Liveblogging My Thesis? Let’s Do This.

This is going to be SUCH a fun night.  My thesis is due tomorrow at noon, and in true procrastinatory style, I have yet to finish it.  I mostly have a laundry list of small things plus some major organizational issues to work through, and since I’ve been pretty neglectful about my writing here, AND since I’ll spend most of tonight talking to myself anyway, I thought, “What better time to update?”  So I plan on stream-of-consciousness-ing it up over here til this bitch is done.  And honestly, I could use the “been working on my thesis” excuse for having been absent so long, but on the real, April was just a shitty uninteresting month; completely DID NOT live up to last April, so I really haven’t had much material to work with.  Until now.  So.  I was blessed to have a professor who was flexible enough to allow me to write about Mad Men instead of focusing on literature which is really, really cool and totally unexpected of the English Department.  So, the topic: Mad Men, Advertising, and the Creation and Validation of Identity.  Uhhhh that’s a working title.  Alright now, bullets to the end!

• 10:21 PM: Working on the introduction now.  This is always one of the hardest parts for me.  Luckily, the last episode of season three was spectacular; it boasted the BEST writing I’ve ever heard, so I’m starting with a quote and working my way forward.  Cliche?  You bet your advertising ass it is.  I don’t have time for creativity at this point in the game.  Brass tacks here, people.
• 10:41 PM: MLA dictates that, when citing recorded telelvision episodes, each episode needs it’s own individual citation in the bibliography.  OH FUCK.  I don’t even KNOW how many episodes I’ve cited so far.  Double digits.  Now I have to track down the writer and director of each ep and make separate entries for each.  Help help help.
• 11:00 PM: Oh man.  Don Draper.  Oh man.  Eeeeesh.
• 11:16 PM: This has nothing to do with my status but roommate H. just sent me the GREATEST text.  “Gossip Girl here, your one and only source into BG’s drunks.  Spotted: (name of guy I used to hook up with who, surprise, is kind of a douche) the knave outside of The Attic.”  Best.  Best best best.
• 11:48 PM: Jesus, how many times did I mistakenly write “Martinson’s” instead of “Martenson”?  At least five on one page, great!
• 12:15 AM: Looking at pictures from the Met Gala.  Yep.
• 12:15:30 AM: Realized it’s AM, not PM.  Heh.  Since this thesis is due at noon, this is a positive development.  Also a positive development for my time-telling skills in general.
• 12:27 AM: Roommate M is home; she’s going to be up all night, too.  Finals week is upon us!
• 12:34 AM: Oh my God, creeping on Facebook (seriously, did you take me lightly when I proclaimed myself a master procrastinator?  Silly, silly.) I ran across a picture of graduating seniors who work at the Union Starbucks and got all teary.  I don’t even know most of their names, but these people have been serving me coffee on the reg for so many years!  Man I am so sad to be graduating!
• 1:11 AM: Can’t stop humming Robyn’s “Dancehall Queen”.  Did I tell you she’s my new hero/role model/guru/girl-crush?  She is.
• 1:12 AM: This whole “live-blogging my thesis” thing has turned into more of a “live-blogging my every mundane thought” thing.  Hope you don’t miiiiiiiiiind.
• 1:20 AM: Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool has basically been my bible for this project, PS.  So, so fascinating, and, because my life is low-key magical sometimes, my professor totally gave me one of his used copies.  To keep.  For free.  Yes, I plan on actually reading the whole thing this summer.  NERDOUT.
• 1:24 AM: I actually think I might be able to shoot for 4 or 4:30 as a finish time?  Which would give me a solid five hours’ sleep, since I plan on getting up at 9:30 to print and turn this monster in.  BUT, that bib is gonna be a BEAST to tackle.  So.  Maybe more like 5 or 5:30.  Eghhhhh.
• 1:37 AM: Brief bout of hysterical laughter.  My introduction is going to be, like, one-third of my thesis, I think.  Cool.
