After staying up for more than 24 hours, I am in that strange state of mind where time has ceased to have much meaning. It has ceased flowing in a forward direction and just is all around me.

My head is full to bursting with tidbits and facts about all sorts of things, most of it Irish history at this point. In this room and the one next door, the desks and chairs are piled high with books and notebooks, notecards, pens and scribbled pieces of paper: the evidence of my mad dash to finish out the semester and gain a few extra days of rest.

Unfortunately, my energy petered out sometime in all of this and I find that I need to simply sit here with a cat draped across my lap, writing all sorts of nonsense in the hope that it will help to relax me back into "intellectual paper writing mode".

I am far to optimistic I think and will have to put down the foot of discipline shortly.

In the meantime, I have a fluffy, yellow-eyed, bushy-tailed, black and white sweetheart of a kitten sprawled across my stomach, purring quietly as she sleeps. Her little whiskers twitch from time to time with kitty dreams and now and then I bend over to kiss the soft fur between her ears.

This is Mephisto's little sister, Sasha. For just over two weeks now, she has abandoned the aloofness which was formerly her accustomed mode of behavior and become just as much of a shoulder and lap cat as her brother. Tiger, has also decided to become more of a cuddler, and it is not uncommon now, for one of us to lie down for a nap on the couch and wake up covered from head to foot in kitties, including their mother Shara, though she usually prefers to perch on the armrest above or monopolize our toes.

Words seem hard to come by all of a sudden. As if I have been drained, dried up, tapped out. Every time I write here now, I am confronted by the banality of my own existence and am seized with a need to spice things up. Because I am so busy, I never actually get around to doing any of these spicy things.

The urge to travel keeps seizing me by the throat. Ireland calls, Australia tempts, India beckons. My horizons have shrunk around me and I feel like I'm standing in a tiny room shouting at the top of my lungs for more space, or simply, an open window.

Maybe our upcoming trip to France will help, though I m dreading it. You'd think that going to visit family in France would be an exciting thing to look forward to. But after all of the stresses of this semester, I find that all I want is a cup of hot cocoa and the familiar fireplace at my parents' house. Instead I am striking off into the unknown for my favorite holiday of the year, for the first time I will not see my family at all for Christmas. we will also be there through New Years' and that seems very odd to me.

In fact it feels so downright wrong that I keep having to fight with myself to keep feelings of resentment, anger and frustration at bay.

The simple truth is that I do not want to go.

Imagine that. Beth, the confirmed Euro-phile, feeling negative about a trip to Europe.

I just have to keep trying to put a brave face on it all and remind myself that just because I'm not with my immediate family this does not mean that I will not be with family. It's just not the family I am used to being with.

There are some things which my mind is simply more flexible about than others.

Christmas just doesn't happen to be one of them.