---
title: Harbingers
date: '2005-05-10T07:16:52-04:00'
permalink: /harbingers/
tags:
    - 'random thoughts'
---

So in my evening down-time, which I’ve actually had some of over the last week, as I try to clear my head from all the grading (which, by the way:

— 2 graduate Cultural Studies projects

— 9 Media Studies term papers

so I didn’t finish yesterday as I’d hoped, but today’s *definitely the day*, right?), I’ve been rewatching season 3 of [Buffy](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/B00006RCNX). Somehow I’d managed to forget that Anya showed up that early in the series’s life, and I’d *completely* forgotten the first emergence of the First, the big bad of the final season.

I got all diverted onto another train of thought, though, by the Bringers, who are in this episode also referred to as the Harbingers. As it turns out, yesterday morning I went to the gym and lifted for the first time in eons — a collapsing arch is currently preventing me from running until I can get into the podiatrist and get a decent orthotic, but that’s a whole other story. There is a point to all this, though: I was reminded for the first time in a while that the brand name of my weightlifting gloves is [Harbinger](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/B0007URSC6). Which got me thinking.

Can something be a harbinger of anything but badness? Every single time I have looked at these gloves for years now, the phrase “harbinger of doom” has run through my head — not a cheery thought when one is attempting to lift heavy objects. And I can imagine “harbingers of winter” as being a reasonable use of the term — leaves dying, that first snap of cold as everything settles into grayness. But: “harbingers of spring”? I want to say I’ve heard it used, but it seems incongruous. “Harbingers of joy”?

What I’m looking for here is “harbingers of being done with grading so that I can get on with my damn summer already,” but I just keep hitting up against doom instead.