How do you end a semester on detective fiction? FULL CRAZY AHEAD, THAT'S HOW

So this friend of mine quit our English PhD program last year and was accepted to all law schools everywhere and--draaaamaaaa--ended up staying here and going to ours. Which was awesome for everyone but nail-biting-craziness for like nine months.

I was having lunch with this friend on Thursday and she was like, "so how are you ending your semester?" I assumed she was talking about next Tuesday, the day I thought would be the end of the semester. And I was--not gonna lie--more than slightly freaked out by the fact that I hadn't thought of anything sufficiently hear-swelling. And she had just finished telling me about the soaring-rhetoric of all of her end of terms classes (because you can send your students out into the world to save bunny rabbits and starving salmon when you're sending them into LAW) and I love me some soaring rhetoric. I watch old West Wing clips. I have them favorited on Youtube. My brother knows that he can never piss me off enough that a West Wing clip on my facebook wall won't make it all better.

But, no, my friend's like, "No, silly rabbit, I meant today."

And I made this face:


Because that meant I had an hour to come up with Serious Business Lesson Plan instead of the Happy Funtimes Lesson Plan I was planning to use that day.

I ended up doing a Frankenstein's Monster (yes, people, Frankenstein is the doctor) Lesson Plan in which we (a) finished the presentations I had not allotted enough time for before, (b) workshopped all their projects despite how very much they didn't need it, and (c) had a nice little Henry V inspired moment of rhetorical whatnot from yours truly.

Yeah, you heard me. I use Henry V as my rhetorical model in all things.

"We few, we happy few who learned how to write basic essays in this course, we band of brothers..."

It is good stuff.

Only--unlike training people to save all the under-represented cactii of the world or whatever you learn in law school--I only had that one trick in the bag. So it was like a fast-forwarded version of Hal but with the volume turned waaaay down. He's all like "once more into the breach, my friends!" and I'm like, "you're going to end up writing maaaaaany more essays before we let you leave this college."

Not so soaring.

That is my story. I ended class like that. And then I said "Merry Christmas." pause. "And Happy Hanukkah." pause. "And Kwanzaa. And SOLSTICE AND ALL THE HOLIDAYS I LOVE THEM BWAHAHAHA."

So there. YOU'RE WELCOME, WORLD.

Holiday Post #10: Doctor Who + snowball fighting

Title: An Unnecessary Freezing of Water
Author: ifeelbetter
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value.
Summary: Snow day for the Tardis crew. Amy doesn't fight fair. Rory can make hot chocolate out of thin air.
Notes: I am a card-carrying member of the Nothing Happens Club. I own up to it.

( And may all your Christmases be white )

Life's Little Failures

Things I Intended To Do Today (and made all sort of promises to myself before I went to sleep last night):

- write at least five pages of my seminar paper
- clean my room -- there is a monster growing under one of the piles of clothes, I'm pretty sure
- shower
- wake up before noon
- eat some meals (one of the hardest things on the list--I usually manage to remember one meal in a day)
- revise my prelims list

Things I Have Accomplished As Of 4 PM:

- shower

And I only just did that.

In other news, my friend convinced me to buy a beautiful pumpkin vintage coat yesterday. It is lovely. Also. I drank much coffee today and that makes me very happy.

why is EVERYTHING eventually about the Reformation??

Still working on the same paper...I just read the six billionth (fourth, my god, B, you are so very hyperbolic) newspaper article by Edward H. House about Japan. I have to make a paper about them fast because I accidentally volunteered to go first on Monday in our presentations.

It was an accident like this:
( I have a tag for my weird life choices because they are so weird )

BUT YES. Back to my point. The PAPER I am writing for this Transatlantic Print Culture and Race in the Nineteenth Century course is about...almost all of the things in the title. Just a different ocean. So it's about House's articles about Japan for American readers back in New York and Boston. See how I did that?

Race? Check.
Print Culture? Check.
Transatlanticpacific? CHECK.

House's articles turn out to be pretty fervently anti-British and anti-Catholic. I called my sister--a medieval and Renaissance grad student--and asked her WTF.

"I get the anti-Catholic stuff in Britain," quoth I. "What's it doing here when the guy is also anti-British?"*

* I was raised atheist--stringently atheist-- and quasi-hippie so I say shit like this out loud and then people give me weird looks. I just. I don't get most religious stuff. It is ALL foreign to me. Also. I once had a history teacher in high school who taught the same two pages of the text book every single day for a year and then skipped to WWII. I am missing CHUNKS of history.

"You're stupid," she said (but nicer) and then explained the Puritans. In the five minutes she had to spare before she continued to fete her hubby for passing his prelims. (She has been feting him for about a week now. I called the other night and they were drinking champagne and eating burgers. Even I would not do that. They were, unsurprisingly, sick afterward.)

I'm still mostly confused and very much unsure of how this all relates back to the Reformation. She assures me it does. So I guess I'm writing my paper about re-staging the Reformation in Japan via America?

...that is so stupid. Now my head hurts.