Forgive Me For Complaining.

At this time a year ago, I was going nuts. Or more nuts. During the first three days of Thanksgiving Break a year ago, I wrote a twenty-six page paper. Then, frustrated by how freakin’ hard grad school was and by how much I still had to do during the semester (and over the course of my grad career), I had a bit of a nervous breakdown. I decided that I was going to quit. Then, I had a great three days, as I was doing no homework and felt that I had no more homework to ever do again. Then, on the Saturday of that break, I decided that since I only had two weeks to go and everything would be over for the semester, I should just finish out and see how it goes. I went back to school, did two presentations and wrote two twenty-five page papers and a thirty pager and did fine.

This semester, things are both the same and different. In the next two weeks, I, much like last year, have too much to do:

1. Teach five more times (and keep office hours)
2. Finish grading and report my students’ final grades
3. Read the novel Moscow Yankee
4. Write a 15-20 page paper on the metaphysical implications of Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter and prove that the resulting theory is viable by demonstrating it in the workings of Moliere’s Tartuffe
5. Write a 15-20 page paper on T.S. Eliot’s assumption in “The Waste Land” of the linguistic forms of Yahwehistic poetry
6. Write a 15-20 page collation essay on the four versions of Wilfred Owens’s poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est.”
7. Read several hundred pages of poetry
8. Slog through about thirty critical articles
9. Take two final exams
10. Apply to ACU for that class I want to take

The odd thing is, all this stuff isn’t bothering me too much this year. It’s not going to be fun. But I’ve done it before. And when I finish this time, it’s over, at least for a good while.