I'm basking in the afterglow of good friends over for dinner, laughter and conversation and multiple cups of tea and coffee, delicious food, and the promise of another meeting soon. This is one of those nights with a chill in the wind, kept at bay by the valiant hissing radiators. I am glad, glad, glad to be here and alive and faced with good work to do (reading, marking papers in purple ink, typing up annotations).

I am also feeling the pull I have always felt between the ideal and the tactile, the physical and the metaphysical. This business of graduate school has a great deal more to do with abstractions and concepts and knowledge than the pages themselves, the scented ink, the book-cloth and polyvinyl acetate. I wonder how to order my days, to both make books and read the classics, to stitch felt coffee cups and drink the stuff in classes, to grapple with theories and chop carrots and knead bread.

In any case, I think that relationships help negotiate the balance. I think good friends who can make funny, earthy jokes and poke around in one's kitchen cabinets are just the thing.