Meat lockers and feelings of inadequacy.

Apparently in the county where my mom lives in West Virginia, the public schools close in honor of the first day of deer-hunting season. And they don't just close that day... they get the whole week off. What the shit...

I finished a paper! [Momentary pause for cheering!] ...And now I have to write two more in 15 days, and I have almost no work done on either of them. [Resuming regularly-scheduled puking into a bucket.]

But as always, grad school is best measured in small victories. And the fact that I got a seminar paper done, it didn't suck really bad, I kinda liked the topic, and it was reasonably within the page count (that's usually a huge problem for me)--that, friends, is what we call a minor triumph. However, handing it in today was highly anticlimactic. The professor's "Thanks" followed by setting it on her desk was a real pin in my delirious balloon of giddiness. Also a downer was then going right back to the library to collect books for my next one. And then thinking of the horrifying possibility that I could actually get a paper back while I'm still writing other ones. Shudder. Nothing like a prof's scrawled "what are you even doing in grad school" to keep your confidence up in the darkest depths of finals week.

But we all know professors aren't that on the ball. I will probably never see the paper again. The much more likely but equally unfortunate scenario I thought of is that she will now think I turned it in early because I think it's perfect. That there's no point keeping it for ten more days, because even given that amount of time, I could find nothing wrong with my work. And this, of course, will inspire my professor to scoff loudly and set about proving me wrong. See, if you turn it in the day it's due, and there's a crap-load wrong with it, you get the benefit of the doubt that you know what that crap-load is, you just didn't have time to fix it. Oh well. It's in, and I'm moving on.

Wilkie Collins, Duleep Singh, and the anxieties of the colonial body, here I come. Hooray..?

Oh, and: 7 more inches of snow last night. If you're keeping track, we've got a solid 10 on the ground right now, according to the local news, with a couple more coming tomorrow. Current temp: 0, feels like 0. If you're going to be miserable, you might as well be miserable in a meat locker, that's what I say!