February crawls on. How are you? This week I bought a ticket to Phantom of the Opera in London — I’m very excited. It’s good every time. Feeling very good about using my tourism opportunities. That said, I must be sweeter to my budget for awhile. I also got some vintage opera glasses to bring: they haven’t arrived yet, but they’re 19th-century and quite pretty.
Otherwise, this week has been alright-to-bad. Almost ran out of antidepressants before finally winning the British Healthcare Bureaucracy. Woohoo! No withdrawal! I was pretty worried there. Now I have all these comfort snacks for nothing — whatever shall I do?
Besides that, all quiet over here. I’ve spent a lot of time maneuvering through the jungle-foliage of archives for my essays. My strategy for avoiding getting flagged as AI is to include some brief but highly specific comparison of your subject matter to a different thing. I stumbled into it after getting a high grade on an assignment where there was a big scandal about half the students using AI (I don’t believe it for a second!): in that essay I compared Greek pottery painting to German expressionism, which machines probably wouldn’t do. Perhaps this might be useful if your college is also trigger-happy with AI accusations. So, yeah, Rudyard Kipling’s weaseled into my Herodotus essay. Fun world, this academia. That said, I had a nightmare last night I got a B- C+ grade on it, so we’ll see if that was a premonition or not.
Did you hear it’s snowed up in Washington? Mom got a few good days of snow. Is it also snowing down there? I’m very jealous. Though it did just hail for about five seconds here, then went back to rain. I cannot begrudge that: it tried.
As always, I love you dearly. Mom sent me an autobiography she made me write when I was eleven for Aaron — to think you had not known me all that while made me very sad. It is still strange to me that you are older now than I was. Here’s my favorite part of that document.
Here’s my section about you:
With love,
Alice