spoken winds up the week of Christmas, and second year writing should be done a couple of weeks after that. That will be good, because as much as I am generally happy with work and pleased with my students’ progress, I’m feeling in desperate need of a break.

And just for the sake of adding another completely random and unrelated note: At China Beat Jeff Wasserstrom muses, through a book review, on the apparent lack of 80s nostalgia in China. I’ve noticed plenty of nostalgia for the relative simplicity of times gone by- even though everybody knows that in the real world those times were never simple- but I have to admit that I’ve never come across nostalgia for the 80s in particular. But what I wonder about is the lack of nostalgia for the early 50s. Everything I’ve read of or from that period of modern Chinese history is so dripping with optimism and hope and progress that I simply cannot understand how it has managed to disappear from everybody else’s memory.