April is the Cruelest Month?

I don’t often have an occasion to quote T.S. Eliot, and if I happen to agree with his assessment of April, it’s for a very different reason than his. This year, for me, April is one of those months which, when you look at your Google calendar, sort of makes you want to cry. Or breathe very quickly into a bag, one of the two.

We started off the month with a bang in the English Department, with a weekend-long grad student conference. It was a wonderful hit, but everybody who was involved in organizing it (of which I was one) needed another weekend to recover from the excitement. It didn’t help that I also went to Cirque du Soleil on Sunday night, which was amazing (a dazzling adaptation of medieval mumming, acrobatics, and grotesquerie!), but see again my comment about the excitement.

Next week I have a dissertation chapter due as well as an important public presentation of my project (the last mandatory event before the dissertation defense, actually—though that’s still a long way off, thank goodness). On the same day as my presentation, I have not one but two choir concerts. That’s in addition to two other singing engagements for church, plus all the dress rehearsals. And then the week after that is Holy Week, which I don’t think I ever considered a time-consuming event—until I joined the church choir. I might as well just bring a sleeping bag and live at the church from Thursday through Sunday, for all the time I’ll spend at home. Gives one a better appreciation for how busy priests and pastors are during the high holidays of the liturgical year.

Not that I’m really complaining; I like being busy, and I certainly brought this all on myself. But if I don’t post on my blog again for, oh, another month or so, let the preceding paragraphs stand as my excuse. Before my enforced hiatus, though, I wanted to post some pictures of the unseasonable snow showers we got a few weeks ago, just when we were thinking it was about to be spring. And here are two fun little “bloopers of the real world” that I’m so fond of. I encountered them just recently, and if the pictures aren’t great quality, it’s because they’re from my phone.

First, a statuette in an antique store labeled “White Horse.” WHAT kind of creature is this exactly? Animal identification failure much?

Second, a lost and found notice in a local high school’s choir classroom. In case you can’t read it, it says: “Found: Black Womens Sock/Hose/Foot Cozy: 3.” (We’ll turn a blind eye to the lack of apostrophe in “Women’s,” since no one is ever sure which side of the s to put it on.) Somebody instead has helpfully added a little comma in between “Black” and “Womens.” I like how the punctuation is supposed to fix this whole strange sentence.

The grammar police seem to have been concerned with political correctness when really they should have been asking themselves the much more important question: under what strange circumstances could one contrive to lose not one or two (which would make some amount of sense) but exactly THREE footies?