Today was a day wholly without purpose until 11:57, which is not the time that i would suggest that you set when it comes to acquiring a purpose — not just in the sense that technically the day ends a scant three minutes later, but also because it clearly means you wasted a whole gaggle of useful hours doing absolutely nothing. Which, and i’m not going to split hairs about it, i did. All day. In fact, i almost decided not to wake up; at the time it seemed like a conscious decision that i could make and stick with. Just… don’t open my eyes. Turn over a couple more times. Wake up on Monday, check my email, and go to class.
Please excuse any incoherencies that emerge as this rambles on. It is an experiment.
The two things that occurred to me at 11:57 were really one thing with another bigger, fatter thing sitting on top of it. The primary thing was that i almost surely had a paper due within the next two days, and that i should figure out which of the four papers i have due this week it was. The hulking thing that was standing in the way of this was my room. Or, more specifically, the mess therein.
My room is/was a mess; i do not attempt to deny it. I am the only person that has to live here, and ostensibly the mess makes it impossible for me to bring anyone home with me from a party because i might lose her on the way to the bed. I don’t necessarily mind all the stuff i have scattered around, but at the same time i somewhat enjoy order (and an unobstructed view of freshly vacuumed green carpeting). Thus, cleaning commenced shortly before midnight.
With me, cleaning is a circular exercise… it’s never just one thing or one place i have to tidy up. Instead, one thing leads to the next and the next until picking up a penny turns into my unearthing my desktop from the mess of cds and bills that it was submerged in. So, it’s not as though i could just find the paper that would tell me the relevant facts about my papers so much as that i had to circle (like a starved vulture over a decaying hunk of carrion) my room until it turned up. And circle i did… and circled and circled.
(This is where i skip over the part about my learning that the Latin American Lit paper was due tomorrow, the Theory one on Tuesday, and the incredibly daunting one on International CopyRight and the Internet due on Thursday. I’m sure you can imagine how fun it was.)
Dr. Ibieta asked for a 750-1000 word paper, and i intended to deliver one. However, around 845 i found myself getting a wee bit weary … both of staring at my monitor and of being awake. Contrary to what you might expect, such weariness motivates me not to quickly reach a summation in my academic wanderings, but to instead blather in a more circuituous route until i finally run out of steam altogether and wind up ending in an unceremonious heap wherever i fall. That’s what happened. To further prolong my weary misery, i decided that i wasn’t just interesting in writing the paper, but also in the paper making some small amount of sense, so i endeavored to read it back to myself. Upon attempting such a feat i discovered that even with my reading glasses weighing in heavily on the bridge of my nose i was basically seeing the screen in triplicate, and that my only hope in untangling the web i had woven with words was in reading it aloud to see if it made a single lick of sense.
My next discovery was that my mouth had stopped working at some point during my typing-spree. I read and re-read my hulking paragraphs, but all that came out was a weary drone that increasingly lacking ennunc- and pronounc- iation. I tried to force my lips to comply with the onscreen syllables, and i was rewarded with a feeling akin to the hinges of my jaw weeping. The proceeded to weep through three consecutive readings of my paper, during which i combined several paragraphs and excised 200 spare words that i had accumulated along the way. The result is a paper of perfect size and shape with a somewhat tenuous grasp on its own narrative (which isn’t a very good thing, since its supposed to be a paper about narrative)…