Welcome Back To School, Kind Of

The Princeton January is a strange beast. All your friends at home have occupied a clean empty happy space in between terms, while your semester has been grotesquely severed by the calendar year and you gotta deal with the nasty little end of it when you get back to campus. So while your pals are only maybe halfway through their vacation frolicking, you're packing up and returning to the grind. Dean's Date is a ticking time bomb and exams loom just after that. But alas, a twist: there are (with the exception of the occasional sadistic language course) no classes!Imagine that!The next few weeks are a blank slate, marred by a big ugly red X next Tuesday and a some more diffuse ones sprinkled in after that. I've got no rigorous daily schedule; I'm carving out my own day. And if you play your cards right, this can, ironically, be a kind of relaxing month, a weird reprieve from the day-to-day toil. This is not to say that I'm good at this -- last winter's reading period was a staggering burst of non-productivity for me. But it is theoretically possible. January is the existential crisis of the Princeton semester: it is exactly what you make of it. This, accordingly, brings me great dread. Sure hope I do it better this time around, even if it makes the next iteration of the liveblog a little less interesting for me. Godspeed to errybody out there.[Oh, and because I know your Dean's Date (and mine) will inevitably still suck, no matter how well you (or I) think I'm planning ahead, still read our liveblog!!!]