katernater | I know this is not my Tumblr, but:

I cannot get over Slings & Arrows and how amazingly relevant to my life it is right now.

So, wrapping up the final semester, the last stand, the end product. After a week of break I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to get ahead of the curve where final papers were concerned and that a simple 3-4 pager would be a nice way to ease back into the swing of things. I don't know if it was the break, that I'm rusty writing papers, or the fact that I really don't have anything to say about how Hippies changed the face of postwar America, but no matter how hard I tried, I had absolutely no intellectual drive to write this paper today. I went through several drafts (one of which tried to connect Hippies to the fall of the Soviet Union through the music of the Beatles) before ending up with three full pages and a squeaker of a fourth. All absolute rubbish. The paper's due on Thursday, which gives me a couple of days to revise and edit, but I hate revising and editing. I don't like to dick around with a paper after the fact; I like to get it all done at once with minimal or no changes. (This is why I will probably never finish writing a novel. I'd have to work for two years straight.) Okay, so it's not total rubbish. Most of it is good, and I more or less stuck to the prompt. But, as a writer, turning in something that I don't feel completely great about is very disquieting.

FACT: I wear a special hat when I take Calloway outside. It's big, fluffy, and has those faux-fur-lined earflaps ("It's Holden Caulfield's 'killin' hat'," Todd says) and it keeps me warm when I have to stand there waiting for Calloway to do his business. So, it's like, 6:45 this morning and I've only just stumbled out of bed and into a pair of shoes. I've got Calloway on the leash and the hat lopsided on my head and I'm really feeling the whole 'it's 6:45 in the morning' thing and this guy comes out of the apartment building behind me on his way to work. 'Sees me standing there in my pajamas, a squatting dog at my feet and a killin' hat on my head and says, pleasant as you please, "Like the hat." I did not know then what I know now: that that compliment was going to be the obscure highlight of my entire day. (And I will forever associate it with my dog having a bowel movement.)

Okay. Homework's done. Gonna' read a little more of The Hot Zone before bed.