Bob the Tea Bag

The way tea bags inflate and bob gently on the surface like buoys in a calm ocean when steaming, hot water is poured into my mug is ridiculously amusing.

Maybe all the scrambling to catch up on readings and the long, mentally draining papers I have been working on late into the nights have already begun to put me into that on-the-verge-of-delirium, overstudied mentality because things like bobbing tea bags and the weird way the blinds covering the window by my desk flutter in the wind have all suddenly become very interesting to me; when noticing the way your tea bag bobs in the water prompts you to tear your eyes from the digital slides of various works by Manet on your computer screen and redirects your full and complete attention to coming up with ways to tug on the string attached to the tea bag to make the bag bob at various speeds to create different types of ripples in your brewing cup of tea, you know it's time for a break.

Or to find a less distracting beverage to enjoy.

(Maybe that is why there are no blinds covering the windows in the Nerd Box - total elimination of all possible distractions!)

That dreaded time of the quarter has arrived; as of Friday, classes are officially over, so the unmerciful monster known and dreaded by all as "Finals Week" is just beginning to rear its ugly head.

What's my verdict?

An eight-page political science paper on the modes of resistance due at 9:30 am on Wednesday at a mysterious location on campus that I have never been to and will undoubtedly have an unnecessarily stressful and difficult time finding on the morning of,

A three-hour history final on Thursday where we must complete eight out of the twelve identification terms that will be chosen from the current list of forty-two, and two one-hour long essays on god-knows-what (though I am positive my pirate-loving professor will find a way to incorporate piracy into one of the prompts),

and

A three-hour art history final on Friday worth 60% of my grade consisting of an undisclosed number of slide identifications (name of artist, work, and year completed) out of the one hundred listed ranging from the late 1600s to the 1900s, an undisclosed number of short essays on slide comparisons, and two one-hour long essays to be written from the four choices that will be taken from the list of ten issued in our study guide.

Then it is off to the San Diego Airport to catch my 7:10 pm flight back to San Francisco, where I will be spending four very busy days at home before hopping on a red-eye jetBlue flight to JFK Airport in New York to spend the holidays and the New Year on the east coast.

I heard it's snowing there!

I have been doing surprisingly well in all of my classes this quarter, so I have my fingers crossed that I will finish the quarter off as strongly as I had started it.

To keep from sliding any further down the slippery slope, maybe I should stop reaching for the distracting tea bags and grab the tin of loose leaf tea and my heart-shaped tea infuser instead; metal doesn't bob!