I Love the College Life

Just jaunted off to University of Waterloo to grab a whack of books before they close. Campus is quiet and chilled, with lovely golden street lamps everywhere.

For books, I got:

An Empire of their Own (Gabler)
First Diasporist Manifesto (Kitaj)
And on the Eighth Day GD Created the Yankees (Bove)
Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo (Adamson)
The Comic Image of the Jew (Altman)
Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Gurock)
The Trotskys, Freuds, and Woody Allens (Kalmar)
The Americanization of the Jews (Seltzer & Cohen, eds)
SmartJews (Gilman)
The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred (Bean)
Why a Duck? (Anobile)

I love a life in which I can take all these things home for free, read them, digest them, spew them back in some critical form, and get funded for that. I complain and crank about school, but I would die without it.

Bless the system that supports this life.

Now I sit here amongst my new friends, enjoying some sort of hideous (but delicious) cinnamon desert thingy and a cup of coffee, and thinking about how nice it is to jaunt to a library for research materials on a chilly winter night with a loved one.

And I think: This is why I put up with the unpleasant aspects.

It's a wonderful feeling.