Wishing My Life Away...

Anyone got a time machine??

I cannot believe that there is absolutely no way to make September get here faster. There must be a way. Does Sony, et all, spend so much time on ridiculous robotic dogs that it just can’t come up with a way to make time go faster? This is wrong.

So I have finished my final paper, my Chaplin one. To celebrate, I have had some extra sleep, and John and I went to the park to see the new spring babies in the petting zoo, and watched The General (1927). (Sorry, Charlie, but Buster Keaton was necessary for a bit of a change.)

Now I am rested, and after I do my taxes and write my Jack Benny piece, I am facing an end of tasks, and four months consisting of a crapulent stretch of nothingness.

Why? I want to work, so why can’t I? They tell me it is because I am required to be a full time student over the summers. OK, that’s fine… But why do they have nothing in particular for me to do with these four months of study-cum-down-time?

Mostly because the profs are all off to Europe or Asia for the summer term, and have left us to fend for ourselves on minimum funding, and with so much time our hands that crime, suicide and dance lessons are really our only options for occupation.

Yes, I realize that only boring people should be bored. My mum told this often enough to me. But, honestly, four months is a long time without projects.

I have four months to read the six books that I already own for the January 2007 comp exam (which has a list of 35 books, but if I can’t afford tuition, I certainly can’t afford to buy 30 academic books), to write a rough draft of a dissertation proposal that is only 10 pages long, to bone up on my French for next October’s translation exam and to “rest.”

(“Rest” will occur naturally enough by itself when I am dead and in my tomb. Now is not the time to rest.)

I have a couple of articles I am working on, and I have some creative writing to do for Swank Puppy, this blog, and perhaps a review blog that I am hoping to start up with Catherine… Somehow this all doesn’t seem like enough excitement to keep me from going alcoholic over these next four months of bleak hell called “Summer Vacation.”

So, please, if you are reading this and have some paying work to do, please (PLEASE!) let me know. Alternatively, if you have something that doesn’t pay, but which may perk my life up (thereby stopping me from taking up glass-eating just to keep my soul from rusticating out of boredom), also drop me a line.

Otherwise, I shall have to look into those illegal games in which millionaires hunt people for sport in order to fill my time, and, with my income, I can say I won’t be on the good side of the deal.

Help keep a grad student off the streets!