4:34 PM:

My life really is a sitcom.

As you may recall, when we last left the Early Modern Drama subplot, the stuation was as follows: I had done a class presentation that I'd thought had gone fairly well, only to find that the professor hated it in every possible way. I decided, okay, the heck with it, and deliberately wrote the worst final paper I could contrive.

So I went to my mailbox on campus today, and picked up the essay, with his comments and grade. I skipped the former at first, and went straight to the latter.

I got an A-.

This is the point where I burst into hysterical laughter, clutching the wall for support, regaining control of myself with difficulty about a minute later. And no doubt startling the other person in the mail room.

So, yeah, A- on the essay, B in the course. (The rest of the breakdown was B in class participation / preparedness and C on my presentation.) Looking through the comments, it would appear that he did, indeed, find all the many ways in which this essay is hopelessly inadequate. However, in view of the clear signs that I did put a lot of work into the paper, he decided to grade it on the generous side.

I hardly need point out that almost all of whatever labor was put into this paper in terms of research and development was done before the presentation he'd claimed I hadn't put any labor into at all. Uh huh.

Sorry, I can't quite stop laughing...

Obviously, I'm not doing a very good job with this HoliDailies thing. I wish I could blame it on my schoolwork, but I haven't gotten any of that done in the past couple of days either.

That I just got a DVD player might have something to do with it. Just possibly. There is, after all, this pressing need to make sure that all its features work properly.

I blame Erin. Not that it's entirely her fault, but she did tell me to go for it when my resistance was weakest... (In other words, I said, "Should I get one?" and she said "Yes!" and I said, "Okay." More or less.) Besides, what's the point of having a sister if you can't occasionally blame stuff on her?

So, yes, at a time when I really should be catching up on my schoolwork, or at least this journal, I've been listening to directors commenting on movies, adding a gazillion movies to my NetFlix queue, and looking around the Web for instructions on removing Macrovision.

That last bit becomes relevant because, thanks to the way the connections work out, I can't plug the DVD player directly into the TV set; it connects to the VCR, which in turn connects to the TV. The catch is that the picture gets alternately lighter and darker every few seconds, which is really annoying. The manual blames this on the built-in Macrovision copy protection support. Apparently, the need to make it impossible to make a clean copy of a DVD outweighs the customer's need to see a clear image onscreen. The manual's solution is to avoid connecting the DVD player through the VCR in the first place, which is a most unsatisfactory solution in my case, requiring me to buy and use both an RF converter and an A/B switch.

It turns out that there's another possible solution, one I stumbled upon when I was researching the DVD player in question before clicking the "buy" button on Circuit City's Web site. It turns out that there's another version of the same DVD player in Australia or something, which lacks Macrovision and the inability to play DVDs from outside Region 1. It turns out that it's possible to replace the ROM in this player with the ROM from that player, thus losing the film industry baggage. It turns out that all one needs to do is burn one file -- available online -- onto a CD-R and put it in the thing, and it'll do the rest automatically.

I'm very very tempted. The only catches are that (a) I don't have a CD-R drive, and (b) I'm a bit leery about messing abound with the hardware, especially as the change is apparently irreversable. I assume it'd void the warranty, for that matter.

Other entries in life's little disappointments: no matter how spiffy DVD technology may be, nothing on an analog TV set will ever be nearly as clear as an SVGA monitor. Alas.

Actually, I did try to go with a DVD drive first, not least because it seemed to be the cheaper option. Got one on eBay a couple of months back. In hindsight, my system wasn't powerful enough to actually play any DVDs anyway, but I think I was at least vaguely aware of that; one of these years, I'm really going to need to upgrade my motherboard and CPU, and I think I was trying to force my hand in that regard.

(This is part of my modus operandi, you'll notice.)

But, alas, what I'd gotten was a laptop DVD drive. And while, as promised, it came with a converter to allow it to work with desktop systems, it turned out that said converter had an IDE connector with a female end, instead of the usual male end. More than a little searching has revealed that IDE "gender blenders" appear not to exist, so I can't connect the thing. (I'm probably gonna put the thing back up on eBay. Before I do, if any of y'all have any use for a laptop DVD drive, lemme know.)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Erin talked me into getting the sort of DVD player that connects to one's TV set instead. So I looked around, found the cheapest one I could, which turned out to have a bunch of neat features, including the ability to play MP3s. Bought it on the Web, picked it up at Circuit City, lugged it home on the bus. Belatedly discovered that I needed one more adapter to hook the sound into the VCR, and thus into the TV set, so, for now, I'm using my boombox instead. Leading to a rather ridiculous tower on top of the TV, pictured to the left. The TV's on bottom; the VCR's perched on the TV; the DVD player's on the VCR; and the boombox is balanced on the DVD player. Except for that last one, they're in descending size order.

