Usually, when the finals season approaches, I accept the fact that the weekend before exams start will be worthless. I will spend three days in academic seclusion, studying, reading, anotating, outlining, writing, editing, counting words and pages, and I will accept that if that’s what I’ve got to do to get all the work over with, that’s what I’m going to do. I call it The Lost Weekend. Well, tomorrow is the last day of classes, exams start on Friday, I have three papers to write before I can go home, and I definitely lost something this weekend: my ambition, my mind, my will to live.
On Friday, I looked for books for my children’s lit paper and realized that if I wanted to write about September 11th books, I would have to drive all over Western Mass if I wanted to write about September 11th because the books are so new that they are very sparsely scattered. But since public libraries do not hold college student hours, the search was put on hold for the M&C’s jam and to watch 13 Going on 30 with Holly, Lindsay and the triplets.
On Saturday, I got up at 9:30 (that’s right) for a library road trip spanning Monson, Amherst and Northampton. I told Holly the night before to throw something at me if I didn’t hear my alarm and force me to get up, so I heard my alarm and sat up just as she was winding up to heave her pillow in my direction. So she says, “Oh! Sorry!” just as she releases it and I see it coming and think, “Here it comes,” in my head right before it hits me in the face. By the time I got back to school with all my books, it was time to take a nap and a shower and get ready to all go see Ocean’s Twelve with Jeremy. Why can’t I write a paper about George Clooney? With visual aids? After, we stopped at 391 where a really cute guy kept looking at me and approaching as if to sit down and talk to me. But he must have been running a fake out operative because at the last possible second he winked at me and left! (Jeremy later revealed that he had been giving him the “not a chance” look to scare him off. Thanks.)
By Sunday, I was pathetic; a shadow of my former self represented only by the form of my body under the blankets. The girls got up at 10 to go have breakfast, and when Holly got back she put on her pajamas and got back in bed, which only influenced me to stay where I was while we tried to brainstorm new procrastination activities. At 2, Jeremy came over to fix my computer (pop ups…they’re popping up…) and Holly and I really were about to start our papers when we realized that we hadn’t watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets yet, so obviously we had to get back in bed and do that. Basically, this weekend was all about almost doing work and succumbing to acute laziness instead. Now I have a stack of children’s books on my desk, three more classes today and tomorrow, and I’m looking ahead to The Lost Reading Days.
Quote of the day: “Belief makes things real, makes things feel, feel alright. Belief makes things true, things like you, you and I” – Gavin DeGraw
