Let's go back to Tuesday evening, as I uploaded that day's entry early for a change.

As noted here a few times in entries past, I had a term paper due on Wednesday, thanks to a one-week extension bestowed upon me last week. On the other hand, I hadn't gotten very much sleep since the start of the week, which only added to the challenge.

So in mid-afternoon on Tuesday, I decided to take a nap for perhaps four hours, so that I could then have a prayer of staying up all night and into the next day, ending up with an 8-12 paper when the dust settled. Or so went the theory.

First I had trouble sleeping. Then, maybe an hour later, my phone rang. It turned out to be the Editor-in-Chief of the school paper on the line.

According to the game plan I had previously agreed to, we were to have a face-to-face conversation with a mediator on Thursday, which was very deliberately scheduled for after I finished my term paper. But i suppose he wanted to both eliminate the middleman, and get it over with.

But we did end up reaching an agreement, so that much is well with the world. They're never going to yank a sentence out of one of my columns again, and if an entire column Goes Too Far (it was granted that this would have to involve something on the order of Yours Truly joining the Nazi Party), they'll at least try to call me first before axing the thing. On the other hand, if I say anything controversial, they'll be printing a notice next to the column stressing that it does not reflect the viewpoint of the paper on the whole. That's in our masthead, and ought to be obvious, but if they want to stress it anyway, who am I to object? :-)

Finding the new issue of Brill's Content in the mail, and reading the cover story on Maureen Dowd, did help a bit. But not enough. I began panicking, and, in case my writing habits have already become clear here, let me clarify that this was beyond the usual, productive, panicky state I tend to enter into just before a deadline.

By the time morning came around, I had a page's worth of notes to work with, and one paragraph of the actual essay.

It was at this point that I wanted to fall apart. I wanted to just collapse in a heap on my bed, shut out the rest of the world, and just stay there for the next couple of weeks. My essay wasn't going to get done in time, I couldn't speak to anybody, I couldn't check on any references on the Internet, I was really short on sleep, and, to quote an e-mail I sent to my notify list from college a little bit down the line, "In short, I am a complete, utter wreck at this point, and my GPA in my major is gonna go out the window, and I'm not certain I still care."

From there to college, and the Macintosh lab, where I sent out a really depressing e-mail to my brother in Israel, who was supposed to be calling me that afternoon (we trade bi-weekly conversations), following it up with a list of phone numbers from the nearest campus phone bank and an exact time to call. I then sent a slightly modified version of said really depressing e-mail to my notify list.

In the next hour and a half, I managed to write a few more paragraphs, but nowhere near enough. And then I went to the phone bank, and the phone rang a second later, and there was a slightly comic moment in which I tried to pin down just which of the six phones were ringing, and then we talked, and I felt rather better afterwards. Especially after he offered to loan me the money for the phone bill, to be paid back next month after my English Dept. awards and scholarship come in.

At any rate, by 4:45 PM, I had about two pages of the essay done, and I threw in the towel. I met a couple of other classmates to discuss our porn and feminism presentation for a bit, after which I felt much better. I sent off a somewhat more positive update to my notify list (I don't usually bother them this much, but I couldn't leave them with the really depressing message), and then went off to read the beginning of Paradise Lost before class, as assigned. But once I came to terms with the fact that the essay wasn't going to be done in time, I was able to put it in perspective, and realize that it really wasn't the end of the universe.

So. After class. Everybody else left the room. "What's the story with the paper?" asked the professor.

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about," I replied. He nodded. "To everything there is a season... a time to live, a time to die, and a time for reckless melodrama," I continued, dropping to one knee, and clasping my hands in front of myself beseechingly. "Oh, great, wise, and generous professor, who holds the power of passing and failing in his hands--"

He rolled his eyes. "How far along is it?"

I assured him that it was well underway, and that I knew what I was doing with it; I just needed more time to write the thing. Apparently, I'm not the only one in the class in that predicament. He gave me one more week, but that's the final, final deadline.

(As usual, the above conversation is reconstructed, and may be even further off than usual, 'cause I was still zonked. Which may explain why "reckless melodrama" actually seemed like a good idea at the time. <g>)