I've had a close friend from Home City visiting since Wednesday. She just left. It was grand fun, but it's incredible how behind her visit has put me, in terms of work. I'm feeling slightly panicky. (And so, I shall fritter away my time blogging.)

This was a funny visit. My friend S is the person I've always said is closest to a sibling for me, an only child. I've known her since I was fifteen. She and I did the Activity together, and still do things like go to dance camps and weekends together. I love her to death. But she is intensely negative about everything from job to love to hobbies to life - always has been. (I know, I am too on this blog - but I don't exude negativity in my everyday life.) She is always this way, but she seems particularly unhappy with her life right now - relatively newly single at 35, she is full of rage and disappointment about the possibility of finding a man to settle down with. She's lonely for friends, too, she says.

I was talking at one point over the weekend about a decade-long mutual infatuation I've had with someone S and I both know, a really quite extraordinary and somehow intimate relation (which has been sexual on a few precious occasions, when he and I have both been single). Out of what I could tell was jealousy and loneliness, S asked me quite aggressively how I "always make all these deep connections with people..." I don't know what to say to that. It feels odd to be attacked for it. As if I'm doing something wrong. And I don't know how to tell her that what comes across as negativity is probably part of the problem she experiences in making connections with people. This was an odd theme that seemed to add a tiny bit of tension to our visit.

Anyway. We had fun. It's lovely to have someone I'm so close to visit me here. It helps me feel better in this place, for some reason. Even if S did observe, a number of times, that "it is really weird that you live here."

But oh my goodness, the work (and life-work) that awaits me. I am going to be paying for this visit for a couple of weeks. This is so much the case that I need to make, for the first time ever, a boring blog to-do list for today, in the interest of keeping myself accountable (and even though I don't know how to do a strikethrough):

- DONE: Call C in Berlin
- DONE: Reading and prep for first-year class
- DONE: Reading and prep for upper-year class
- GOT 8 DONE: Grade 15 of ~40 first-year assignments
- NOPE: Grade the set of critical questions for the upper-year class
- NOPE: Email K
- NOPE: Email Su.
- REFIGURED: Email St.
- DONE: Return video
- DONE: Do the many dishes
- DONE: Go to gym for some of physiotherapy regime
- DONE: Finish physio regime at home
- DONE: Meet my friend D to strategize my nomination of him for an award
- NOPE: Outline my nomination letter for D
- DONE: Shitloads of laundry - probably 5 loads

What's freaking me out is that I have a scary conference paper to write, and I just haven't had time to get there. I have only a couple of weeks left, and I'm worried. But oh well, this list is all I can contend with today.