It's Almost February...

...and I've spent most of January reading Harry Potter. Well, if the year has to be one-twelfth over, that was certainly an excellent use of my time. I've also been occupied with hundreds of sonnets--because as if I didn't have enough to do with my thesis and my comprehensive exams this semester, I have an independent study in poetry as well. I don't even have enough time to distract myself with the X-Files any more-- but at least I can justify my Harry Potter spree as work for my thesis. I haven't had any nightmares at all lately; I just keep falling into a sound sleep for about five hours and then simply waking up at 5 AM (!), so anxious about getting my work done that I feel the need to start up again at that ungodly hour of the morning.

The one break I allowed myself, however, was a day to go to the Inauguration of President Obama. And it did, indeed, take up an entire day--my husband and I joined the queue at the Metro station near our apartment at 6:30 AM, got down to the National Mall 3 hours later, and didn't get home until 5 PM (the ceremony finished around 1 PM). It was 7 hours of traveling in densely packed crowds in order to witness the important twenty minutes of the ceremony. Worth it? Well, now we can say that we were a part of history. It was worth getting out of the house for a day, even in the cold that stiffened my legs, numbed my feet, and froze my knees... it was also enough to tell me that I really don't feel the need to go to another presidential inauguration ever again, but at least I can say I was there for this one in particular.

All of this is to say that January has sped past, filled with anxiety-ridden nights, fifteen hour days and a strange mix of Shakespeare, Harry Potter and Pablo Neruda, with a little Barack Obama thrown in for some flavor. The nice thing is that even though I don't have any more time for X-Files marathons before bed, the inauguration has brought a resurgence of interesting political broadcasts. Now I can listen to msnbc.com reports on things like Obama's address to the State Department before bed, or the presidential press secretary's report on how Obama will indeed get to keep his Blackberry. These are important news items, after all--helpful to staying informed about political events and simultaneously able to help me drift off to sleep when I finally allow myself to put my homework down for the night.

The real challenge is how I will cope with the rest of the semester, once January passes by and I've re-read all my Harry Potter novels. Then I wont have an excuse any more; I'm going to have to start the actual process of WRITING my thesis... which I think will make February go much, much slower than January has.

Terrors Worse Than Alien Abduction

Christmas break has sped past, and I'm thrilled that I have nothing more exciting to report than the fact that I received a green ceramic turkey as a gift. Yes, a green ceramic turkey. All the usual holiday stories aside, though (including a little too much gin at one party, a little too much Chinese food at another) I spent my break from school uneventfully. We visited family and old friends in Michigan (where the cold reminded us why we moved south), then we returned home to D.C., where several X-Files marathons took up a lot of my time.

Guilt and anxiety have set in, though, that I did not study more for my comprehesive exam while I had the chance. I've got about twelve weeks to write and memorize about forty essays, plus prepare myself for the poetry section. I've also got to worry about my thesis; over the last week, I finally returned to my research, which made me realize just how much more work I have to do--with only eleven weeks to finish! And then there's my coursework to consider. Why, oh why, did I lay around watching Mulder and Scully so much?

Quite honestly, these terrors are exactly the reason why I keep retreating to the comfort of my new X-Files Complete Collectors Set DVDs, which I persuaded my husband to buy me for Christmas. Nine seasons of Mulder and Scully has been doing wonders for my insomnia: if I lull myself into a benign terror of alien abductions, incurable contagions, and government experimentation on human beings using alien DNA, I am at least able to fall asleep without thinking too much about all the work that will bury me in the next two and a half months.

Of course, every time I have an X-Files marathon, I start to have really disturbing dreams, which have already started. Only one of them has given me any sort of real fright--I dreamed a man was watching me and stalking me, so apparently I'm more afraid of human predators than aliens. The monster dreams mostly just amuse me--I'm quite fond of the most famous of all my dreams, the product of an intense several weeks of watching the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I dreamed I was an alien slayer, a hybrid of Buffy and Mulder/Scully, I suppose. My friend Zack was being repeatedly impregnated by aliens and it was my job to hunt down the children he had borne and stab them through the heart with one of those click pencils that everybody loves using when they are in junior high. The whole thing was quite vivid, a little disturbing, but mostly hilarious... so much better than the dreams I tend to have about writing papers (and other academic nightmares) now that I'm in graduate school.


In the face of questions regarding Renaissance plays and free verse poetry, the X-Files has become my new comfort blanket. I'm hoping that if I watch enough X-Files, though, I'll start to have dreams about aliens and vampires again, instead of nightmares about endlessly re-writing my projects and taking tests. The real horror isn't the Hell that most people imagine, the place with flames and physical torture--it is, as Buffy once imagined, the experience of taking your exams over and over and over again...

