DONE

Grades are in (I had to fail a student) and term papers are done (the worst work I've done in grad school so far). Approximately 90 weeks down, 222 to go. Please excuse me now while I go curl up with this bottle of cheap champagne and try to forget what a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad semester it's been.

Validate me, please

An hour past the deadline I set for myself, but still two hours and eight minutes ahead of the deadline my professor set, I have officially finished - and turned in! - a term paper.

Things I'm thinking about instead of literary history

• It's 65 degrees outside.
  
• There are little kids playing on the trampoline next to the flowering crabapple tree in my neighbor's yard, while he grills something that smells delicious, as his family sits around in the sunshine laughing and drinking lemonade.
  
• I am at my desk, looking out the window. No wonder so many grad students are depressed.
  
• I want a beer.
• Academe might not be anything more than putting big fancy words on stuff everybody already knows about (intertextuality = referencing, drawing inspiration from, or being influenced by other things you read), doing weird morphological things to common nouns to show their important theoretical status (othering), and using lots of French words.
  
• Tempted to insert some non-sequitur quotation from, say, Monty Python into this paper to see if it is actually being read. Will settle for something jargony from Derrida about the archive, I guess.
• Is it worth it to try to make macaroni salad without celery?
• How on earth is this ever going to turn into or lead to a career?
• It is difficult and awkward to give dating advice to my Turkish Muslim friends, and not just because my Turkish has become terrible this year.
  
• I think graduate school has had a negative impact on my writing.
  
• I should have gotten a haircut before finals. My split ends are much more interesting than this paper.
  
• I've reached the minimum page limit. I give in (up?). Getting that beer now.
  

On entering (what feels like) hour 173 of my finals marathon

Nope, not done with the semester yet. Working on it (obviously not very hard at the moment, but I was). I was so stressed/busy/worried about the M.A. exam that I think I used up my semester's allotment of self-discipline - I'm having a really hard time knuckling down and getting these papers done.
Possibly because of that, it was lovely to take a semi-break the last couple of days while Papa was in town. We had a nice birthday dinner with friends at our house, which I realized isn't that great for entertaining yet. Even with a leaf in the table, 5 people is a squeeze (still deciding what to do about that dining set - paint, refinish, or sell?). We do have 5 non-chipped dinner plates, but only 4 matching napkins. We also gave books to about 700 first-graders, bought some peonies and lavender and more tomatoes to plant in the yard, and went to a Twins game.
In other news, I hate literary history. Well, the idea of literary history. The only reason I'm lingering over my literary history paper is because there is a paper twice as long on semiotic theory that's waiting for my attention. Ok, working again.

Menards

Someone pointed out to me that they were having trouble with the Menards registry link, which is possibly due to the fact that they make everything really difficult there. Anyways, here's that list so far:

1 0 1-1/8" RECIPROCATING SAW RS7 241-9857
1 0 7 1/4" CIRCULAR SAW CS10 BOSCH 241-6586
1 0 14.4V DRILL /DRIVER COMPACT 1.5AH 241-6920
1 0 10" COMPOUND MITER SAW MASTERFORCE 240-0014
1 0 FREEZER, CHEST, 7.2CF,WHT EWCF7WBX 453-5399
1 0 6' FG STEP LADDER T1A 976 560-0860
1 0 24' FG EXT LADDER T2 4924 GREEN 560-0800
1 0 50 PINT ELECTRONIC DEHUM FDF50S1 623-4921