The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a valley, matted with rains passing over from each festive rise.

It was in the final Gayogo̱hó:nǫʔ class of the semester that I received my first advice for celebrating Thanksgiving. Our indigenous teacher was one half of an amusing double act: the sublime and the ridiculous, as his colleague, a wiry professor of linguistics with an uncanny resemblance to Willem Dafoe, called it.

"Enjoy the holiday," he said. "It's kind of an interesting time for indigenous people. Just tell your families: think of the Wampanoags. That'd be a good thing."

Earlier in the same class, an undergraduate student had proposed training a Large Language Model on the Gayogo̱hó:nǫʔ language for his final project. He had apparently no notion of whether this might be something the nation would want, nor the risks or considerations of feeding the language into such a model. I was incandescent with rage and indignance, but our teacher, with the unmatched grace and reticence so characteristic of his people, merely smiled.

trade offer! you receive: the ability to generate pizza recipes (with glue) in your native language. peter thiel receives: the ability for drones to read the signs on your reservation and bomb your house.

This time of ours can weigh on the soul. Despite having twice had what my classmates amusingly call a "crash-out" (duly added to my list of delightful Americanisms) about the technofeudalist hegemony suffusing our technology—and increasingly our language—I read Peter Thiel's thirty-page manifesto on a whim. Reading with the mouth agape soon aches the jaw, but the piece boggled and flummoxed me unrelentingly with its almost incomprehensibly frank evil. It's scarier to be ruled by people intellectually confused than those who are merely morally deranged, but one has cause for worry when one's rulers are both. It's also worrying to see such confusion exported to, and gaining ground within, university campuses. I am to begin tutoring next semester; I have fantasies of a dramatic, Hectorian entry to my first discussion section, with some Draconian proclamation: if I see any em-dashes, any bulleted lists, any 'delves'—you've had it!

Thanksgiving eventually arrived as a placid relief, an exhaling before the last frantic melée of the year. Having been adopted by a kindly classmate, vibrations gradually rose in my seat as the highways grew more twisted and injured with every mile we drove closer to New Jersey. The trees crowning the banks of the Delaware scratched little holes in the fog rolling down the river. The whole scene loomed like an eighties horror movie, featuring a somewhat desultory performance by the early winter rains. The holiday fare was impressive; turkey steals into the stomach like a spy, a satisfying lull soon followed by a wave of irresistible torpor as you realise you're betrayed.

The snows, when they came, would fall on Jersey in a rich sleet, affording the suburbs a certain grey homeliness. The state is nestled into the very bosom of the Atlantic coast, close to everything. This made possible a quick jaunt around a couple of nearby towns, with very good schools and very good sandwiches. The most exotic destination was Philadelphia, at which I was introduced to the Philly Cheesesteak, and made for a pleasant day trip. It was with some dismay that I learnt that the Cheesesteak did not consist of a steak topped with melted cheese, but the greasy mince sandwich I ultimately received was, I admit grudgingly, almost tasty enough by itself to justify the trip. However, our first and most notable trip was to Princeton which, with its remarkable university, ensorcelled my party almost as soon as we left the gloom of the parking building and saw the Tudor arches. In Philadelphia we would visit the pleasant University of Pennsylvania—archaeology students are to college museums like stepmothers to engagement parties—but the Princeton collection was truly remarkable. Each of the Ivies has a different approach to the curation of their museums; where Penn's (like Cornell's) is polite piquery, Princeton's is something more akin to naval shock and awe.

Unlike Philadelphia, our Princeton trip would bear real ethnographic fruit. Owing to a chance encounter with someone quite pretty and bizarre, my extrication from the museum would be followed by a trip to the hippie town of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Everybody in New Hope is working on a Project, which is absolutely without exception one of three things:

1. Terrible music
2. A massage therapy business
3. A medicinal cannabis enterprise

In hindsight, it was foolish to have expected less from a town whose single row of nightlife haunts featured a kava bar.

