This past week has been hell. I hate doing final writing projects, so I try to do them in as compressed an amount of time as possible. I wrote two papers totaling 29 pages on Sunday-Monday-Tuesday (at 2 p.m.), and yesterday and this morning I planned out a syllabus for "English 265: Themes in American Literature: Religion." It's more or less a course proposal with a syllabus. I got all the required stuff done except for an explanation of the assigned readings, the structure of the three units I made, and the assignments in the syllabus. I seem to love only to put things off, then do them as fast as possible, then turn them in, and have that be all of it. (I should mention that I have practically no grammar mistakes of any kind on all of my first drafts, so that makes procrastination easier and of course worse.)

There may be a day of reckoning for me eventually. Not today. I turned the extra materials in to the prof's home mailbox, after I left a message. Now I will have to wait and see just how bad graduate school grade inflation has gotten. No matter to me, really. I just have to get at least a B in every class to keep my teaching assistant funding, and probably the worst I could do is just that.

I will reform, I will reform--next semester. I will have to, because I'll only be in two grad courses, and I'll be teaching two English composition courses to incoming first-year students. Nothing can be as bad as this semester. I was never close to breakdown, though, and I'm not about to crash now. But I taught one class of comp, took a German translation class to get my foreign language requirement out of the way (the class was held Tues/Thurs 7-9pm), and took THREE lit grad classes, which met once a week for around three hours, in the late afternoon or night: literature of travel, Kolodny's "The Texts that Changed American History," and the teaching of literature, which I just got out of my system. I feel like going to drink two-for-one Tecate (Mexican) beers. I may just go get the mail and go lift weights, put off the booze for tonight. Maybe I should call some good people.

My brain is fried; I think I'll crash soon. The computer screen appears closer than it is. I have tunnel vision. My advice: go to graduate school if you think these things are enjoyable.