Back From Spring Break

I was outside in warm weather, walking down a pleasant road, the hand of a beautiful Ethiopian girl interlocked with mine. We waved at friends, and chatted. The warmth of her hand, the warmth of the sun, and the warmth of my heart all blended in a springtime harmony.

And then my alarm clock went off. I reached sleepily for the "snooze" button to stop the offending and eminently unwarm siren. I couldn't remember where I was. All week I had woken up on a sofabed in a sunlit room in Florida. Now it was dark and cold and it was 6:25a.m. I couldn't remember where I was, but I wanted to go back to my Ethiopian princess. I lay down and decided to doze until the alarm went off again, by which time I should have remembered where I was.

I did, and I got out of bed. I limped around the house trying to get ready for 14 hours worth of class, work, and meetings. When fed, washed and clothed (in the opposite order), I trotted painfully downstairs on sore limbs from a week of workout and a demanding frisbee game last night. I grabbed my bike, geared up, and then wrestled the frozen door open to get out into the wet, melting snow. After getting my butt soaked by fenderless-bike-splatter, I arrived 10 minutes late for prayer. No one was here. Again. I prayed and thought alone for 20 minutes, then walked off to class. My linear algebra exam was a killer. How do you multiply a 2x2 matrix with a vector in R3??? How do you find the transpose of a 2x3 matrix??? I knew the stuff we were being tested on, but not the tools I needed to do transposes and vector-matrix multiplication. Grrrr. Everyone looked haggard and pissed and not warm at all when we traipsed out at 9:00.

Remind me again why I wake up in the morning?