Taking Stock

There are all kinds of lists floating around this time of year—gift lists, Christmas card lists, naughty and nice lists. Posted on Facebook, I found a list of “Things I Did in 2008,” and I felt somewhat inspired. It’s time to take stock of the year—my deeds, my failures, my ambitions. Much of this particular inventory had to do with dating, falling in love and screwing up at work, though, so it didn't really relate to me too much—I'm already married, and since my husband and I are both in grad school, we don't really have time for dates.

So, I decided to write a couple lists of my own, to take stock of what I did in 2008 and what I would like to do in 2009. After I thought about these things for a while, I was a little depressed by the shortness of both my lists. I should be more forgiving of myself—I am in graduate school, after all, so the list of things I have accomplished in the past year is bound to be somewhat short and focused on academics. I tried to come up with a more well-rounded list of aspirations for the coming year, and I think I’m satisfied with my goals. If nothing else, a list that is focused on several different things will make me feel like a complete human being again, not just a machine that must constantly churn out her graduate coursework. Of course, this list may be a little bit ambitious for the year that I’m going to write my Master’s Thesis and (hopefully) begin a Ph.D. program… but we’ll see. At least I have the goal of emerging a little bit more into the larger world.

Things I Did in 2008
(That I Had Never Done Before):

- went to Little Rock
- tried Palm Wine (which, by the way, is yuck)
- stood up to my superiors (boss, professor)
- wrote a paper in 24 hours (and got an A!)
- got a publishing contract
- became informed about politics
- ate at the Brass Balls Saloon (Ocean City, MD)
- (somewhat) successfully limited my book-buying addiction
- went to Philadelphia (and got delayed on the subway)



Things I Want to do in 2009:

- write poetry and/or stories again (like I did in undergrad)
- get a “Distinction” on my comprehensive exams
- earn my Master’s Degree in Literature
- see my article published in a book
- teach my first college course
- be admitted to a Ph.D. program
- continue to loose the weight I put on while sick
- learn Spanish
- read Ulysses (by James Joyce)
- find a hobby to share with my husband
- finally watch Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, & other classics
- get to know the bike trails in/around D.C.
- visit the zoo more often
- tour New York City on foot

Recovering at the End of the Semester

I haven't blogged a whole lot lately--after the debacle of my Josephine Baker paper, I've purposely kept the laptop shut for a day or two at a time, in fact. After I had taken my exam, I knew I had to get right to work on that paper in order to pull all my research together into a coherent display of what I had learned over the entire semester. This is a ridiculous expectation, of course, and turned out to be a painful experience that definitely lowered my GPA a little bit.

I spent about twelve to fourteen hours a day, for three days straight, sitting at the computer--and finally submitted my paper at 4:15 A.M. on Saturday, December 13. A measly 4 hours or so after it was actually due... I'm hoping the professor didn't notice the time stamp on the submission. It's not like he was going to grade it right away when it was due at midnight.

Of course, I woke up in the morning with a clear picture of how I should have approached the project and written the paper. I then developed a new and exciting obsession with rewriting the paper that I had already turned in--so I decided that it would be much more emotionally healthy for me to close the laptop and back slowly away. I figured that a healthy diet of movies and shopping should cure this useless compulsion to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite (a paper that no one else would read). I didn't even allow the lure of surfing Amazon and Facebook to entice me back to the computer. I swapped one screen for another, deciding it was time for some therapeutic romantic comedies.


After watching Love Actually, followed by several discs of The X-Files season 1, I was suddenly overtaken with a desire that seizes me at the end of every semester--to clean and reorganize the apartment. It's like a cleansing, I suppose. I could no longer stand the dirty dishes, Smirnoff bottles, cardboard boxes from Amazon shipments and stacks of papers that had piled up during the last few weeks of the semester. Everything must go--into filing cabinets, the bins at the recycling center, or the trash. Old clothes must be donated, the apartment dusted, the furniture re-arranged. I managed to move the Queen-sized mattress and box spring by myself, as well as the five zillion pound elliptical machine in our bedroom, in order to make room for a new bookcase, which I then hauled home from Ikea and assembled more or less on my own. I re-hung all the pictures on the walls to suit the new furniture arrangement. I scrubbed the stove. I did five loads of laundry. I wrapped all the Christmas presents for our families. I read virtually nothing for an entire week, and it felt so good to be DOING--anything--instead of just sitting and reading.

I feel better, and now that we've come to our parents' homes to celebrate Christmas with all possible permutations of our family groupings, do you know what I want to do?

I want to cuddle up with my copy of Nadeem Aslam's new novel and Hermoine Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. Followed by Ulysees by James Joyce, although even my friends in the literature department think that I would be punishing myself to read that particular book as Christmas "Break" reading material. I'm a sick, sick person, but I've regained my insatiable desire to read. Perhaps it's a good thing that while at my parents' house and my in-laws' house, there aren't too many quiet moments... another week or so without hundreds of pages to consume might do me some good. Except all I really want for Christmas is some time to read books of my own choice. Well, that and a yacht. But for now, I'd settle for the time to read.