A Tale of Intense Academic Interest

I was up until 3:30 a.m. crafting a 10-page paper from start to finish. The writing process also included much of the research that I cited in the paper itself. Jay and I have a seldom-spoken agreement that when I have such a task to perform, he does something in the living room while I get the bedroom to work. This may be where he got the idea that the living room is "his space" (I had a lot of work to do this semester and sort of took the bedroom out from under him). Regardless, I have a few photos from my academic exploit yesterday/today I thought I would share.

3:31 p.m.
This was around the time Jay got home from work. I had spent most of the day reading research that I had found for my paper (which was about marriage as portrayed in theatre in eighteenth century England, if you care to know).

I had uploaded several online articles into Microsoft OneNote (which I cannot live without anymore) and had one book from the library that I was planning on using in my paper.

Jay saw me working diligently and so as not to disturb me, he wrote me a note on a post-it and stuck it to my laptop. It made me smile so I put it on the wall in front of me.

Here's a close-up:
(The text reads: You look very cute today! P.S. I ate all the turkey *picture of a turkey*

So time went on, I read a bit more and we went to another couple's house for some lentil soup as payment for driving them to their mechanic a couple of times when their car broke down. We were having a really nice time, feeling very sophisticated drinking tea and eating a vegan dinner at an actual table with other adults, talking about sophisticated things like The Blair Witch Project when I had to kill the mood and suggest that we leave.

On the way home, we stopped by CVS to pick me up some Red Bull and a couple of candy bars.

I unwrapped my Three Musketeers, cracked open my Red Bull and got to work at around...

9:39 p.m.
My laptop is closed here with my lamp on top of it (the Internet beckoned so many times, but I ignored its call, burying my face in a chapter on wife beating). I would have taken notes in OneNote, but I find it easier to write with a pen when reading from not-an-internet-article.

Jay was still out in the living room, I believe he was playing Assassin's Creed II. At some point I heard him switch from the game to a show or a movie.

I plowed through the articles, absorbing information like a sponge. Time flew by surprisingly quickly because I was able to keep my eyes from the clock (I have two on my desk, my laptop and an analog clock). I finally cracked open my laptop to review the notes I had put in the articles on OneNote to find connections I could make. Luckily that was very easy to do (historians like to talk about a lot of the same things, especially where feminist and gender studies are concerned).

THEN I got out the plays that I had read for the course. All of them:

1:28 a.m.
Because I'm smart and figured out what I was going to be writing my final paper on fairly quickly into the semester, I had made pencil marks and notes in the margins where significant lines were and was able to just go in and sticky note the bejeezus out of just about every play except for perhaps one or two out of the 9 or 10 read.

I traded Red Bull for water. I had a second one but I was feeling pretty good at this point, aside from a moderate stomachache that had been throbbing all afternoon. It didn't seem like it was 1:30 in the morning and I was still going strong.
At 3:20 I began to print my baby out. I went to fetch Jay who had fallen asleep on the couch to tell him he could come to bed. I stapled it all together and crashed myself.

Then this morning I proofread and revised it, printed it out again and stapled it much more confidently. To my surprise, I'm a fair typist and writer after midnight. But you would not believe my handwriting:

Neatly printed class notes:--------------------Insanely scribbled research notes:










((Click to enlarge))
I've been in college for 4 years now. This was the first time I've ever attempted to stay up into the wee hours of the morning to finish (much less start and finish) a project...especially with the aid of an energy drink.

All that said, I'm really proud of the paper I wrote. I didn't just pull it out of my ass and hand it in, I really thought about it and organized it. Before I endeavored to do what I did last night the paper had been swirling and stewing in my head so that all I had to do was create the mold to pour it into. Am I bragging? I feel like I might be bragging. Point is: It's done, done well and now all I have to focus on is concocting three lessons of a unit plan to be turned in on Tuesday.

If you read all that, congratulations. You're a better person now. ^_^

"Betting Living Through The Undead"

I have a twenty-page paper due on Thursday at 5:00. So far I have pounded out ten pages and within those pages is all that I have. My paper is concerned with the interest in the Infected zombie and the collapse of civilization that follows it. There was, believe it or not, scant research on this specific type of zombie (but a ton of research on the Haitian witch doctor zombie. It's too easy to make the connection to slavery with that one, and everyone and their mother did in the articles that I read).

Right now I'm having Jay read my paper and mark it up for me with suggestions, questions, rearrangements and so on. He's an art education major, but we both share the same love for the "zombie narrative" (a phrase I crafted in my paper). I'm hoping he'll have some valuable insights that can help me stretch it out a bit...in essence, double it.

Every November there is a writing contest called National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo for short). In this contest, participants write 50,000 words in one month. That averages out to around 1600 words per day. When you get around Thanksgiving, you start to get desperate to up your word count, so you throw in dream sequences, pages from Jack's typewriter in The Shining and really long-ass chapter titles that often involve a quote loosely related to whatever the hell your chapter is about.

I'm considering starting each section of my paper off with a center-aligned quote. I did start the entire paper off with something my roommate said:

“In a world where there are zombies, everything that you would like to do to people you don’t like, like with a chainsaw because of the law, you can do with reckless abandon.”

