Rejoining the Wagon

My fine fellow Princetonian, Laura Sillers, whose blog Life of Soup I read regularly, recently won the Washington Post's second annual Peep diorama contest -- you can see her winning entry here -- and in giving her congratulations and catching up, we briefly discussed our respective blogs. I'd confessed to her, "I was starting to get a little worried...I put your blog on my page and then you didn't post for a while," something that's happened to almost every member of my little blogroll on the side of this page. She then reminded me, "Haha, I think you did the same when I put you on there." Touché.

I'll be the first to admit that my life isn't terribly exciting right now, and a great deal of the truly fascinating mental things that are going on in my mind aren't anywhere near fruition and, therefore, not particularly worth being brought up in a public forum. That, and the majority of most of my days, as I confessed to Laura, consist of the following sequence of events: "woke up today...went to class...read a bunch...wasn't productive enough...watched Food Network...went to bed." Enthralling shit, I know.

The most exciting thing that happened during my spring break, for instance, besides my tattoo, was the aforementioned power outage that left two days of very little action and even less consciousness. (Related side note: How the hell do the Amish do it?) The week did eventually give way to a lunch with an old teacher of mine, who is doing quite well in his quest for the Ph.D. he never got when he was younger; a trip to Princeton, to see some friends and make myself feel better about the fact that Princeton basketball really does suck more now than it did when I was an undergrad; and a few other small adventures to see people who were home that I hadn't seen in a while.

The one thing I didn't do while home was work with any kind of diligence. And that bit me in the ass come Friday, when I realized I still had a paper to finish from last semester that would, by Monday, have dire consequences if left unfinished.

A Brief History: Last semester, I took a class on science fiction that really interested me, but when it came time to the write the paper (on Coheed and Cambria), I got so caught up in it that it took on an overwhelming new life, becoming far more involved than I'd originally anticipated. I opted to defer my grade in order to have more time to spend on it, and have been working with little urgency since then as a result of not having a set deadline for its completion.

All of which was fine and dandy until I received an e-mail on Thursday, informing me that on Monday, all unresolved deferred grades without a professor's approval for extension would automatically become failures. Fuck.

So the race until Monday became tense, with me trying to get my thoughts coherent and well-developed while continuing to struggle with the same sense that I desperately needed something to give and let me get through this paper in one piece. It all culminated with an e-mail to the professor, asking if a paper turned into his mailbox on Monday morning would be there with enough time for me to receive a grade. Response: affirmative. All I had to do now was, you know, finish it by Monday.

And it cost me a lot of sleep, and probably a few years off the end of my life, but I got it done, and handed in on time. All was good in the proverbial 'hood, right?

Well...except for the fact that I, panicky bastard that I am, would not rest until I knew my grade was certain. So I checked every couple of hours, to no avail, until finally, at around 3:30, my weighty eyelids decided they'd been open long enough and it was time for the kind of nap I'd savored in a near-epicurean fashion during my undergraduate days. Off to bed I strolled, falling quickly asleep for about three hours.

I awoke to the always-entertaining sound of my upstairs neighbors fucking so vocally that I thought the girl must have been filming a (bad) porno flick. So much for more sleep.

Awake and somewhat refreshed, it was once more time to check my grade, which had, at last, been filled in. With an F.

The words that followed featured the words "fuck" or "shit" so many times that even I don't believe I could write them here enough times to do myself justice. I was upset, I was disappointed, I was confused, and I was freaking the hell out. The next few hours were spent trying to calm myself (a fun task, I assure you) as well as try to, as reasonably as possible, plot out the course of action necessary to ensure this didn't permanently blemish my graduate school record.

A few hours and lots of whimpering later, Danielle, in her infinite wisdom, decided I needed a drink and offered to pour me some conciliatory Scotch. I liked her thinking, and I'd really wanted a glass of Macallan 12 to celebrate the demise of the semester that had heretofore haunted me, but she suggested that perhaps I might have some Glenlivet 12 instead, and save the Macallan for when I'd actually settled this whole thing.

So she poured me some Glenlivet and, as the glass was placed before me, I decided to check the grade one last time. And it was a good thing I decided not to have some of the Scotch while I did so, because it would've ended up spewed across the screen -- a screen which now read "A."

I'm not really sure what happened, why it happened, or how it happened, but my grade was just entered late. So in the course of a few hours, I'd improved my grade from an F to an A, something I'm proud to say had never happened to me before -- but, in hindsight, I'm glad it happened at the particular moment it did, so that I didn't actually have to go groveling in the Grad School office begging them not to ruin the rest of my life by failing me.

So it was, in fact, all good in the 'hood.

The rest of the week, thankfully, has been uneventful. I'm back home for Easter weekend, and have no obligations nearly as impending as that to contend with this time around. Also, there's power here, which is great, as well as a few books that I'd been wanting to read for fun that I can actually peruse guilt-free -- at least for the time being. Unfortunately, the one thing home does not have is Scotch. But that's not such a travesty either.

Right after I saw the grade, I downed the Glenlivet and poured out the Macallan, just like I said I would.

Yup. All good.