10th week.

ahhh 10th week - the time for all those little neuroses and facial tics to kick in - a time of caffeine, of fast food, of alcohol, and of toner cartridges mysteriously running empty in the middle of a printout. This is that moment when every grad students' nerves are twanging, when they wake up from the middle of a dream in a cold sweat muttering "My god! Kantian aesthetics and the sublime! I have to say this in my paper! How will I say this in my paper?!" and then fall back into a semi-sleep where they occasionally jerk a leg and words like "liminal", "instantiate", "uncanny", "aporia", and above all "Times New Roman" escape through their tightly clenched teeth.

It's moments like this that let you know you're alive - in the Buddhist sense, of course, where existence is suffering.

Personally? I'm attempting to navigate all that picky little crap work that I have been putting off in my papers. My first drafts are fast and loose, usually with large sections missing and a helpful comment in red going "Insert argument about liminality here". These are indecipherable later (although at the time I swear I knew what I was talking about). This is also the time of the Appendix, the Endnote, and the "insert quote here" that I never got around to doing. It is also the moment for last minute source-finding on random little things that I swore to myself that I would find a source for (like the prevalence of diamonds as used in wedding rings in the 1860's, the various incarnations of the language of flowers, and the actual text for the vows in a Christian or (if possible Catholic) wedding ceremony). Oh, and of course, it's the moment for revisions and additions to an argument that I thought was just fine a week ago. Just a week to go, folks, but assuming my continued rate of progress, an absence of any carnivorous plants showing up in my bedroom, and the assistance of a miracle from some god-like entity - I just might make it.