He responded with this when I started to bounce ideas off of him one afternoon before my paper really started to formulate. I credited him with it by including his name, and since no one knows who Garret is, it kind of holds some weight. It is directly relevant to the middle section of my paper where (in theory) I describe the survival-story part of the zombie narrative. Point being: It takes up two whole lines at the beginning of my paper and I'm down with that.

Le Bistro

Our small metropolis isn't exactly on the cutting edge of liberal policy, but you wouldn't think that we have a booming population of homosexuals clamoring for a place to call their own. However, we have not just one, but two gay bars. Thursday night was karaoke night at The Bistro and our friend David (who is gay) asked us to go.

I love karaoke, so I jumped at the chance.

I won't sum up the entire night for you (we were only there for maybe two hours) but there were high points and higher points:

-We saw someone we work with at Flarget. I never really talked to her, presuming we had nothing to talk about. Also, she doesn't really exude an "I'm friendly, talk to me!" sort of vibe. But the next time I see her I will not be able to think of anything but her kissing upon her girlfriend and something about that calms me about our lack of conversation. It was sweet.

-Punk/Goth lesbian singing Pink and walking around the bar. We looked away for one second and when we looked back Jay said, "Wait...who is singing?!"

-Jay: "That guy just pinched my ass." Enough said.

-Old patron giving me a fist-bump after my rendition of "Criminal" by Fiona Apple (which went much better than when I did it in California).

-Jay's description of the place: Dark, sweaty and sticky. All three are completely factual. But you get over it when you take into consideration the different levels of people there are to enjoy, how much everyone digs on each other and this general feeling of "We don't give a damn, we're here to have fun, go to hell if you don't like it."

The three of us sat in a balcony-type area on barstools for a while while a bunch of people played pool behind us. I realized we were just gazing down into the milieu of people, talking about the current singer. "It feels like we're up here judging everyone." David laughed and then proceeded to pretend to be writing things down in a judgmental manner.

It was a good time. I will be happy to spend the occasional Thursday night out there. You should come too!

The Grid

I woke up the other morning to my fiance and our friend watching Tron: Legacy on Blu-Ray. I had seen the original Tron while visiting Jay's sister and her family in California over Thanksgiving break. I remember not enjoying it very much. Granted we were playing Sequence at the same time and there were constant interruptions from sleepy children wandering down the stairs, rubbing their eyes saying "Moooommyyy..."

Legacy was fantastic. Visually stunning and of course, Daft Punk's presence made it much more appealing to me than the original which is lacking in any interesting musical score. Last night I went back to watch the original (also on Blu-Ray) and once I got through the "80's-tastic" format and focused on it, I enjoyed it much more.



So much so that it has infiltrated how I look at some of the things I do, say, for example, my job in retail. Check it out:

I work at a chain department store, let's call it Flarget. It is surprisingly easy to superimpose The Grid in Tron (either the original or Legacy) to the physical and mental set-up of a sales floor job.

Identity disc: Name tag

Color-coded uniform: Red shirt and khaki pants

Lightcycle: Shopping cart

Master Control Program / CLU: Whatever manager may be "messing with your whole zen thing, man"

Dumont: Fitting room operator

"Water" / Source of nutrition: Free PB and J sandwiches in the breakroom

The Grid: The Physical Sales Floor / "The Racetrack"

"The Games" between programs: Interaction between team members and guests (not all the time...but there are times, oh there are times)

There are endless other lines to be drawn between the Tron universe and Flarget, but that's enough for me to get over the fact that I actually have to work tonight, the first time in three days where I was really enjoying high points of productivity.

Tag, You're It

Good bloggers know that it's important to tag your posts. I have been an epic failure at this.

For those of you who aren't familiar with tagging...I'm not either really. But I do know that if you tag (or label) your posts according to what they're about, it makes them easier for people to search for, either within your blog or outside of it.

I used to do this for Holy Matrimony! I even had them organized into subcategories (yes, I was that overreaching). But the more I wrote, the random-er I wrote. My topics were so erratic that I found myself coming up with more tags/labels where the ones I had were "too general."

You know what's weird, though? I have no pressing things to do today. I have class at 5:30 where, once there, I will listen and respond to my classmates reading their papers that we all just wrote. I suppose I could turn my paper into something more readable for next week...or start my global revision for that class...or write some clinical observation reports...or write a reflection about my teaching demonstration yesterday...

Why do my posts turn into a "What I should be doing"? Is it my guilty conscience that gets the best of me? I think part of it comes from a lack of anything substantial or interesting to write about. Well, that's not true. I have lots to say but not always something everyone cares about. I mean, I can only talk about certain things so many times without getting boring.

I know! Maybe I'll figure out a way to post copies of my YA Zombie Literature blog that I had last semester. That had some direction in it. Maybe I could find the most embarassing, *facepalm*-y LiveJournal posts that I've kept and share them with you (with the disclaimer that I am not the same person I was in 2004).

I'll think about it.

Yeah...try coming up with a tag for that post and using it again.