Ten Little Chances to be Free

I got everything done Friday/Saturday. Did not even want to THINK about my French essay since I finished it--I essentially researched and wrote a seven-page essay in two days, including two all-nighters and maybe a three-hour nap somewhere in there. I finished it and emailed it to my professor literally five minutes before the dress rehearsal for the concert on the day it was due, repeating "done is better than good, done is better than good" like a mantra to keep me from editing it to death and missing the deadline. I then steadfastly refused to think about it all weekend, because it was seven pages of nonsensical bullshit I'd come up with at three in the morning and I was probably going to get a D on it.

Today I wake up to an email from my French professor saying "Your final essay was so great that I took the liberty of submitting it for the annual French department prize; I hope you don't mind."

sjl;asdfasdf universe, this is not encouraging me to develop good study skills!

Okay, packing is DONE. I stayed up all night loading shit into the car and mom drove off with it at nine in the morning, leaving me to freak out about my essay in peace.

I have my sources. Not many, but according to the teacher three will suffice: an eyewitness account of the July Revolution--that would be Dumas--a general history of it, and a third source of our choosing. I have a general outline for the first half (which is going to be about how Dumas's account resembles a novel as much as a nonfiction work of memoir/history) and vague ideas about the second half (how the novelistic approach compares with a general history and another participant's bare-bones account of the action). Now I just need to sit down and produce seven pages of double-spaced bullshit in passable French.

Yeah I know you guys probably aren't terribly interested in my schoolwork, but this is LJ, it's meant to be self-indulgent and navel-gazing. Consider this the nerdy version of, say, posting eleventy billion pictures of my cat.

Edit: It's almost eleven pm and I'm a little under halfway done with the paper. Looks like I'm going to be staying up all night two nights in a row. Fuck my life.

So that paper I was supposed to be writing? The one that's, theoretically speaking, due today in about two hours?

Let's put it this way: The last thing I coherently remember is consuming excessive quantities of Jolt and perhaps a No-Doz pill. I know I wrote after that, because in the morning I woke up to the shrieking of my alarm with my notebook in my lap. Here is what was written in it:

Dear Brain,
Caffeine makes you concentrate, yes, but it would be nice if you could concentrate on Darwin instead of going into spiritual/religious anxiety overdrive.
Hugs and Kisses,
Self

Dear Self,
--FART--
Deepest affection,
Brain

After that edifying conversation was three-quarters of what resembled a five-page paper, written in a style which at best could be called "quaint" and at worst could be called "the product of not reading many books written after 1900," in which a gibbon and a warbler finch get together over tea and argue about Darwin's scientific method.

I swear I am not making this shit up.