Six days, nineteen hours, twenty-five minutes

I've been a slacker when it comes to updates, I know. Please forgive. This semester has been every bit as hellish as I imagined. My Intro to Grad Studies class, for instance. In addition to the five major papers we have due over the course of the semester (including the one we had due the first day of week two) we have ten "sleuthing reports" that we have to write. Essentially, we have a list of questions (such as "What reference works would help a scholar locate and provide the most reliable information on the location of -- and the importance to literary study of -- the corrected proofs of most of Dickens's novels?") that we have to research the answer to, find five sources that would provide the best answers, and then evaluate them as sources (without providing the answer to the question) in a one-page paper. Basically, it's a role-playing exercise: if you were researching this question for real-real (not for play-play) where would you start looking for this information. Each one takes many hours in the library finding and flipping through reference books, and then several hours trying to condense all of this information into one page without screwing with margins or font-size, a whole lot of stress, and then each one is worth 1% of our final grade. Awesome.

But the real thing weighing on me is the first-year Ph.D. exam which I will take a week from today. Oh. My. God. One week. I was feeling good about it, but the panic is starting to set in now. I think I'll do fine, but so much is riding on my performance in this exam -- namely, whether I get to stay in the program -- that I don't think I'll ever feel prepared enough.

I can't wait until it's over, because then I'll have this great weight lifted off my shoulders. It will free up some of my time to work on Intro assignments (that, and write fiction, you know, the whole reason I'm here) but really it will free up only a few hours each day. The main reason I want to get it over with is to get rid of this sense of impending doom hanging over me and most of my friends, this heavy stressor that is killing my appetite and my ability to sleep at night. It's funny -- most of the time, I don't feel that stressed about it, but I know I am because of how my body manifests stress. I feel it without feeling it.

I'm sure once it's over I will feel relieved. For about a day. Because then, two weeks after the exam, our Survey of Scholarship, the biggest paper we have for Intro to Grad Studies, is due. For this one, we have to choose one author or work (I've chosen Lolita, natch) and survey a large portion of the scholarship on the work to see how it has changed over time. We have to limit our search as much as possible, by assigning a time span or theme to explore, but we have to find at least thirty-five sources to use. His instructions say the papers should be as long as they need to be to cover the scholarship. Talking to students who have done this before, it sounds like most are in the forty-page range, though I've heard that some overachievers have written as much as seventy-five pages for this assignment. That's damn near a thesis. So that's what I have to look forward to starting the day after the exam.

Seriously, anyone want to put me out of my misery?

But on a brighter note: I forgot how utterly, mind-blowingly amazing Arcade Fire's Funeral is until I bought it on vinyl. Wow.

And on an even brighter note: I had a date last night, and it went really well. So I think I'm sort of seeing someone. I wanted to wait until after the exam before even thinking about anything like this, but it happened on its own as relationships always seems to do. I'm happy. Kind of cheesy how happy I am today, but there you go.