Done!

My fall semester officially ended at one this afternoon, when I turned in my last paper. Eager to do something celebratory, I immediately treated myself to a cheeseburger and fries at Pete's Cafe, a popular greasy spoon on Fordham Road. After that, I walked down to 187th Street and got a haircut. I should probably say a word or two about the kindly old Neapolitan barber that I go to - which would be at least two more words than my barber and I typically exchange while he's cutting my hair. That's not to say that my barber isn't talkative - he talks a fair amount during the haircut, just not to me and not in English.

Like many barbershops of yore, Saverio's doubles as a neighborhood hangout where old men go to chat in the language they grew up with and read days-old copies of Italia Oggi and La Repubblica. Though I took Italian in college, I can't pick up much of the conversations, which are carried out in a fairly impenetrable dialect. Saverio's is the kind of barbershop you go to as much for the atmosphere as for the haircut, and that's what I like about it. I've also been uniformly pleased with the haircuts I've gotten there, so I suspect I'll be going back there when I return to Fordham for the spring semester.

Tomorrow morning, I head home to Massachusetts to spend Christmas with my family. I'll be there for about two and a half weeks, interrupted at the end of December by a weekend trip to Detroit for the annual bi-province Jesuit formation gathering. I'll probably update this blog sporadically during the break, so stay tuned. AMDG.