You snooze, you lose.

I'm taking a few minutes out from research at the library to post this afternoon, hoping that it will wake me up from a literary-theory induced stupor. Although I would be more productive if I could stay awake, it's been nice to switch gears and get back into the business of essay-writing today after a week of obsessing over a presentation yesterday. All of us MA's have to make a 15-minute presentation this week on our plans for our dissertations. The scary part is that they are in front of the whole classics faculty (well, supposedly -- in practice it's really just the 6 or 8 who can be bothered to show up) and all the other postgrads, and we are, of course, subject to the dreaded Q&A period at the end. Those two aspects have been enough to get all of us suitably stressed, and I'd put everything else pretty much on hold until I got through mine. The title of my paper (and working title for my dissertation) was "Augustine against the Clock: Time, Language and the Economics of Salvation." I think it went about as well as could be expected, and people seemed positive about my ideas.

I had a good excuse to take the night off yesterday because a friend from Edinburgh is in town doing a short course at the uni. We went to a pub I like in Clifton Village and had a lovely time catching up. Not to depreciate all of his other charming personal attributes, I must note that spending a few hours listening to his Aberdeen accent was music to my ears! The posh South of England accent is fine, but it just doesn't stir the soul in the same way, evoking the sound of bagpipes in the distance...a sip of aged single-malt...the low of a hairy coo...OK, I'll cut it out.

In other news, I have another speaking engagement coming up, this one much less stressful! I'm going to be on a faith chat show on Radio 1 on Sunday morning, because they want to hear an American's impression on the Pope's visit to the States. I'm very happy to oblige, and there will be lots to say about such a successful visit and the positive benefits I think we'll see from it. More on that later, if I don't say anything stupid that makes me want to forget the experience entirely, which, knowing myself, is a very distinct possibility!