• 2:12 AM: Ok.  Yes.  Ok.  Starting to feel really good about things.  FINALLY think I have an idea on how to fix my largest organizational issue.  Fuck yeah, fuck yeah.
• 2:46 AM: Slowly but surely, slowly but surely.  Also, it’s FREEZING in my apartment.  I’ve got on socks, slippers, sweats, and a hoodie WITH the hood up, and my nose is still cold.
• 3:07 AM: I think I’ve finally spit out what I want to be the final thesis statement of my thesis.  I think.  Time to take a break, put on my senior year playlist, and look up all the writers and directors.
• 3:34 AM: THAT only took half an hour.  Pulling the rest of the bib together now instead of later, mostly because I can’t face finsihing organizing and adding transitional material and re-reading what I wrote earlier and checking cohesion and unity and blahblahblah just yet.
• 3:40 AM: And thaaaaaat only took five minutes, as all I had to do was copy and paste all of my other sources over from my annotated version, which was due ages ago.  Eff.  Time to bite the bullet and just grind it out until I finish this bitch.  That sounds like every snuff film plotline?
• 3:51 AM: My intro spills over onto the fourth page.  My bib spills over onto a third page.  Too much?
• 4:28 AM:  Oh.  I kind of forgot I was doing this.  Prime reason why the brain is not made for all-nighters.
• 4:31 AM: FUCK IF I KNOW WHAT THE ETHICS OF MANIPULATION HAVE TO DO WITH MY THESIS RIGHT NOW.  I QUIT I QUIT I QUIT.
• 4:33 AM: More hysterical laughter, this time verging on tears.
• 4:58 AM: Oooooh, “jai alai”, that’s fun to say!
• 5:10 AM: I’ve officially entered that space where I’m not really sure anything I write makes sense or is flowing well at all anymore.  Ayyyyyy.
• 5:11 AM: Just misspelled “really” as “relly” for a second up there, which is probably one of my LEAST FAVORITE misspellings in the WORLD.  It makes my skin crawl.
• 5:30 AM:  And here we are at what became my REAL goal bedtime for the night (or morning, I suppose).  I’m waving as I go speeding by
• 5:31 AM: My thesis is making less and less sense the more I work on it….
• 5:35 AM: “The Puppy Who Lost His Way”.  I am so MUDDLED right nowwwww.
• 6:06 AM: My mother has officially started her day.  And I have not officially ended mine.  Things are coming together in a pretty piecemeal fashion.  I’m not confident at all, but I am weary.  I am tired and I just want the damn thing to be DONE.  So, I’ll take piecemeal.  Probably not the attitude I should have toward arguably the biggest, msot important piece of writing in my academic career, but there it is.
• 6:27 AM: Was stretching just now and almost fell out of my chair when I realized it’s already getting light outside…
• 6:43 AM: Hallelujah praise Jesus, I’m working on the conclusion.  The body may or may not need more work; I can’t tell anymore.  It will definitely get a few more proofread-throughs, as well as somes adjusting and tweaking here and there, but for the most part I think it’s alright.  The end is near….?
• 6:57 AM: Ooooooh, nope. Uh-uh, shouldn’t have crept on that person on Facebook.  That was like punching myself in the gut.  Oh, I’m sorry, I’m supposed to be writing (about) my thesis?  Whoops.  Still not closing that window. 
• 7:20 AM: Twelve hours ago I was in the midst of my shift at work.  Twenty-four hours ago I was fast asleep in my cozy, cozy bed.  Sigh.  No I’m not finished yet, that’s what she said.
• 7:34 AM: Doing an out-loud readthrough.  This could be soooooo terrible you guys.
• 7:41 AM: I seriously tries to use the “word” “manipulatory” instead of “manipulative”.  Wow.
• 7:56 AM: About halfway through reading, correcting, tweaking and editing as I go, and I am a lot happier with this than I originally thought.  I just needed to focus my brain.
• 8:11 AM: OMG.  The word “young” like four times in one sentence.  Eeeesh.
• 8:32 AM: Alllllllmost an hour later- readthrough complete.  And….thesis complete?  I can’t decide if I want to just leave my last sentence as is, or go out with a bigger bang.
• 8:45 AM: Yep.  Done.  Complete.  Finito.  Amen I say to you, my thesis, she is birthed.

