Mint Tea and Birthdays

So today's the big day, and I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I don't think I've ever approached a birthday with less enthusiasm as this one. Normally I'm a little kid about these things--I truly believe everyone deserves to be spoiled on his or her birthday, and I do not take myself to be the exception! I love all of it: the hugs and the cards and emails and feeling part of a network united in love. August 1 is a special day for me, too, because it brings into mind Lughnasa, or the midsummer festival celebrated by the Gaelic (Irish) as the first of the harvest festivals with bonfires and dancing--honoring the fullness of summer but looking ahead to the scarcity of winter.

But despite the gloomy morning, things have brightened up considerably. My friends here surprised me with a gift and cheesecake, and the whole cafeteria sang Happy Birthday, so I got to blush and feel like an idiot, which is the way it's supposed to be!

I will spend today as I have spent the last two birthdays, working on a difficult and frustrating paper near the end of summer term classes. :) So what I really desire for my birthday this year is some inspiration! Come thesis, come into my brain, make the connections between all these poems...current topic is "tensions between the isolated self and the unified self in the Sublime in the poems of Coleridge, Keats, and Barbauld." My brain's in a big muddle right now...

So time for some mint tea! Delicious, nutritious, and refreshing. I drink a lot of it here, even though today the sun is shining and birds chirping and the weather is neither too hot nor too cold. The first month of the summer was rainy and chilly, and I spent quite a lot of it in front of a raging fire in the library. Now the sun is shining and here I am, still in the library with the tea. Sorina and I will go jogging this afternoon to break up the monotony and get the blood flowing through the whole body. We go almost every day up the across the field, looking out over the Green Mountains, past a white cottage and down a dirt lane until we hit the steep side of one of the mountains and start to run / walk up as fast as we can. It's a hard climb, but we talk so much about difficult concepts that it's hard to tell whether our legs or lungs hurt more. Then we turn, stretch, and jog the whole way down, flying past the trees and looking out into the mist.
Hope you all have a fantastic day!