I want it to be Tuesday.

I am so close to the end of Finals Season 2011. I can feel it: relaxation, Florida, family, home. It’s all right around the corner, but still so far away. The days seem to be moving more and more slowly as I knock things off my to-do list. Isn’t that how it always works, though? When you have a billion things to do, there are three seconds in which to accomplish them, and when you have nothing to do, hours seem to last lifetimes. That’s my life anyway.

Actually, here’s my life over the last few days.

Exciting, eh? Oh well. I came to peace with the fact that my life will revolve around books and cats for the… well, forever, I suppose. As Phil Dunphy so eloquently explained to Alex, the academically-inclined female doesn’t have much to choose from other than books and cats. Lucky me, I get both. So, in good graduate student fashion, here I am sitting in the library creating an outline for my exam tonight and clicking through pictures of cats on the Internet.

Tuesday, please get here soon.

It happens to us all.

In my Shakespeare Seminar class on Tuesday, we discussed Macbeth, and the conversation inevitably wound around to the Weird Sisters. How could it not? I mean, come on, they’re weird. We talked about them as possible agents of evil, possible projections of Macbeth’s Calvinistic reprobate soul, and as simply ladies who can perform magic. During our discussion, my professor asked which of us, if any, believed in the supernatural. She was shocked that we were so ready to dismiss the last idea that the witches might just be witches, that they might actually have been there on the heath, doing magic, brewing potions, and conjuring ghosts. She said that she often likes to imagine her former students sitting in class with us, filling the spaces and the air with their presences. She even told us a story of her encounter with ghosts in the very building in which we have class.

Apparently, just after Seton Hall opened its doors to women, she began teaching here. Her first night on campus, she got stuck an elevator between floors and had to be hoisted out of the shaft by emergency personnel. According to my professor, the ghosts were trying to keep women off the campus. Guess I better watch my back.

Anyway, she concluded her story with “I guess it’s just the life of the English majors. We believe in the craziness. Must be why we all go crazy in the end.”

The whole class chuckled, and I couldn’t help but remember a comment on of my new friends made at Target the other night. She and I and a third were making our way through the hats, gloves, and scarves. Realizing how many strange items Target carries this time of year, we began to take turns picking out the funniest, most outlandish hats and scarves (and hats with attached scarves and scarves with attached hoods) we could find. I started to try a couple on just for  some fun, and as they got more and more ridiculous, my new friend commented that I seemed able to get away with many of them. “For some reason they don’t look so crazy on you,” she said. “Must be the English major thing. I feel like you guys can get away with anything.”

I suppose it’s true. We English folk have a history of craziness. We push the limits of societal norms, and many of us spend our last days in the looney bin.

But isn’t that what makes life fun? I say embrace the crazy.

It’s not following your dream if you call it a mistake.

I’d be lying to you if I said I never wonder about my commitment to English – pursuing two Bachelor’s Degrees and now a Master’s – but I’d also be lying if I said that I see my choice as a mistake. I considered several fields before settling on English: Architecture, Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Physics. I even went so far as to find internships and job experience in some of these fields as a high school student. Call me an overachiever if you want, but I wouldn’t trade those months of sitting at a desk playing with graph paper sketches and numbers or standing in a tiny back room scanning blue print after blue print into a computer database for anything. Those months (arguably some of the most annoying and terribly boring of my life) taught me that while I may be naturally able to grasp scientific concepts and somewhat adept at addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, I was not happy doing those things. I didn’t want to learn the next best thing in those fields, and I didn’t relax by reading up on tech blogs.

I relaxed by reading novels. I felt at home and at peace when writing. I realized that no matter the limited earning potential, I needed to be an English major. And, as my undergraduate career of doing exactly that drew to a close, I realized that I am not done learning, that I want nothing more than to spend my time pursuing my dream.

Sounds cliché, right? And it very well may be, but I am sick of hearing people ask me why I bother with this path. I’m tired of having to defend my dream to others, and I’m over caring what those others think. I’m also (and probably most ardently) done with listening to people who wonder “Why did I get this stupid English degree? What am I supposed to do now that I made this silly mistake of following my dream?”

News flash: if you are calling your dream your biggest mistake, it probably wasn’t your dream to begin with.

Sure I laugh at a silly comic now and again and joke with my friends about how I’ll probably be living in a cardboard box after getting a PhD. I’m human. It’s nice to laugh at myself every once in a while, but I’ve never let those jokes or that laughter turn me against my dream. I’ve had my struggles, yes, (haven’t we all), but there is a difference between wondering and worrying and calling my life a mistake or a waste. I did not enter this field to make a million dollars. I entered this field because I love it. Every day. Every book. Every term paper.

