Graduation

I remember when I graduated from high school that I didn't really feel like I was done, that there were more things I could learn at that level to prepare myself for college. I really don't feel like that as I'm finishing my undergrad. I keep being told by professors that there are no comments that they can make on my papers to help me improve on them at the undergraduate, 500, level. It's terribly frustrating. What's the point of all of these exercises if I don't receive any constructive criticism? I literally sighed out loud when I got an A+ on my last paper. There were no comments, just an A+ from a professor who used to give me more comments than anyone else. No comma corrections, no "you could do this better," no "when you go to grad school, you might want to try X"
I'm really ready to be done, I must say. At least a year after high school I still missed being there, but I don't feel that with college and I don't really like it. I verified with my advisor again today that all of my paperwork was in order for graduation, hallelujah. I have this fear in my head of being finished and not being allowed to graduate for whatever reason for not filling out my forms properly or something. Now all I've got to do is finish my thesis work and I'll be done with it all.
I hope I'm not let down by grad school. I really want to work hard and be challenged. I wouldn't continue to choose the work that I do if I weren't concerned with being challenged. If I wanted to coast through school I'd write on Austen or the Brontes or Mark Twain, I'm reading Joyce and Woolf and Pynchon because their writing is really hard! I want to work at it more than anything.
Okay, that was my rant for the next few months. If you made it to the end of this, thanks for your patience with my insanity.

My laptop

I was just commenting to someone earlier today about how I have about 70 television episodes and movies on my laptop and how I didn't even have to move to change a DVD if I wanted to watch hours and hours of TV. Alas, I spoke too soon. I've had this laptop since just after Christmas, so what is that, three months? I successfully managed to run a 100 gig hard drive down to about 700 mg. Oops.
I just deleted all fourteen episodes of Firefly from my hard drive (I do have them on my external though) :( That brought me up to about 4 gigs of space. I might have to resort to deleting more shows as need be, but I'm going to hang onto my BSGs for as long as I can.
I'm trying to decide what else I can delete. Sigh.
Now I'm running a backup. I'm not waiting until 3am for it to be done though. Who waits until 11:45 to run a backup though? Me, that's who.

ice cream

Anybody ever notice that ice cream tastes better when you eat it with a plastic spoon? Maybe it has something to do with it being more pliable. Hmm

grad school

I think I'm the only person alive who'd think a call directly from the director of English graduate admissions at a university could be a bad thing. I was completely horrified, and somehow I managed to convince myself that she was calling to tell me my application was missing something or that there was a problem with my records, as if the director of admissions had nothing better to do than call applicants about missing files and so on. Sigh.
Well, I'm still pretty shocked about the whole thing. The idea of getting to go to grad school, let alone getting to be a GTA with a decent amount of money, is pretty surprising to me.
I haven't made any final decisions yet, I'm still waiting to hear what other schools are offering me. I feel oddly like a high school athlete being recruited by major universities. It's weird to think people actually want me, me personally to go to their school. I don't quite know what to make of it.

vehicles vs. the snow

So, this morning I go over to my father's house because the weather has been kind of bad and I figured I'd take my stepmother's SUV to work since it's bigger and theoretically less likely to slide; a rather logical plan. I grab the SUV, pull out of the driveway and go up the big driveway hill. Right at the edge of the street I stop the car so I can grab the newspaper and the car manages to slide about twenty feet backwards down the hill into a snow bank. I notice a little yellow light pop up on the dashboard which I'm sure means something horrible so I look it up in the manual in the glove box. The manual says the light means "slide." Is it not clear that I'm sliding? Can I not tell that I'm sliding? Apparently not, the dashboard has to tell me. Ahhh!
Anyway, I spend a good twenty minutes or so digging the car out with a shovel and my hands, reving the engine and so on trying to dig myself out, to no avail. Of course, I'm supposed to be at work when all of this is occuring. I call the store and explain the situation while my boss laughs in amusement at my situation. Next I call AAA and after about a half hour of listening to their lovely advertisement based audio recording (why do they advertise to people who are already AAA members, hello, captive audience!!!)I speak to a real live human being who tells me it can be up to four hours before they can get there. Sigh.
At this point the SUV is stuck at a point where it's not blocking the driveway or the neighbors' driveway so I go grab my car and figure I'll take that to work. I back out of the lousy parking space I'd chosen and manage to back into another snow bank right behind me. The driveway is ridiculously narrow and it's thus unavoidable. I manage to get my car really stuck there too, redo the whole shoveling bit, no such luck. I'm somewhere between hysterical laughter and screaming obscenities around now.
I go back inside the house and walk around with my shoes off hoping to regain some feeling in my toes. Eventually (far less than four hours later) the tow truck guy arrives, and in the process of pulling the SUV out of the snow bank the tow truck gets stuck. Again, hysterical laughter meets screaming obscenities. After about half an hour he calls a tow truck which manages to pull him free and eventually they get the SUV out onto the road. I ask if he can get my car out of the snowbank closer to the house and he tells me it's far too trecherous for him to go down there since he already got stuck close to the house, in his words, he says to "wait it out" or in short, wait until the snow melts and then drive my car out. It's freaking February, that could be months and I'm blocking the entire driveway.
I opt to take the SUV to work which I'm already two hours late for and call my father on the way. He doesn't care at all about my emotional well-being, or that I've just spent a couple hours outside digging and am now exhausted. He's concerned about the case of wine in the trunk of the SUV that could potentially freeze, and demands that I find a way to move my car so he can get his car in the garage when he returns from his vacation tomorrow. Ahhh!
Anyway, I go to work and after a few hours the manager sends three guys to help me push my car out of the snow bank. It took surprisingly little time to get it out and I left the SUV behind and now am using my car. So that has been much of my day. Tada! Reason 732 why I need a vacation.
This has been another absurd tale from my absurd life. Proving once again that reality is far more amusing than fiction. Thank you very much.

My thesis is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

I feel like I've said the same thing seventy five times, but I haven't said it at all. For my literature review I have five categories, but everything seems like it could go in every category. How is this possible. When do I get to write my own thoughts? When do I get to say something I think instead of trying to write out what has already been said for the last eighty years? Now I know why people like to analyze new books, there aren't that many people to cite. Or maybe I should pick someone really old who isn't popular, so not popular that nobody has said anything on it. But would anyone care then? I've got to find somebody really old that is great and then I can inform the world. I need to make friends with a literary archeologist, then I could get access to an old manuscript and teach the world. What I need is a new (old) Chaucer, or Cardenio, I need someone to find Cardenio and give it to me. Can someone arrange that?

What happened to global warming?

Didn't Al Gore go on and on about Global Warming in An Inconvenient Truth? This doesn't look like Global Warming to me. It looks like freaking ridiculous snow crap.

This isn't even good snowman snow. It's all powdery, not packable, snow. Bah.

Now, nobody respond to this explaining what global warming is to me. I know what it is. I'm just bitter, bitter cold at least. I'm so not driving to class tomorrow if it's still like this. I recant all statements about being willing to drive in any weather that I made yesterday. It'll take two years to get to class and I haven't the energy.