Like The Floodlight, Like The Sun's Rays, Like The Moonbeams

About ten hours ago I took the last final I will take for my Master’s. If you remove one little apostrophe, that sentence turns quite strange. Anyway, this was one of the more demanding tests I’ve ever taken. In four years in college, two and half years in an M.B.A. program, and a year and a half in this program, this was the first final that I actually had to use the entire period to finish. I’ll find out soon if I embarrassed myself or not.

I’ve been mentally dead since then. Unfortunately for me, I had another class after the final. It’s too bad. I went to Othello’s with a bunch of the other students to watch them eat and drink. They’re good people, and I’ll miss having class with them. Not enough to take International Relations Theory, though. That’s a level of devotion of which I am not capable. It was nice, though, hanging out with them, brief as it may have been. It was also the first time I’d been to a bar in almost three weeks and the first time I’d been to Othello’s in quite a bit longer. It still felt like home, and the coffee was great (1 pint in about 8 minutes!).

As for my second class (7:00 to 10:00pm), I was so checked out that I could not even pretend to pay attention. Today was devoted to presentations of paper topics, and I spent the entire class coloring. Not like, “look how I expressed myself” kind of coloring, but filling in all the enclosed areas within the letters of the handouts the students passed out to us. You know what I mean, right? For instance, in the last sentence you would fill in the o’s, the spot in the a’s, the little divot in the e and the two tiny spots in the g. Yeah, I did one in pencil, and one in ink. Ink allowed me to work faster, but I did go outside the lines a couple of times and had no way to correct it. Unfortunately, the effort it took to stay so conscientiously within the lines was making my hand hurt. I wondered if that were some kind of metaphor, then quickly disregarded that thought as it distracted me from my coloring.

Maybe it is a metaphor. Maybe I’ve accomplished all I can by simply staying in my lines. Maybe it is time for me to let my ink spill out over the paper, perhaps in a fashion that could be described as “willy-nilly.” I’m not sure what that would entail, exactly, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it does not involve three-to-five years in a nice, cozy Ph.D. program somewhere. Nah, that’s just crazy talk.

While I mull that over, I can work on putting together my paper for Monday on Althusser’s ISAs and international media systems. It’s only twenty pages, and I’ve got the outline done. I actually find the topic exciting and I’m looking forward to the work. Just another of the many ways in which I am lame.

[I’m currently lame at biblebeltbabylon.blogspot.com, xanga.com/moontos, and on blog.myspace.com]