Thursdays usually promise to suck because classes run from 9 to 5:30, but today wasn't horrible. PWR opened at 9am with an hour of peer review, but we didn't have much to review. The assignment had been to bring in the introduction and conclusion of the 15-page final research paper due in a week, but I tend to write my conclusions at the conclusion of the writing process. That's not toowild and crazy a method, is it? So I ended bringing in one of those prepackaged, melodramatic, trying-really-hard-to-be-attention-catching introductions and a failure of a conclusion. They did have a few redeeming qualities, one of which was that in verbally untangling their obscurity I managed to clarify my train of thought, so I'm just going to let this go and turn in a smashing paper next Thursday. Right on.

Actually, I'm feeling decent about the PWR paper. We've already written some shorter assignments from which I can literally cut and paste several passages. A nice by-product of those papers is that I've got several inches' worth of dense academic articles to cite or refer to. Also, I've had to explaaaaaiiiiin my fairly obscure topic and thesis so many times to so many people that I've got the verbal delivery, at least, down pat. Finally, I've got a 5-minute presentation slot on Tuesday with whose results I can fine-tune my paper. One full and torturous day should take care of these boasts.

Another final paper is in medieval women. I'm starting to regret taking the 5-unit option, but, hey, it's too late for regrets. One thing that I have figured out about this class is that the grading criteria which pulled off a B on my clearly bad, started-at-midnight-the-night-before-because-I-was-programming midterm paper can't be too harsh. I'm budgeting three half-days for this one, which is tentatively 7 pages about Christine de Pizan's torturous misquoting of Greek mythology.

Notice how I've saved the most pressing paper for last? This one's a 5-page IHUM paper officially due tomorrow at 5pm. Yes, our TF did state, without explicit implication, that she would not be able to reach her box til 2pm Saturday, but I haven't completely trusted myself to wake up before 2pm ever since I slept at Suzie's over Thanksgiving break and woke up at 2:15, just in time for me to miss the post office's package window hours and thus, unwittingly, Roger's brownies. Also, this additional night would have actually meant something had I not scheduled to go to Larkin's Screw Your Roommate tomorrow night.

Being so short on time, I naturally dawdled at dinner (at Wilbur today! Nice-looking, and much more open layout, but food's still the same... and you can't reenter and get that simple cup of tea you suddenly crave after dinner) and participated in the brief but daily hall wrestling match with Tory, Kiel, and Ben. I'd catalogue the rest of the junk I have to do before finals, including a set of data structures and a Battleship program, but perhaps it's time to actually get crackin' on this work, eh?