young laughter fills my throat with the ashy pitch of a great tree burning since the days of Noah

Insight! I had a conversation with one of the Social Work academics yesterday, in which we commiserated about our mutual state of complete exhaustion after all the curriculum advice. "Of course you're tired," she said, with that trademark professional-mental-health-specialist self-conscious analytic empathy. "For as long as you interact with a student while you're advising them, you carry all their anxiety."

Hell, you so do. Suddenly it feels both understandable and legitimate to come out of these days feeling as though I've been lugging heavy weights up steep stairs through treacle for approximately the last fifteen years. I was congratulating myself on having made it through the crazy season without having to resort to Red Bull, but today was more or less an emergency. Newsflash: it still tastes like shit, but I feel slightly more as though I might be in possession of an actual brain.

My subject line, incidentally, courtesy of Wondermark, who have made Hell Friday slightly more bearable by dint of upping the levels of the pleasingly linguistic surreal.