Is this what the home stretch feels like?

my father has been telling me every time we talk on the phone that i need to buckle down and do this thing. that i cannot afford to think of anything as over until it actually is over.

it's a strategy that i've long employed during finals weeks past, present, and probably future. and it's a wise strategy, naturally. but it just really hasn't worked so well this semester.

see, all throughout the semester, i've had these days when i just didn't feel like working, and so i didn't. and yes, we all have those days from time to time, and i'm not any different. but this semester, there's been in the neighborhood of two of those days each week.

dangerous thinking for a grad student, because as everyone knows, in grad school there are no weekends, no sick leave, no holidays, etc. every break you take is made up for by extra work somewhere along the line.

this leads me to my point. all those breaks? all those days when i didn't do jack shit because i was a hair's breadth from burnout and trying to hold on by letting go?

yeah. that makes finals week hell.

and the problem this time around is that it's the last real finals week. i mean, i'll have teaching deadlines next semester. and i'll have quals which will be hell and a half all on their own. and there will be the regular deadlines on the dissertation to avoid a multi-hundred page finals week of apocolyptic doom at the end of this grad school thing.

but i've written my last seminar paper. and i've revised half of my manuscripts for this last workshop. and i have about three days of work left to do in a day and half, and i'm mentally done. this does not bode well.

currently, i've got two essays i'm revising. the last two. one is about my not-hometown, where they baked that gingerbread man. i'm trying to find it in myself to write about the town and the people when i've been trying to put them behind me. and i'm trying to leave my family out of it. and i'm trying to treat everyone fairly, which is hard, because i don't want to. the self reflection is also showing me a lot of my worse traits, so joy.

the next one on the list is generally better, but needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 new pages and a lot of rearranging. it deals with my family's take on special ocassions. namely, that we don't have many. of course, there's the self reflection there, too, which i'm just not in the mood to do. and since i need to cut out about half the essay and rewrite the parts i keep... ugh.

my refrigerator needs an overhaul. i need to go to the store and buy ground beef for spaghetti or i'll be eating ramen until this thing is done. i'm pleased to say i'm not surviving on a diet of clementines and hershey's kisses, but probably the ramen is less nutritious than the citrus/chocolate combo, so i'm not sure i should be pleased.

and, given that i've not left the apt since wednesday and need to buy stamps so i can send my manuscripts with a SASE, i think i'll post this and get myself to a united. i'll buy.... hm. ground beef, orange juice, yogurt, and a loaf of french bread that i hopefully won't eat in huge chunks straight out of the bag (hey, sometimes you just don't have time to slice it, butter it, and bake it in the oven. there's nothing wrong with eating french bread like a giant braided doughnut--and actually, maybe i want one of those, too).

well, there's that. my break time is over. i'll score some real food, cook it up, and get back to it.

love and peace.