The End is Near!

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I might actually live through this semester after all, and just being able to type that without laughing hysterically is an incredible feeling (and seriously, it's only in the last four days that the possibility of being to type that without hysteria has entered my mind.) It helps that I've gotten a few grades back which, in turn, enabled me to feel ok about where I was going with an assignment. See, one of my projects is a big paper (shocker, I realize, cause I never mention writing papers. I know, I shouldn't keep things like this from you.) And we have to turn in little pieces parts of the paper incrementally - I think her intent is that we get used to following the dissertation process so that it's not an incredible surprise when we're finished with our coursework and now we have to write a really big paper. And that's nice and all. Except that it means I just spend my life writing really big papers that don't culminate in adding three letters to the end of my name.

So anyway, right up until December my professor had been great about turning around grades. In December? Not so much. So you'd turn something in and the deadline for the next piece was looming and yet you hadn't had any feedback on the first little piece so turning in the other was a little unnerving cause you just knew that whatever mistakes you made in the first bit would be carried over into the second. And so on. And so forth. But no matter, I have now finished a first final draft and turned it in for the last little pieces parts grade: the blind peer review.

I'm not sure why the idea of a blind peer review terrifies me, except that it smacks of high school where every quarter we had to write a PPP (Potentially Publishable Paper). And we'd write these and then they'd be distributed out for reviews. And it was this process that convinced me that 1) I couldn't write and 2) Writing for a living was something completely out of my reach, despite how much it might be something I wanted to do. The PPP reviews turned into this huge popularity contest and as the only popularity contest I would ever have won in high school was the "Who's the least popular person at the school" popularity contest, my stories and poems and essays always came back marked up from here to eternity with helpful comments like "You suck. This sucks. Why do you even go here?" And then there were the really nasty ones. So, that effectively squashed any belief I had in my ability to write because seriously, in four years - four PPPs a year - I never got one positive comment. Not one.

(Ok, I'm discounting the one that I got from my then chemistry lab partner who wrote something nice when I asked him to because I told him that otherwise I'd tell our teacher that he'd copied off me on our last quiz.) (Yes, I realize that it's pathetic that you have to blackmail someone into saying something nice about your short story. That's kind of the point, you see?) (And if he'd been smarter than the basketball he dribbled to great acclaim on the team, he'd've pieced together the fact that it was a pretty empty threat because the teacher would've gotten more angry at me for knowing that he cheated and not doing something about it than at him for cheating in the first place.) (My only defense is that I had a crush on him and that can cause high school girls to do much weirder things. Of course, I don't think he knew I existed. Even though I was his lab partner.)

Anyway, knowing that this paper that I've worked on and feel ok about, but not great, is going to be subject to peer review makes me want to squirm into a hole, possibly never to return. But I suppose the one saving grace is that it's "blind" - meaning that theoretically no one will know who wrote it. Except that, of course, we had to post information about our topics in the forums and I'm the only one doing this topic. But let's ignore that little fact, k?

Now, returning to the main point of my rambling here - I am down to two major assignments left for the semester (excepting the revisions of that paper after the peer review; I'm banking on that not taking tons of time.) And that makes me do a little happy dance. And this morning I'm closer to being finished than I was last night when I went to bed.

How is that possible, you wonder? Did I kidnap (or blackmail) the shoemaker's elves into doing some work for me? No, of course not, that would've been a much better alternative to the lack of sleep I got last night. After 2 hours of watching the clock tick, I got up and worked on homework for another 2 hours before crawling back into bed, exhausted yet strangely wide awake, to watch the clock tick some more.

And that leaves me with my parting question: Does anyone actually count sheep successfully? Cause I'm telling you, I tried that, and those little sheep just wander all over the place. First off, TV has clearly rotted my brain because the sheep? They all looked like the Serta sheep. So I tried to get them to jump a fence so I could count them, but then I found myself being that pesky Norwegian judge in the Sheep Olympics Fence Jumping Competition - you know, the one with the super low scores all the time? So the sheep got together and attempted a stampede. It wasn't pretty.