All that’s left is to finish two papers, take an easy final, and I’m done with college!
I know that over the next week I’m going to go through a slew of emotions ranging from excitement to sadness to joy to terror and so on. (Britta articulates the roller coaster particularly well, so check that out.) For the moment, though, all I feel is relief. It’s been an exhausting semester and the end is in sight.
This is my post-senior seminar face. Can you sense my joy?
This post isn’t very substantial, but stay tuned! Once all my papers are done, I’ve got a week with little to no obligations. I’ve got a list of posts I want to write and will hopefully get to them. I’m looking forward to getting back into blogging regularly. I’ve missed this!
Maybe it’s because really nice out, which is odd for Minnesota this time of year. Or maybe I’ve spent too many afternoons pent-up in the library writing essay drafts. Whatever the reason, every time I open WordPress to make a new post, my thoughts fly out the window. My mind goes blank. I sit back. I think, “You know… maybe I’ll find the words tomorrow.”
I don’t want to abandon you, dear blog, especially when there is so much pre-graduation nostalgia floating in the air. There’s not better way to make a good post than channeling as much sentimentality as possible!
Really, though, my focus is elsewhere at this point.
I’m a busy girl.
My senior seminar draft is in full swing–I hit sixteen pages this afternoon! It’s nowhere near complete, but it’s a start. I’ve spent three afternoons on it and fully intend on using a fourth tomorrow. I wrote a different nine page essay earlier this week. I’ve been thinking deep thoughts about Romeo & Juliet, which is WAY better than I remember last time we met back in ninth grade. I have an interview for my dream internship next week. I’m reading this AWFUL book for my Courtly Love class called The Rules: Time-tested secrets for capturing the heart of Mr. Right. (It’s one of the most sexist, offensive texts I’ve encountered yet. My face contorts with disgust every time I look at the cover.) I’ve been planning and attending Bible studies and meetings, preparing for my future career in ministry. I’ve been trying to spend time with people I care about, which is a challenge ’cause it’s the busy time of the semester. I’ve been going to the gym, taking walks to the wind turbines, and soaking in as much sunlight as possible in hopes that it will keep me going.
At this point, I’d rather do all these things and more than try to blog properly. Maybe when my senior seminar draft is finished and polished, my inclination to write will come back. Who knows?
Until then, you can find me in the library. Or watching Netflix. Or thinking about Shakespeare. (I wasn’t kidding about being in love with Romeo & Juliet. It’s a wonderful play and those poor kids need to learn to keep their hormones in check.)
Yesterday evening, I learned that one of my dearest friends was in town. She graduated last year and I’ve only seen her a couple of times since then.
In light of a long, antisocial Saturday, her visit was an enormous blessing. Sometimes when I’m alone for too long, I get stuck in my head and need someone to pull me back out. Allison was exactly what I needed. She popped in my apartment around six thirty, half an hour before I had to work. A few minutes of rushed conversation was not enough, so against my usual habits, I ventured forth into the social sphere after my library shift ended at ten. It was a fantastic night. Talking with her, someone who knows me deeply and has been there since freshman year, was exactly what I needed.
The problem, though, is that I was out until one in the morning the night before Hell Week. Oops.
Surprisingly, the repercussions have not been too severe. I made it through class, work, and working out without feeling overly exhausted. That hasn’t changed the fact that, whenever I enter my apartment I change from real pants to my p.j. bottoms. But I’m coping quite well.
To add to my happy thoughts, my Victorian Lit professor cancelled the nearly thirty page article we were supposed to read this week. And, as a bonus, this was his address in the email: “Dearever-widening circle of semi-demons who batten on the helpless…“) How can that not brighten your day?
Also, my paper on verbal hashtags has been submitted and I will be finishing up my Visual Journalism portfolio is nearly complete. After today, I will be free to devote the entire week to writing my ten-page Dracula essay.
So far, so good. As long as I stay on top of things, I should make it out alive.
I’m currently in the throes of writing a first draft for my final Grammar & Language essay. The assignment is to write a long paper on a particular use of the English language, making a claim and defending it using the grammar rules we have learned throughout the semester.
My essay is on the way hashtags have made the jump from Twitter to everyday conversations. For example, a friend came up to me and said, “I’m like hashtag blessed all the time”. Why is this a thing? How do statements like these work grammatically? I’m determined to find out.
I’m enjoying the assignment immensely, but that’s mostly because I get to watch things like this for school
For the paper, though, I’d love some public opinions about the usage of verbal hashtags. Are they appropriate? If so, when? If not, why? Let me know in the comments! Opinions are deeply appreciated!
It’s the time of the semester where Amelia enters full-out English Major mode and locks herself in the basement of the library for hours on end writing essays.
6-8 pages on Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell due by Friday. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and this morning outlining and am finally getting into drafting. I’m currently on page 4, over half way through my argument, but there’s a LOT of polishing to do.
It’s not all bad, though. I’ve got my classical music playlist keeping me going. Swan Lake is my essay-writing power jam.
I promise I’ll get back to substantial posts once Midterms are over.
In the meantime, what music do you listen to when you study?
The problem with Spring Break is that, although you may start with the best intentions, you inevitably fail to get anything done.
On Monday, you open your notebook to work on one of the several creative writing pieces you need to finish. Then you decide to spend your evening talking to your dad instead.
On Tuesday, you’ve got plans with friends in the cities with a five-hour gap between them. “Great,” you think, “I’ll find a Starbucks and power through that Virginia Woolf essay!” Upon arriving at the coffee shop, you realize you remembered everything but your computer. So instead, you spend twenty minutes planning the essay and the remainder of the day is spent wandering around secondhand bookstores and thrift shops.
Wednesday is a designated pajama day and you mean business. After all, writing in your pajamas is way better than writing in normal clothes… right? Yeah, no. You briefly glance at your copy of To the Lighthouse, then promptly decide to play Skyrim for four hours instead.
Thursday is more hopeful. You force yourself out of bed, hit the gym, and before you do anything fun, force yourself to work. Two essay paragraphs and a few new sentences on your creative pieces later, you resign to an afternoon of more video games.
As for Friday… on Friday you realize that you can only say, “Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow” for so long. It’s crunch time. You need to sit down and actually write that essay. But then you look out at the melting snow and lovely warm (well, warm for Minnesota standards) weather and think…
I’m on week two of a three-week essay writing spree. Oh, the woes of being an upper classmen… papers due every week. Last week, I analyzed Clara Durrant from Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room.
This week, I am writing a rhetorical analysis of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. So far, I’ve about seven pages in. The further I get into my analysis of this speech, the more I find myself fascinated by it. This is rather surprising, because I’m not too keen on Faulkner’s writing. (As I Lay Dying… “My mother is a fish”… Anyone?)
One rhetorical method I’m using analyzes the situation and context in which the speech was given. The situation gives need for rhetoric. In this case, the need for rhetoric comes from increasing fear from the Cold War. Faulkner discusses how this fear has affected writing, and issues a call to go back to the old ways of writing about the depth of the human condition.
It really is a beautiful speech, which is why I’d like to share it.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Here’s a clip from 1950 of Faulkner receiving his Nobel Prize. (Look for him in the 6:45 mark!)
Keep Your Feet 