(Oh, to the left of the VCR is a holiday card from a classmate, in case you were wondering. On screen is... well, you've seen the TV commercials advertising The Best of the Muppet Show on DVD? The first installment of same [actually vol. 2 of the series] was the first disc I bought. If you can name the guest star from the episode on screen, award yourself three points.)

The MP3 interface turns out to be way more trouble than it's worth; better to just use the computer, really. (Except that the boombox the computer is usually plugged into is now being used by the DVD player instead. But that's only until I can get the right patch cord, probably next week.) On the other hand, the "A-B repeat" and zoom features both turn out to be fun. The former allows you to mark the beginning and end of a segment to be replayed until you get tired of it. Such as, for example, the ten seconds or so of the Chicken Run behind-the-scenes documentary in which a choir plays kazoos. The latter feature allows one to zoom in on the get-rich-quick brochure Mrs. Tweedy reads in the same film, much of the small print of which is actually legible at 4x magnification. Or Roger Corwin's schedule, on the screen of a Palm Pilot in Charlie's Angels.

(Okay, so I'm a bit weird. I should think that had been adequately established by now...)

And then there's the alternate language track thing, providing another level of rationalization for this purchase. I'm taking a French exam in two weeks, after all, and most of the DVDs I own have alternate audio tracks and/or subtitles in French, so, why, this would have real educational value!

(One thing I've found out so far is that the person who did the French subtitles in Charlie's Angels was clearly working from the English dialogue, and not from the French dubbed version. 'Cause the two diverge all over the place. And it's not just a matter of the subtitles occasionally being shorter to compensate for reading time; when the person onscreen says "Bonjour," and the subtitle is "Salut," they're clearly not on the same page. It's interesting, really.)

Anyway. That's what I've been up to for the past couple of days. And if I know what's good for me, I'll forget about the stupid movies and get back to my English work. The last thing I want is to leave it for the last second again.

On the other hand, the first installment of Lord of the Rings is playing a few blocks away...

(Cue ominous music, and FADE TO BLACK.)

10:09 PM:

So here's the story.

I'm now done with exactly one of my courses. Sunday night was occupied with another 'round-the-clock paper-writing session at the campus computer lab. This was for my final paper in Early Modern Drama. As previously explained, my avowed purpose was to fill the assigned number of pages, but otherwise to turn in garbage.

Given that goal, I think I may have outdone myself. I got done with a few minutes to spare before the 10 AM Monday deadline. Roughly two-thirds of it is concerned with a narrative about the historical Joan of Arc, which is almost entirely irrelevant to the actual point of the paper -- dealt with in the other third -- which is a look at Shakespeare's depiction of her in I Henry VI. A connecting sentence or two is used in a halfhearted attempt to pretend that the two are tied together, but it would fool nobody.

But the really interesting bit is the last paragraph, in which the author, motivated by one part exhaustion, one part page-count desperation, and three parts sheer contempt, commits academic suicide. For one thing, I introduce a new idea, which one never does in the final paragraph. For another, that idea is, in fact, the one the professor had wanted me to write the entire paper about, but which I ignored the entire rest of the way through, this omission being made blatant by the last-second reference. And most flagrantly of all, rather than doing any research on that idea, as he'd wanted me to, I simply quoted his instructions as my proof and included "Marginal annotations to 'Description of Long Essay'" in my Works Cited list.

So, one course down, three to go. And here's where it gets sticky.

I ended up realizing that there was no way I was going to get the Linguistics project done in time. Under what I'd thought the original timetable was, I might have; after finishing the above paper on Monday, I'd have had three days until the deadline on Thursday, allowing one day for intensive research, and two days for intensive writing. It would have been a wildly implausible schedule, but I've done the implausible before.

On the other hand, the revised timetable left me with two days: one to research, one to write. And, y'know, I'm good at crunch time, but thirty pages in one night? I'm not that good. So an incomplete was pretty much the only option. And as this is doubling as the final project in two courses, this meant getting incompletes from both professors. Neither is exactly happy about this, but neither am I.

An aside seems in order: I gather that attitudes towards incompletes vary widely among institutions. In the case of Michigan, I understand that they're not looked on very kindly. But, you know, no choice, lousy semester, yadda yadda yadda.

So I now have about two-and-a-half weeks to finish three courses. On the one hand, I'm trying to be good for a change and actually work on all of this before the new last minute. On the other hand, I really need to get some rest and relaxation during this break if I'm to preserve my sanity, so I'm going to try to strike some sort of balance. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I'm back at the campus computer lab, this time to work on some overdue Theory homework. The lab closes at the end of this week, and will stay closed until next semester starts. Which is a pity, 'cause I'm getting to like the place, and would have liked to have been able to keep working here over the break. I gather that most students go home, though, so I suppose it makes sense.

12:05 AM:

Okay, this is annoying. I wrote a longish entry a few hours ago, setting out what I had planned for tonight and the weeks to come... and then Blogger went down, taking the entry with it. I don't have time to reconstruct what I wrote just now, so it'll have to keep. Sorry about that. I tried.