I am already somewhat into that euphoric Christmas break/next-world paradise i alluded to ealier. The only nice thing about two exams in one day is that half of your total stress load lifts in period of a few hours. More work remains, including preparation for the dreaded physics-that-is-the-death-of-many-an-arts-student final, but i feel demonstrbly lighter. In fact, come the afternoon of December 20, i may need a tether.

returning to an earlier subject, i used to dream about heaven. All the time, actually, when i was a kid. Which is a bit odd, in the sense that i was not raised to beleive in heaven, didn't go to church, and didn't have any theological concept of it. Nevertheless, when i slept, i used to die and go there on a regular basis. Now if you are the sort of person who, when you watch action movies like to point out things like the impossibility of firing a handgun sideways, or who turned off 'Crouching Tiger' when people started flying, you might also point out that my dreaming of heaven likely had some bearing on my degree of satisfaction with my 'earthly' life at the time. Well...possibly. But if you are that sort of person, you might also need to lighten up.
The point is, when i was young, I had recurring dreams in which i was involved in huge battles or other calamitous ordeals, managed, despite a typical lack of heroics, to get myself good and killed, and went on a guided tour of various versions of heaven. (There was never, at any time, any trace of puffy clouds, harps, souped up suburban garden gates, or people walking around in sheets with wings on their backs) actually, in one of the most memorable of these, heaven was simply the schoolyard across from my house, at night, under the orange glow of streetlights, quiet, still except for a slight, warm breeze stirring the treetops and promising...something. I was walking leisurely with friends, light, relaxed, laughing. It was quiet cool at the end of a long summer day, eveything was done, and we were waiting, with no hint of anxiety, only relief.
I suppose my heaven was, at that time, simply a slightly accentuated version of the one real place and time where i sometimes felt somewhat at peace, and somewhat ok.

You'll sense a reoccuring theme in the last few posts. In the madness of the last few weeks, hell, of the last year, simple daily moments of peace and relative clarity achieve an almost mystical value...