Relapse

Just when I thought I was over the hump in my recovery from a typical cold, I was thrown back into the worst of the symptoms, more extreme than ever, this weekend. Luckily, I don't have class again until Wednesday, so I can afford to rest (i.e. not do work). And my roommate made matzah ball soup, so that's lucky, too.

Prior to this setback, I had two encounters I felt epitomized what I'd hoped for when I came back to school. The first was with a building -- the Gilmore Music Library, pictured above. One of my courses this semester is going to meet in a conference room just off the main library, so I went there to make sure I cound find it. Isn't it remarkable? Some of the study spaces in this school really do look out of a movie.

My second encounter was with a professor and an entire class. I'm TA-ing a course called the Economics & Financing of Journalism; there are 12 students. The professor graciously took us out to dinner Friday night in a private room at Mory's, and I thought it was a really special opportunity to get to spend time with a professor outside of school. When you begin school, you might expect/hope that such evenings will happen, but they're rare -- rare, not totally unheard of. Last semester, for example, a professor for whom I TA'd had the eight TAs to her house for a home-cooked thank-you meal at the end of the course. These are the kinds of things I think are so generous of professors because they needn't be done, but they'll be remembered by students for years and years to come. A more cynical angle is to point out that when we're all in a position to make generous donations to Yale, these are the memories we might remember fondly enough to add an extra 0.