Last week I jumped out of a plane. Well, hypothetically. Well, mentally. I sat down at the desk, breathed deeply, double-checked my pen grip, tried to settle the nausea rising from my stomach, and opened my eyes to look at the four prompts to choose from for this essay I was supposedly going to write. That's when I fell out of the plane. And wasn't sure if the parachute was strapped on, or if any of the training I had been doing was going to be of use for the five-hour fall towards earth I was going to take, guided by the tip of my pen.

That's what it felt like. I've never felt like I didn't have control before, or like I really wasn't prepared. Or like I would have to bullshit for five hours in Italian for lit professors to read about an author of whose work I had read barely anything. I still can't figure out if I survived the fall or not. But very few more of those jumps are planned in the near future. Just two oral exams and a paper.

I'm going to post new pictures soon. To really capture the essence of my life lately, I should put on my pajamas and turn on my desk light, set up some crumb-covered plates and an empty mug with a dry tea stain at the bottom, hunch over my desk with ten books stacked up in front of me, flip wildly through my dictionary and have someone come take pictures. That's really been the essence of my life in the last month or so. A presto, cari amici.