Spring Break

This is where I spent my first day of Spring Break. No, it's not an exciting San Diego landmark. It's not in Balboa Park, it's not a museum, and it's not buzzing with people and strange smells. At least not today. It's the San Diego State library. Usually it is crowded with undergraduates sleeping on oversized chairs, sofas, ottomans, or the floor, smelling like whatever happened to them the night before. Today, though, the only people around were the maintenance crew, my friends at the reference desk, and the occasional graduate student.

Why would I be there on a beautiful San Diego spring day? I'm working on a paper, of course. What else would you do over Spring Break, after all, but catch up on work that should have been progressing throughout the last 4 weeks? The paper is a thrilling one (drumroll!): examining a rhetoric of blame, shame, and mercy through ontological and axiological assumptions in the "To Wives" chapter of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book. What? I'd explain it, but I'm going to need 30 pages or so to do it. Manuscript available upon request. (Cue impish grin.)

Instead of the dusty librarians, I would have liked to have been hanging out with this guy at the SD Zoo, doing exactly what he's doing. He's brewing some good ideas about ontology. You can just tell.