Monday, November 16, 2009

Counting Down

Now it is 4:30 am. 7 down, 4 to go, 5.5 hours left. More than halfway!

To Sleep, Or Not To Sleep...

Right now it is 1:11 am, and I am listening to the song from which the title of my last post was drawn. You might now be asking yourself why. So am I. Why, I ask myself, am I pulling my second all-nighter in all of college for schoolwork? Ironically, the first was also this semester, and was for the same task. There are thirteen lucky students in a certain Humanities 202 class that get to turn their papers in to me before their professor. As a Writing Fellow, it is my job to read their papers, comment on them, and then write each one of them a response letter giving them suggestions for improvement. I have precisely one week from the time I get the papers to finish all of them. My week is up at 10:00 am tomorrow morning (or would you call it this morning?), and so here I sit, struggling to finish response letters. The tally thus far is depressing: 2 down, 9 more to go!
I love my job, truly, I do. But these all-nighters are killers. I managed to make it through my first three years of college without ever staying up all night for school (moving out of my apartment, however, is a different matter altogether, and another story for another time, unless by unanimous vote it is decided that I adopt the Ovidian narrative habits of embedding stories within stories up to many layers - and hopefully I won't be pulling an all-nighter to finish up that lovely paper I get to write this semester). Considering my normal amount of procrastination all through high school, and even in college, that is a truly remarkable feat. But alas, no more. No more. Now I stay up all night to finish things due the next morning. Now I will buy a large bag of chocolate candies (probably Reeses peanut-butter cups) in the morning to help me stay awake during my classes. Now I am only making the situation worse by writing this post instead of finishing up my third response letter.
Alas, alack, and other pithy phrases! Maybe I should bring the wonderful Waldo out to keep me company. After all, we have only a limited amount of time left to us before an 18-month separation. Tragedy.