4:30 PM:

No time, no time!

Went to class, it went fairly well, and concluded with the instructor evaluation. Mine was scathing. My only regret is that I don't have a copy of it to treasure for posterity; with any luck, I won't have to write anything like it again.

Of course, the best news is that I'll never have to sit through this class ever again. Yay!

9:25 PM:

My final project in my Linguistics/Women's Studies/Anthropology class is doubling as my final project in my Introduction to Graduate Studies, otherwise known as "homeroom." The first draft of one portion of said project got workshopped in the final session of the latter class today, and I got all sorts of useful feedback. I now have lots more research to do in a very short period of time, but I am happy about this.

Tomorrow, it's on to the final session of The Class I Hated With A Passion But Am Now Indifferent To, the final clause of which will be put to the test, as this will be the first time the instructor and I will have been in the same room since the break. The real question may be how I handle the teacher evaluation. It's definitely gonna be negative; the question is whether I'll confine myself to the numerical ranking portion, or if I'll scribble lots of criticism down in addition.

2:17 PM:

Okay, so we're officially in crunch time for the semester. I think I've finally hit the point where I'm past caring about... well, anything, really, short of getting everything done by the end of the semester. Never mind quality control, never mind my generally negative attitude towards grad school, never mind the fact that I'm stuck in Ann Arbor and long for New York, never mind that a career in copyediting is starting to look really good about now... let's just survive the next couple of weeks. We can worry about the rest later.

Doubtless part of this is spillover from my Early Modern Drama class. Brief synopsis there: I gave a presentation on Joan of Arc and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I thought it went pretty well, was excited about the possibilities, and went to the library to find more relevant stuff on Joan. I then got an e-mail from the professor in no uncertain terms, to the effect that the presentation sucked in every possible way, and that I'd better shape up on the final paper or else. Said e-mail refrained from offering any useful criticism on anything I'd actually said, instead criticizing it for what it wasn't, with a side order of personal attacks.

A week of stewing later, I finally managed to achieve something resembling apathy, which can since solidified into what I think is actual apathy. I no longer give a damn about the course. The final paper is due a week from Friday. A week from Thursday, I shall go to the library, and find stuff with which to fill in the outline he provided on the margin of my paper proposal. I will fill the requisite number of pages. I am aiming for a C. I will probably pass, and I will never have to deal with his class again. The end. It's simply not worth the time and effort, which would be much better spent on my other classes. The only question is whether I'll bother reading the three plays assigned for this week's class. Depends what else I have to do tomorrow, I suppose.

The other three classes, I do care about, but it's basically do-or-die time now, and I can't really afford to overanalyze them. Either I'll manage it or I won't; worrying about it isn't going to help me any.

Or maybe that's just my exhaustion talking. But I kinda hope not. I think I need to be mildly burned out now if I'm gonna have a chance of pulling off another end-of-semester miracle.

11:36 PM:

Still no time. So here's a link to grad school Barbie, the description of which seems all too apt just now.

(Warning: comes with a large sound file of "Barbie Girl" that plays in the background.)

(Courtesy of Dawn, who in turn got it from a scavenger hunt thread on The Usual Suspects, I think.)

10:19 PM:

No real entry here today, sorry. To the (unfortunately large) extent that I'm not working on essays, I'm too busy wallowing in self-loathing. And whether or not that's something you'd be interested in reading about, it's not something I wanna write about. At least not just now.

Oh, by the way, a long overdue correction: back on January 22nd, in response to what I saw as overstated paranoia from some of my online friends, I wrote that "President Bush is... not going to wreck the country beyond repair. Lighten up. How efficient do you think our government is, anyway?"

Obviously, I was way off base, not having entertained the possibility that he would find a way of getting us into a war. Sorry about that.

9:48 PM:

Greetings, HoliDailies readers! It hadn't really occurred to me that being part of this project might draw more readers to my site; I was thinking in terms of the readers I already had, committing to give them an entry a day for the month.

I'm still not expecting too much new traffic from the ring; there are simply too many sites in the thing for anybody to follow them all regularly. I tried making a circuit of it, and I'm still only about two-thirds of the way through. I plan to finish my trip around sometime over the next day, after which I'll probably ignore the rest of the ring. There's simply not enough time.

(Aside to anybody else considering making a similar circuit: you might wanna give "Lessons Learned" a miss, or at least be forwarned. I understand that there are people who enjoy practices better known for being used as punishment in Singapore, but I don't really want to read about it, and I certainly don't want to see photos. Nothing personal.)

(Conversely, new readers here should be warned that this is not a G-rated journal, or even PG-13. Let's call it "rated R for strong language and some sexuality," although the latter is found mostly in occasional links to outside sites.)

But should any of you new readers want to keep reading, I'm certainly not going to complain. And as I've never gotten around to updating the "about me" section of the site, let me give you a quick rundown of who I am.

My name is Shmuel. This is, in fact, my real name; it's pronounced "SHMOO-el," and it's the original Hebrew for "Samuel." My last name appears nowhere on this site. Nor do I ever mention the name of a particular bicycle manufacturer, a maker of school paste, or the full name of Reform Party founder Perot. This is to keep search engines from displaying this site when someone does a search for my full name. (Fortunately, every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the Jewish world is named "Shmuel," making the use of my first name relatively safe.)

I'm 28 years old. Single. Not looking to change that. Oldest of fifteen kids. 5'6". Brown hair, brown eyes, brown beard. Right-handed. Fanatic follower of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More stuff along those lines can be found four entries down, and on my survey page. (Come to think of it, I need to update the survey page. But it'll keep.)

I'm an Orthodox Jewish fundamentalist religious moral relativist liberal feminist English major who studies dirty words. I've spent most of my life in New York, but am now attending grad school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The idea was to get a doctorate in English, which would take five years or so. This is an idea I'm now seriously second-guessing, with the second-year "take the M.A. and run" escape hatch looking more and more appealing as time goes on, but we'll see what happens. Perhaps next semester will be better.

This journal doesn't have a large cast of characters, aside from myself and my neuroses. This is partly because I don't have a life, but mostly because I don't generally think it's fair to write about people behind their backs, and very few people I know in Real Life know about this journal. So this journal takes place against a shadowy backdrop of unnamed professors, siblings, and passersby, who tend not to be mentioned any more than necessary.

Upcoming entries are expected to cover the Joan of Arc mess, the end-of-semester crunch, and some very exciting recent book purchases. For now, however, the second of those items demands my attention. I probably wouldn't have even posted this if I hadn't pledged to do so, so clearly this project is already paying off.

See you tomorrow!

Opera and Blogger seem to be working just fine now. Occasional glitches have popped up elsewhere, but I'm now taking a "wait and see" attitude before making any more complaints; I suspect that once I get the hang of things (including which sites require which browser identification strings to be fooled into working properly), everything will be okay.