gnat is relieved of her seasonal affective disorder symptoms

andy williams is an idiot.

i guess that isn't fair - andy williams sang the song "it's the most wonderful time of the year" but he didn't write it, eddie pola and george wyle did. well misters pola and wyle, i respectfully disagree. scratch that - i outright question whether you were in your right minds when you called the middle of winter the most wonderful time of the year. maybe you were on drugs. maybe you lived in the arctic circle and had never experienced summer. in any case, you were wrong.

it's 80 degrees and sunny right now. people are outside walking and there isn't a sleeping bag coat in sight. i wore a dress to school today.

the poor naked trees are starting to get their leaves back.

the city planted tulips EVERYWHERE. billions and billions of them (probably).

christmas is ok i guess, but THIS is without doubt the most wonderful time of the year and it's about damn time it got here.

(stay tuned for more whining when the weather takes its inevitable sharp downturn and i am forced to wear a jacket again for several more weeks.)

gnat sings the praises of elly's pancake house. again.

yes, i'm coming to you live from elly's, in the seat where i spend several evenings a week desperately attempting to do productive things.

my typical vantage point:

this is where i am when i'm not adventuring around chicago. it's my favorite place to study.

thank you, elly's. i would not be able to succeed as a graduate student without you.

gnat incurs an unexpected amount of muscle soreness

i am not an athletic person. by the time i hit high school i had tried and sucked at just about every sport there is, at which point i gave up and became a theater kid instead. by this point in my life i have made peace with the fact that i possess the coordination of a drunk ostrich (i have no data to support the assertion that drunk ostriches are uncoordinated - this is purely conjecture) but at the same time i tend to shy away from opportunities to showcase my profound lack of sporting ability.

this is why several months ago, when zain first tried to explain to me how badly i needed to experience the phenomenon that is whirlyball, i was completely closed to the idea. had he thoroughly explained what a game of whirlyball actually entailed, i might have been more amenable to it.

basically you take ten of these:

ten of these:

and ten of these:

and play a game somewhat akin to basketball.

my passing and shooting abilities were, predictably, nonexistent, but i feel my aggressive LA driving skills offset my other weaknesses. action shot!

...sort of.

i woke up the next morning with a surprising amount of soreness in a surprising number of areas, considering i had played a game throughout which i remained seated. this is, i suppose, a testament to how out of shape i am. i blame winter.

whirlyball wasn't invented in chicago, nor is it unique to chicago, but i had never heard of it before moving here. in fact there are only 17 whirlyball venues in the world, none of which are in california. (chicago has three; kid rock's house in the suburbs of detroit has one. the rest are mostly in places to which there is no reason to go except to play whirlyball.)

my apologies to zain, who for several months attempted to introduce me to something excellent and was met with nothing but staunch resistance. whirlyball is awesome.