Beer Wednesdays

I had a really irritating professor in high school who would refer to Wednesdays as "hump day", as in it is the day, once you are on the far side of it, there is a clear view to the weekend. It sounded so damn lazy to mentally frame your entire week in relation to how far away you were from the weekend. Sure, maybe he hated his job as a teacher, and maybe he had a really fulfilling weekend life, but it seems to me that if you spend five days out seven thinking about two days, that's a lot of lifetime.

Anyway, for me, Wednesdays really are "hump days" in that if you look at my weekly planner, there are large chunks in the middle of the day every week except for Wednesday, which is a solid bar of green from 9am until 9pm. It's an ordeal, and not just from the length of the day.

This morning I got up at 8, got ready for school, and was out the door at 8:30. Driving. Wednesday's and Fridays I usually treat myself to driving to school instead of walking to the bus or bicycling. Today was special because there was a group of undergraduates who were selling "pancake breakfasts" to fund-raise for their upcoming service spring break to New Orleans. They're going to build a urban farm hut, whatever that is, as a compliment to the chicken coop a previous group of students had constructed. Whatever the cause, I was sold at "pancake breakfast." 

I was actually the first customer of the day and they were still working out the kinks in the pancake-production process. Astoundingly, it seemed like one of the two students staffing the electric griddles they had set up on folding tables had never made pancakes before. Actually, he admitted it, and I wasn't impressed with the pancake making skills of his associate either. The surge protector blowing and the griddle turning off in the middle of cooking my pancakes probably didn't help either. 

This is kind of turning into a "so there I was, eating pancakes" story, so I'll skip a bit. The pancakes were good and they gave me some coffee. I think they might have actually made some money, too.

First class of the day, at the crack-o-dawn hour of 9am, was my Architectural Association class, where we talk about various articles, papers, and books associated with the AA. This is a tough class, and there are some really smart people in it. The readings are devilishly hard, lengthy, and complex. An decent understanding of modern and postmodern theory as well as critical theory is pretty much prerequisite in order to have any idea of what the authors are going on about. It's a good glass, and when I struggle through the readings and catch a glimpse of what the author is trying to show, I'm always staggered with the power of the ideas and why these readings have never come in front of us before. 

So there's three hours of that, which is pretty brutal, and then I have a break for an hour before my next block of time, which is four to five interrupted hours of studio. Really its closer to six, as I'm usually scrambling straight out of the AA class to jump into whatever I'm supposed to have done for studio. And studio is usually a mix of struggling to understand what I'm supposed to be doing followed by a struggle to understand how I'm supposed to do it, followed by a struggle to understand why we should be doing it in the first place. And then I brew a fresh cup of tea. 

Immediately after studio, we file downstairs en masse to structures II, which is actually a wonderful chance to attempt to learn something with a definite answer. It's almost kind of like sudoku, you don't have to think, you just follow a process to arrive at an answer. I'm usually pretty beat by this time, and so by the time 9pm rolls around after three hours of structures, I'm so happy to have my car there to drive me home, I could dance. Or weep. And Suki is always so happy to have me come home two hours later than usual to feed her.