The avatar of this milieu, whom I'll call 'Hugo', lounged in a wooden chair next to a dive bar. He was white, with curly, mid-length brown hair fiercely disciplined by a black do-rag. A dark, open shirt and a cheap pinstripe were draped over his slender figure, whilst a constellation of silver necklaces and rings glinted as they caught the light of the outdoor heaters. Our conversation went something like this:

Hugo had one redeeming quality, however, which I found so delightful that I couldn't help but like him. He would insistently refer to everybody, friend and stranger alike, as "feller". This wasn't necessarily amusing in itself, but for the combination of two factors: firstly, that he was very clearly from the part of the country where people say "feller", and secondly that he had equally clearly never, ever used the term until his twenties. It was the raw determination with which he used the word; so incongruous with the rest of his speech, yet such a compelling part of the image that one simply had to respect it. I would get my own back for the 'lecture time' jibe: some time later he was nobly attempting to write down his phone number as a safety measure for a couple of girls bound for a shady trap-house in the strenuous pursuit of cocaine. However, he lacked a pen. Never to be outdone in pretension, I deftly produced my notebook and fountain pen, which I handed to him with a beatific grin. He grumbled thanks, and not five minutes later I even managed to light his cigarette with my book of matches after his lighter died. I left New Hope with a renewed zest for life and a love of the game, in no small part due to the quiet magnificence of Hugo the Hometown Hunk.

With Thanksgiving over, the melée began almost the instant I returned to my own university. It was during the final fortnight of the semester that the suicidal American work ethic was brought home to me. With four five-thousand-word papers due, a proctor's position at the Law School, and social engagements to keep, it ought to have been no surprise that I fell ill almost as soon as classes ended. Having evaded sickness completely since arriving, I felt a sense of kinship as I watched the students in the exam rooms falling to pieces with sniffles and stifled coughing fits whilst my own body called in its debts. The climax of finals week was a forty-eight hour period during which I missed a night of sleep, worked a morning shift, took a four-hour nap, and then wrote an entire paper from 7:30pm until 11:30am. The paper itself was composed of maniacal nonsense so good I was convinced I had revolutionised the field of archaeology—an illusion of which I was soon to be disabused.

Rejection only really matters when one cares about the rejector. As the semester ended and the grades rolled in—and certain other professional matters came to a head—I received two blows to the ego on the same day. Firstly, that my groundbreaking, revolutionary essay had received something like a B-plus or an A-minus, and secondly that I had been denied the opportunity to contend for a political role I had coveted. Whilst the usual, sour-grapes response is to disdain the rejector(s) and/or his process, the dual ego wallop was unavoidably potent: "your ideas are rubbish, and your politics are rubbish." The suite of other, supposedly healthy responses in such a case are fairly well-known; one is told to consider growth opportunities offered by critique, reframe, separate worth from outcome, or to take the agonist view that all struggle is character-building. However, it is quite difficult for one to actually choose an approach when one is so keenly aware of, and thus paralysed by, all the possible ways of looking at a misfortune. Thus it is almost at random that I have chosen to consider critique of my ideas a chance to improve them, and the closing of one door the impetus for a renewed focus on the opening of another. As December comes to a close, I wonder: perhaps I'll even haunt these gorges for another summer.

It is well that Christmas is a labour. My mate Barnaby insists that merriment is an obligation, and has to be something that breaks the flow of normal time. He is convinced that genuine merriment has to be worked for, and it's not the same as 'being very comfortable'. Mine was spent on the West Coast, in a home filled with boundless, prodigious love and, accordingly, a fair amount of conflict. An atmospheric river had recently deposited a huge amount of rain across the region, with some areas in Washington State transformed into murky, emerald quagmires beflecked by the drab caps of roofs. These storms, both inside and outside the walls of our suburban refuge, would subside, and I was left with a deep gratitude for having been so warmly welcomed during such an increasingly inhuman, schizophrenic, and comical moment in time. After a good Last Word at Zig Zag bar in Seattle, I decided to write a sonnet to end the year:

Ceterum autem, Thielus deportandus est.