Sickening ironies.

Which is to say, when I think about what's on my professional plate in the next three months, I get this low pressure system swinging through the guts. I remember once when I was an undergrad, our class complained to the graduate student TA about how busy we were--the implication being that we were too busy to deal with the assignment soon to come due. The TA responded, with admirable equanimity and a gentle and indulgent smile, that undergrads should never complain to grad students about how busy they are. The truth of his observation was driven home to me when I was a grad student teaching undergrads. But even then I couldn't believe that it might possibly also be true that grad students shouldn't complain about how busy they are to professors--after all, professors are living the high life, right? No dissertation to write and all that time spent just reading books and teaching a couple of classes...