20: excuses made to my conscience

I didn't finish The Essay last night. But that is only because I remembered that I had to work this morning. I don't think I have ever mentioned my job here before, with good reason: it's boring, unfulfilling, and completley meaningless in the larger scope of my life. I'm a weekend, evening, and holiday receptionist at the local community college, which means that I have developed an excellent phone voice and have come up with dozens of polite ways to inform people that I can't help them, and no, there's nobody who can because it's nine PM on a Friday night before a holiday weekend and all of the professors are at home. Because my job could be done by a machine, I usually do not need to be alert or intelligent in any sense of the words. I regularly come to work half asleep and sick and manage just fine. Most times I don't even have to look particularly nice, since the only people who see me are the security officers and the basketball players. The most challenging part of the job is maintaining the strength of will to sit behind a desk for nine hours at a time without losing hold of my sanity. Today, however, I'm temping for the usual secretary, so I actually had to do challenging and unthinkable things like brush my hair, dress nicely, sleep, and eat before coming to work.

So clearly I couldn't stay up all night finishing The Essay. I'm doing it now, and will have it done by tonight. Then I'll be able to watch House, M.D. and read Dostoyevsky all night without guilt. I remind myself of this every time I feel my resolve failing and my hatred of this paper mounting.

16.1: there will be more from me today, I guarantee it

One especially good thing about posting every day is that it forces me to keep a firmer handle on dates and time than I probably otherwise would in my current backwards insomniac existence. Unfortunately, I am painfully aware of how much time I am wasting. I really need to write the poetry essay that will finish my last incomplete from spring semester, something I am reminded of every time I type in the date at the top of these posts. It's really difficult to write papers without deadlines or structure. This should be easy!

There are two unfortunate reasons why this paper remains unfinished:
1. My mentor-teacher-surrogate mother is too nice and keeps giving me extensions
2. I suck and cannot impose structure on my days no matter how (admittedly feebly) I try

10.2: the punchline to a mocking joke about literary theory

I just read an article called "Remembering Race: Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in 'The Red Wheelbarrow'".

If anyone wants to know why this is so incorrect, I would be more than happy to bore you with a rant. Hint: it has to do with W's. And Gertrude Stein.

Sometimes I hate studying literature. And it will only get worse.