WARNING: The following could be uncomfortable to read. Do so with caution.

Yes, so it's basically been forever since I've written. I'm sorry. Let me update you on life up north.

It's banal.

It's monotonous.

It's bland.

It's boring.

It's drab, dreary, hum-drum, pedestrian, stuffy, stagnant, unstimulating, demoralizing, draining, wearisome, tedious, dull, enervating, fatiguing, discouraging, disheartening, lumbering, unrewarding, unfulfilling, undramatic, uninspiring, uneventful, destabilizing, distressing, injurious, painful, laborious, dragging, unhealthy, jeopardizing, detrimental, gloomy, bleak, cheerless, gray, melancholy, sepulchral, sobering, dismaying, glum, gloomy, desolate, comfortless, dreary, lonely, and most of all...

depressing.

Perhaps a series of metaphors would be more illustrative of this and my condition.

It is as the London of Charles Dickens, a city with a thousand chimneys coughing smoke into a yet blackened sky, its harrowing poverty staring at you through sunken eyes in sallow skin.

I am as a trapped woman, benevolently protected, it would seem, from a cruel and unjust world, locked in her tower of gray-tinged stone to shield her from the outside, but no hope of escape to it should her own world prove likewise.

Or perhaps I should explain the city a bit better. It is a UNESCO World City of Literature. It has a copyright library containing every book printed in the UK since the mid 1800s. The University library was a copyright library until just past that point. Both the University library and the National Library of Scotland have incredible collections of rare manuscripts, including the First Folio. Yet even as a research graduate student, I have been instructed to not begin my research. Explicitly told to refrain from doing the one thing I came here to do.

In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."