1:11 AM:

And now it's on to New York, for a longish visit, by my standards. If all goes well, I'll be departing Ann Arbor Monday evening, and arriving in New York Tuesday morning. It then looks as if I'll be staying a bit longer than I'd originally expected, probably departing on Saturday night, and arriving back home late Sunday afternoon.

In the meantime, I've been trying to contact people I want to get together with in New York, with only two successes so far; everybody else isn't answering their e-mail and/or phones. Hmmph.

Although those two successes are nice; I'm really looking forward to seeing my friends again. Not to mention stopping by the Campers' Paradise. And seeing my ocular plastic surgeon, which is ostensibly the main reason for this trip.

So here's what's been going on. Back on Friday, July 26, at the urging of a couple of net.friends, I finally did something I should've done much earlier: I e-mailed the professors whose courses I had incompletes in, told them about the August 15th departmental deadline by which grades needed to be filed, and asked them when I would need to submit the final papers in order to be graded in time.

Two out of three replied by the following Monday. It turned out that i was, after all, done with the Theory course from two semesters back; the reason I hadn't get gotten a grade was not, after all, because I had one homework assignment left to go, but because the professor had been busy all summer. He assured me that he'd file the grade in time, though.

As for the Masochism paper I'd been obsessing over all summer long, it turned out that it would be due a week from that Monday, on August 5th. So far, good enough.

Then, late on Wednesday 31st, I heard back from my Black Marxism professor. His paper was also due on the following Monday, August 5th. And I hadn't, technically speaking, started on that paper, having been busy obsessing over the Masochism one. I didn't even, technically speaking, have a topic.

Well, I got a topic almost immediately. My subconscious served one up on a silver platter, and when your subconscious does that with a deadline staring you in the face, you don't refuse it. Even if it requires a research blitz on a topic unrelated to the course in general, which ultimately leads you to the conclusion that the topic in question doesn't actually work. No matter.

The question of whether I'm capable of writing two full-length papers in two days flat has been settled with a "yes." 34 pages total, in fact, albeit by moving the margins in a scootch, making each paper 17 long, plus another page for the "works cited" list. One was supposed to have been 20; the other 18-22. Close enough.

The question of whether I'm capable of writing two good full-length papers in two days flat has not been settled, it being impossible to prove a negative, but it sure didn't happen this time. I was going for quantity; quality got tossed right out the window.

In the case of the Masochism paper, this doesn't really bother me. I was never really that comfortable with the subject matter of the course, and the paper could have gone a lot worse. I'm just glad to be done with it, really. But the Black Marxism paper. Alas for the Black Marxism paper. I liked the course. And there's the germ of a decent paper trapped inside the crap I handed in; given another day or two, I coulda had something good. Alas.

Still, they're all done. Yay!

So far, one of the grades is in: B+ in Black Marxism, both for the paper and the course. Sounds a bit generous for the paper, and about right for the course. Fair enough. As long as I passed...

(Thanks to the usual support group, by the way: Alia, Mary Anne, Mo, all the Usual Suspects, and, in this case, especially Erin and Jen.)