Shakesfeare

So after many hours of completely wasted time thinking about a paper topic on the Sonnets, and then maybe ten to fifteen hours of coming up with a completely new paper topic about Merchant of Venice, I think I have something I can work with. I spent three or so hours just working with the text and my lil' noggin, and wrote what amounts to an incredibly informal (at one point I paraphrase Lorenzo as saying "Dude, lay off, I had other shit going on"), 2 1/2-page version of my paper. It's not awesome, it's certainly not anything terribly original, but it's enough to get me a ten-page draft, whose comments will hopefully drag me to the finish line.

I'm not showing it to HD. Not only because it contains phrases like the one mentioned above, but also because I just cannot deal with anything else from her until the draft is complete. I know I can write a paper with a topic that will in the end be more or less what I am working with now, and so I'm just going to forge ahead with the draft and deal with her complete and utter disagreement with everything afterwards. Writing this paper is like pulling teeth. And fingernails. And something else that would be really hard and painful to pull. 

It's almost 7:30. I'm going to peruse some books and articles, write my email for my Meridian presentation, and then go home and thumb through OMF to remind myself what I'm writing that paper about.

But on the plus side, today reminded me that Madison can be somewhere I'm happy to live, and also that, when this semester staggers painfully to a close, I will have a summer of sunshine and terrace beers.