All of my colleagues at work are fleeing town for the holidays, so I have been enlisted to care for not one, not two, but THREE other cats.  The not-small amount of glee this fills me with makes me wonder if I should have even bothered going to graduate school at all, and instead just have become a professional pet-sitter.

December is wonderful, but only at the expense of a bleak January…the worst month to come along since August was invented.  I prefer endings to beginnings; winter to spring; holidays to anticipate rather than the massive stretch from Christmas to Easter.  December reminds me of final exams and the satisfaction of finishing classes and handing in the last paper and the flurry of activity when roommates go home for the semester…the pleasant feeling of wandering around a quiet campus in the snow, the sound of suitcase wheels rolling across the pavement…of turning in grades as a TA and savoring the month’s break until everything begins again.

Januaries are bad because that is the time I always get the flu, that is the month I was hospitalized with appendicitis when I was eleven…that is when I had to move to a new school and empty out my locker into a garbage bag after the janitor unlocked the door and I realized that the bells ring in the hallways even when no one is there to hear.  January is when I gamely begin some paper-diary that I hope will be some treasured artifact when I am old and forgetful, and by the eleventh I have skipped a day and by the fifteenth I have abandoned it in a drawer and by March it is some cursed thing that is only a reminder of human failure.

January is when I sat at the kitchen table painting some horrible clown paint-by-numbers on the dullest day of the year, listening to the people on the radio talk about Berlin Wall this and Fall of Communism that and things I had no idea about until I fled the house and skated on patches of ice in frozen dead fields and everything was silent and grey as if there were no people left on Earth.

January is a new shoe that pinches the heel and looks a bit too contrived; I much prefer the broken-in feel of December.  It seems as soon as I get used to the year, it is gone and I wonder how I got so old; I was just eleven, I was painting at the table to the slow click of the clock radio numbers changing over.