So to all you English majors who believe following your “dream” was a major mistake, I refuse to listen to you or to pity you. If this choice of yours was a mistake, stop whining and go find your true dream.

Shopping = Panacea… even for geeks like me.

I spent today shopping.  It was great.  I’m usually not one to spend hours at the mall lusting after items far too expensive for anyone to ever actually buy them, but sometimes I just want to spend a day wandering around stores, strolling up down aisle after aisle.  Most of the time, I don’t even end up buying anything.  Today, however, that was not the case.

I’m trying to build a new wardrobe for grad school which is turning out to be more difficult than I anticipated.  While I found some wonderful things today (shirt covered in tiny giraffes, super soft blue scarf…), I’ve also got my eye on some especially nerdy online finds.

1. A shirt that explains it all.  I was recently introduced to a website called Think Geek.  It’s a great little gem of a website filled with everything geeky.  From t-shirts to cubicle decorations, pretty much everything on this site makes me smile or laugh.  Of course half of the jokes revolve around crazy computer lingo I don’t understand, but I’ve been told that those, too, are quite funny.  I’ll have to take my boyfriend’s word for it.

2. My favorite novels on t-shirts?  What could be better?  I found this site through a fashion blog I’ve been reading for the last few months and immediately wanted almost every shirt they make.  How great are they?  Now I don’t even have to walk around with my nose in a book to look like a pretentious English major.  I can display my affinity for the written word right there on my t-shirt.  Fantastic.  I’m loving the Catcher shirt, but I don’t think my English grad student wardrobe will ever be complete without at least six of these great t’s.  Yes, you can say it; I already know I’m a nerd.

3. JSTOR.  On a t-shirt.  That’s all.

And now I’m off to scour the web for some more geeky, nerdy goodness.

Revision season?

It’s no longer rejection season.  It is now revision season.  I have spent the last 48 hours in serious revision mode, red pen and all.  In fact my last red pen is about to die on me.  Unacceptable.  How will I work without my favorite Bic crystal pen?  Hmm… why am I hung on up on silly things like that.  I guess it just goes to show where my head is right now.  After an eventful and incident-full evening last night that did not resolve itself until 3:30am, I was up again at 7:30.  One visit to my friendly neighborhood Starbucks and some moral support from two friends later, I was on my way to seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

As I look over the revisions I have made to my thesis in the past day and a half, I am astonished.  These are the most extensive revisions I have ever made to a piece of my own writing.  On some pages, the original text is barely distinguishable beneath my advisor’s blue markings and my own red ones.  It’s bizarre and invigorating all at once.  What kind of English major would I be without having done this kind of intensive revision at least once?  A pretty terrible one, I’ll tell you.  I mean, I’ve worked at the University Writing Center for the last 2 years and have told more students than I can remember to revise, revise, revise.  I always felt a little bit like a hypocrite.  There I was lauding the value of extensive and intensive revision without once participating in the process myself.  Sure I’ve cleaned up a paper or a draft, but I’ve never gone in with the intention of making serious, main-idea-altering changes.  Now I have, and I am happy for more than one reason.

As much as I may hate it, I know that this process is making my writing and my argument stronger.  I know that I, in turn, am growing as a writer.  Most of all, this process seems to have ushered in a revision of my mental state.  Just last night, my mom told me that I sounded sad on the phone, that she could hear in my voice that I was stressed, upset, anxious, unhappy…. You name it, my voice revealed it.  Today, I woke up in a similar state, but one grande iced coffee and several red pen revisions later, I was feeling confident, confident in my ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable task in front of me.  As I accepted the fact that maybe, just maybe, my mom and my friends were right, that I can do this, I began to feel confident in other ways.  I felt happy.  I wanted to smile.  I laughed and joked and ate food and drank coffee and, miraculously, enjoyed myself.  Despite the odds stacked against me, I felt confident in my ability to succeed and to pull through it all, in my ability to prove to my advisor that I deserve this honor, that I am capable of finishing this project, that I will be ready to defend by March 25th.

A friend recently told me that this time in our lives is more often than not a test in ignoring the people who tell you no and never admitting that you’ve reached your limit.  Today I learned the truth in this statement for myself.  I have chosen a passion that requires me to face the impossible every day, to stare it in the face, and to say “bring it.”  I am here to do the impossible and to allow my passion for it to fill me up and see me through the trenches.  Nothing about this situation is going to change.  Ever.  I have chosen this path and must accept the consequences of such a decision.  The funny thing is, for once, today, in the midst of all this pressure and uncertainty, I am more excited by the impossible than I am afraid.