Recovering
Yesterday was…intense. Intense in a good way, though. I can almost never get myself to focus on anything, much less anything intellectually challenging, for more than ten minutes at a time. It was refreshing to actually WORK on something, for a change.
I left the apartment around 10:30 and settled into a comfy chair at Starbucks (with a cupcake, naturally) at 11:00. I had done literally no work on this research paper besides checking books out at the library, so I spent the next five hours reading and taking notes.
When I got hungry for real food I relocated to Panera and whipped out my laptop to start typing. The beginning was slow going, but I had half of the paper (1235 words) written by 9:45 (they close at 9:00), at which point the clean-up guy suggested he and I become “study buddies,” so I decided it was time to leave.
On the way home I stopped at Sonic for a root beer float, marking the first time I have ever deliberately ingested caffeine in an attempt to stay awake. Turns out I sacrificed my “morals” for no good reason, as it didn’t do shit. I started writing again at 12:35 and only got through two more pages in the next 3.5 hours.
Three-ish hours of sleep, a rush job on the last three pages, and some content-editing and stupidity-checking help from my Latin-teacher-friend* Wendy later, I submitted the “finished” draft at 10:20 before dashing off to the 11:00 final.
I was absolutely unprepared for the final and should have failed it, but due to an incredibly fortunate series of events**, I probably passed with something B-ish. Today was my day to be a lucky sumbitch, apparently.
As for the paper itself, you might expect that a semester-end paper researched and written in 24 hours would be half-assed and sloppily written. In fact…it was half-assed and sloppily written. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s nine pages long. I haven’t read it since I turned it in, but my gut says B-/C+.
Given the B+ I got on the midterm, I’ll probably end up with a low B in the course. In the short term, I’m thrilled not to be failing. In the long term…good god. If you’d told my 15-year-old, 4.06 GPA/1600 SAT self that in six years I’d be glad to sneak by with a B- in a class at UH in which I probably deserved a D, I would have completely lost my shit.
So…I don’t know. I feel like I had some profound conclusion to draw from that, but right now I’m dog-tired. I have a Latin final tomorrow at 11:00, and I’ve slept three hours out of the last 37, so it’s bedtime for Bonzo.
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* I think this should properly be punctuated “Latin teacher-friend,” but to me that just looks like it’s referring to my friend-who’s-a-teacher, who happens to be from Brazil. Pity this isn’t German, or else I could just smush the words together and not have to deal with these silly hyphen rules.
** It’s a good story. I’ll probably tell you once I catch up on sleep.