I got a paper back today that made me happy. I got a paper back today, which made me happy. In the first sense of those concatenated words, it was a paper to be relatively proud of. Contrary to my usual procrastinatory self (that phrase sounds familiarÑI must have used it before?), I'd composed a thesis statement and outlined the body nearly a week before the due date, submitted those to my TF for comments, then drafted it the next night. From then til the due date, I carried a printed copy with me and slowly, subtly tweaked it to its final state. I finished in the Bender Room just after 11pm the night before it was due, then went downstairs to exploit the free printing privileges on the CD-ROM database machines before heading back to Branner.

When I got it back this morning, all of the comments were excellent or good. There were nine of them, praising the clear voice, use of quotes, and expansion of ideas; the lone missing element was a most sophisticated and nuanced integration of material (rephrasing my TF's words here). The grade on the paper was a 92.

I guess that's the second form of the above sentence in action. While I expecte—complacently, perhaps—a solid A, I'm thrilled by the fact that there's a whole new set of standards here for me to have fun reaching for.

Right now, I'm in the Tressider LAiR taking a brief respite from academia because I've just finished my Go-Moku program. As you can see, it's more than 25 hours after my last and desperate update. The upshot of that is that I've taken a second free late day on that program, which leaves me with one left for either this upcoming pointer problem set or one of the last 2 programs. The problem set looks manageable; in fact, I was chipping away at it all last night while avoiding my unruly program. As long as I finish by 4:30 pm on Wednesday, I have a 50-50 option for the last late day. It was a terrible work ethic that has led me to this state, but things should work out okay.

I suppose I might be further along in all of this work were it not for the fact that I went to see Korematsu, the film, and Korematsu, the man, today. They brought a lot of things I already subconsciously half-knew to the forefront of my mind: that Korematsu, like most Supreme Court case parties, was a test case. They also called up an important question that I've been avoiding for some time: Did I wimp out?. Lastly, they made me slightly more optimistic about changing the system to encompass changes of fact. If the above made no sense, that's because it was essentially a memo to self that I wanted to record before its contects were forgotten.