My MIA status for the past month or so can probably be attributed to my extreme levels of dedication to actually doing research for once.  Did I magically find some kind of motivation?  Well, sort of.  We’re all required to give a department-wide seminar during the spring of our 3rd year, and mine fell on this past Wednesday, which incidentally was Valentine’s Day (did I need to remind anybody of this fact?).

The seminar isn’t really as scary as it sounds, but nevertheless, I worked up quite a sweat leading up to it (but it didn’t stop me from procrastinating … my last slides change was at 11:12am, and my presentation began at noon).  In general, it was rather anti-climatic.  It came, and 30 minutes later, it went, with no drums nor any fanfare.  I also got lucky because the one professor famous for picking students apart was also magically absent from my seminar.

Which then brings me to Valentine’s Day.  I thought about writing something about having an anti-Valentine’s day, but thought better of it because I didn’t want to come across as being bitter.  I’m sure plenty of us hear great many mutterings about the stupidity of such a Hallmark-imposed holiday that you really didn’t want to read about it on my blog.  Besides, I preferred sleeping to procrastination via blogging.

So in the end, all I have to offer is that this year, unlike most other years, I had no special feelings toward v-day.  It really was just another day that also came and went with no fanfare.  That was helped along by my boarding an overnight train to DC at 9:45pm on the evening of February 14.  Even if I wanted to have make a big deal of it, I wouldn’t have been able to.  So my Valentine’s day dinner consisted of some Bourbon chicken bought at the Amtrak station and shared with my handsome, and very much loved, GSC officers and one hot Latin grad student magazine editor.

I’ll be back to the real world sometime tomorrow when my plane lands in Boston and I subsequently end my email boycott.  Then I will have a ball cleaning out the 250+ unread emails that have accumulated.  Yummy.