Ready. Break.

This is Emerson, who lives on the walk to the metro and sometimes comes BOLTING out the bushes, begging for love. He makes my day.

Yesterday was the last class of my first semester of grad school. And it. was. awesome.

Ok, maybe the class itself wasn't that awesome, it was actually kind of hilarious. It was a "final presentations" class in which everything went totally wrong for at least one presenter, and at least partially wrong for everyone else in some way. We ordered a pizza for the class and the pizza guy got lost on campus and kept calling the professor, who would answer the phone and shout "I CAN'T UNDERSTAND YOU. WHERE ARE YOU?" in the middle of someone's presentation. At one point a choir started doing vocal warm-ups right outside our door... It was bad.

And of course the class went almost 45 minutes long and my phone died, so by the time I got home Tim was put on his shoes and coat to go drive around looking for my dead body because I hadn't shown up.

But my final presentation of the semester went ok. (I like it when the only comment is, "you're on to something." Thank god.) And I'm glad I did it. Because in working on it I had a bit of a breakthrough content-wise, where before I was sort of floating around in space thinking there had to be a story out there somewhere. If you're interested, the paper is on the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, who was a comedienne and a champion of the Jamaican dialect.

So I'm in the home stretch now. One 20-ish page paper to turn in before I go home on the 16th and the semester is done. I'm completely finished in my other class and my professor has already told me I got an A there. I've told myself that if I can get A's in both classes I'm going to reward myself with a Georgetown sweatshirt.

My reward for getting IN at all was a t-shirt. My reward for graduating--if I can manage--will hopefully be a nice education, a job, and a small pile of loans.

It feels really nice to have made it to the end of the semester. Nothing like the end of the first semester at Centenary, with Dead Week and Finals, etc. Just me and my paper. Chillin'.

I'm excited about next semester's classes (Sex and Time in 19th Century America and Testimonial Fictions & US Latino Lit.) and about going home for a month, and about the fact that Georgetown looks like Hogwarts to me. That excitement is ALMOST rubbing off on the paper, so it ALMOST feels like I'm excited to write a 20-ish page paper. That's how I can tell I haven't yet been in Grad School long enough to be bored/tired/frustrated.

Good.