Well.  HASN’T THIS BEEN INSTRUCTIVE AND FUN.

Grumpelstiltskin

I HATE that it’s been 11 days since my last post.  I’d been doing so good!  But, I was home on Spring Break, and there’s just something about being in Dayton that kills my drive to write.  I was relatively unmotivated and lazy all of break, come to think of it; I think I must have watched about twenty hours of basketball in the last three days I was home.  I did manage to apply to one grad program my first day of break, so there’s something.  And I thought I would be overjoyed to be back in BG, but I’ve been incredibly grumpy allllll day.  Minimal patience.  I think I’m just super salty at February and the boy situations that went down.  One slow-burn ended up fizzling out and one friendship fucking EXPLODED EVERYWHERE MONSTER FUCKING WRECK.  I would really like to just get the fuck over it already, but there’s no way to force these things, now is there?  And you know what is just not comforting when you’re suffering from some low-key boy-related drama?  Every damn soul around you falling in looooooooove.  Or at least liiiiiiiiiike.  Shut up and take it to the back row of the movie theater and leave me here in my moth-eaten faded wedding dress, staring at this moldering piece of cake or what-the-fuck-ever.  Yeah, yeah, I’ll be FINE.

So.  I’m sure you’re happy to see my sanity is just as intact as ever.

You know,

something that has eternally* confused me is how to properly pronounce the name “Siobhan”.  Nothing I know about the rules of the English language help me out when I encounter it, and I’ve NEVER heard it said aloud, just seen it written various places.  You should have heard me five minutes ago trying it out different ways.  “Shabaaaaaaahn.”  “Shobin?”  “See-o-ban?!”  And so I think today might be the day I finally Google it and have that internet lady robotically murmur the name in my ear.**

On an ENTIRELY unrelated note, the sun has been out almost all week here, and GOD I have spring fever something fierce and I swear on (something important and meaningful) that if I come back from Spring Break to a frozen tundra and ten inches of snow, HEADS WILL ROLL.

*and by eternally, I mean occasionally

**I did this with the word “jodhpurs” a year or so ago, and it was a life-changing experience.  Really revolutionized my thinking.  Evidently, something about the letter h behind a consonant just really throws me.  Something to work through with my therapist.  That I don’t have.  But probably should.

Dreamurder

I started to write this post forever ago, like over a year ago, and for the life of me I cannot remember how the dream ended.  I’m so pissed I didn’t finish this; it cuts off right when things are getting so good and I desperately want to know how it ends.  I think someone died.

I woke up completely creeped out from a dream this morning.  I was trapped in a hotel with a murderer, and Juliet and Lassiter from Psych were there to protect me.  I was hanging out in a room stressing (mind you, I was not crying or flailing about; the fact that someone was after my head only had me mildly perturbed) to my three best friends (who were there… why?) when I get some sort of map from the murderer

Juxtaposition

Currently: reading Richard III while listening to “Get Buck In Here”.

But it’s ONLY because I really like the part where Ludacris says, “If you wanna learn something, bring your mother!”

A Million Little Paragraphs

I woke up this morning with “Bury Me With It” in my head and briefly considered just rolling over and going back to sleep and skipping Chemistry class, but forced myself up since I plan on skipping Monday’s class.  Wandering back from the bathroom, after I had been awake for less than ten minutes, I noticed that someone had scrawled a message about making love to Edward Cullen one day on my board.  I reallllly did not have the energy to deal with that shit so early in the morning, so instead I just stood there and glared at the message for a minute and then shook my head and went inside. 

On my way out of the dorm, I opened the door into the stairwell and it collided with a cardboard box stuffed inside of a trash bag, and do you know what my first thought was when this happened?  ”What if there were a baby in that trash bag?”  What the hell?  I mean, I had been awake for at least half an hour when this happened, so what the fuck was I thinking with that?  I mean, whose first thought upon seeing a trash bag in a stairwell is “Hmmm, maybe someone’s abandoned their child in there”?  Who thinks like this?  I do.  On a Friday morning before I’ve had Starbucks when all I can think about is turning around and going back to bed, I do.

This morning was the coldest it’s been all school year, and I really had forgotten the way the cold can cut straight through your pants.  Three minutes into my 15 minute walk to class I was so cold my teeth hurt.  And the wind was back too, the kind of wind that makes you want to stop and through a temper tantrum in the middle of the sidewalk, like “We get it!  You’re freezing fucking cold and plan on blowing in my face for the remainder of my walk, constantly and irritatingly.  Consider your point made!”  But then, you know, you’re just the girl that yells at invisible things in the middle of campus, and that’s really not a label I can deal with at this point in life.

Then I was at Chem class, and there was a girl with a really bad weave sitting in the front row.  Now, I’m not normally a person who knows what a bad weave looks like at all, but I mean, this one basically looked like a mop had settled comfortably on top of this poor girl’s head.  So I guess the moral of this story is that if even I can tell your weave’s fucked up, you know it’s bad.

Would you like to know the kind of things I think about during International Relations?  Artie, from Pete and Pete.  You know, like “the strongest man in the woooooooooorld” Artie.  I ate that shit up when I was a kid.  I though that was fucking hilarious.  (I still kind of do.)

So after class, I headed over to Starbucks, and while I was waiting for my drink to be made I was sort of checking out this totally adorable guy in Weezer glasses, a button-up-the-front sweater, and a bow tie.  He was sitting up really straight, quietly reading and there was old-timey Christmas music playing and I’m pretty sure I fell in love for a minute.

I stopped to get some snacks on the way back from class and Starbucks, and my cashier at Chily’s was really friendly and happy and babbling away about something.  Her accent was so heavy I couldn’t understand her at all, but she was making herself laugh so hard that I couldn’t help but to smile and laugh along.

And then my walk home was nice and not as cold as this morning and I got to the lobby and picked up my free copy of The Road and there was a handwritten note inside that said ” *Congrats* “ and this girl who looks like she’s from the ’90′s said hi to me like she was some character on Saturday Night Live and I’m pretty sure the first half of today was almost perfect.

The only lowlight I have is that my precious, beautiful show Pushing Daisies got canceled by the fools at ABC.  There will be a little less happiness and gorgeous set design on my TV next fall…