write like you're running out of time

First of all, if I get called about subbing tomorrow it had better be before 7 am. I can't get up, shower, take care of the pets, eat and get to the school by 7:30 in the span of fifteen minutes! Maybe I'll just stay home again...

Second, a meme. Ganked from...someone on my f-list; I'm too tired to remember or go back to check who.

( 100 movies circa 1998 )

Well, that's half an hour that I could have spent sleeping wasted...

In the middle of due papers, homework and other shite that needs to get done before the end of the semester (or Thanksgiving, whichever comes first), the one bright spot was this weekend when my best friend came down. We had a really great time hanging out together. I showed her some of the best spots in town, we went out to eat and trolled the mall last night, and we just got to hang out together and catch up and all of that fun stuff. Then she had to leave this afternoon to go home. So now I'm sitting in my room, feeling alone and a little depressed. And my roomate's back after being gone since late Tuesday night. I would have preferred to be alone in my depression for just a little while longer, thank you very much.

Finals week on Monmouth College campus has finally started, which means people can be loud only one half-hour out of the entire day, which also means they try to be as loud as they possibly can during that entire half-hour.

Fortunately my finals schedule isn't too bad. I have one tomorrow, a free day on Monday from when my grammar professor turned our final into a take-home one, a non-formal final on Tuesday, one at 8 AM on Wednesday and a second non-formal final on Thursday. Said Thursday is also when my mom and I will be packing me up and moving me home (where will Dad be? In Conneticut. Thanks a lot, Dad).

Now for the bad news. Just found out today that the mom of a friend of mine is really sick. Actually, she's more like a friend of the whole family; she's one of the heads of my brother's Boy Scout troop and helped him a lot in getting his Eagle this past year. From what I've learned she has a mass around one of her kidneys, and the doctors aren't sure if it's gotten into the bone or not. In other words, cancer and it may or may not have spread.

To add to this, I'm the only one between my friend and I who knows this information. All my friend knows is that his mom is sick and in the hospital. He's planning on going home tomorrow morning, but I don't think he knows that he's not going to be coming back to take his finals. I just hope I don't see him anytime before he leaves tomorrow, because I'm having a hard time as it is not IM-ing him and telling him everything I know.

-Lady Iapetus, She of Many Identities

The Monmouth College wind ensemble has its spring concert in two days (coincidentally that's Founder's/Scot's Day, but that's a whole different rant). Ergo we need to log in all the rehearsal time we can. Tonight was our informal dress rehearsal, informal because a) it's not the night immediately before the concert and b) we were rehearsing in the basement rehearsal room, not on stage like we normally would for a dress rehearsal.

And why weren't we rehearsing onstage?

Because the religion department of the school decided to invite a theologian by the name of Martin Marty to our school to give a lecture and talk to some of the religion classes. And they picked tonight to have the lecture, in the same auditorium where the ensemble rehearses.

Ordinarily any sane sensible conductor would talk to the religion department and work out this snafu, or else postpone the rehearsal a night.

But not Blomster. Oh, no. We went right on with rehearsal as scheduled, lecture be damned.

At first I thought it would be okay. After all, we'd pulled this stunt earlier in the month when people were on the first floor trying to rehearse for a play. But then about forty-five minutes or so into rehearsal a professor sticks her head into the room and tells us that they're having a lecture upstairs, and that they can hear us all the way up there. Blomster stops rehearsal and tells her that we've got a concert coming up and this is the dress rehearsal for it, and there's nothing he can do. The professor leaves, and someone in the ensemble makes a remark that she's one of the more easily pissed off proffesors.

No apparent harm done. We kept on rehearsing.

We had made it about halfway through the eighth movement of "Pictures at an Exhibition" when who should pop in next but Reverend Fannin, the chaplin. And she did not look happy. My first thought was, "Oh shit, now we're in trouble." I expected Blomster to stop rehearsal and Fannin to chew all of us out; my guess is that she expected us to pack up and go home after that first warning. But no, Blomster kept conducting and we kept playing. One of the percussionists went over and talked to Fannin. I don't know what he told her but she eventually left, still not looking too happy.

Blomster was pretty vocal about his opinion of the whole thing. His opinion boiled down to "we were there first, the students are the ones paying for an education which includes music, blah blah blah." A lot of the students agreed with him, including me (to a point). In fact the only person I talked to who didn't agree was one of the student chaplains. Actually, he kind of agreed with Blomster but said that if he had known about this earlier in the week he could have contacted the Green Army (aka the campus moving crew) move everything back over to Austin Hall, which had been our old rehearsing quarters while the auditorium was being remodeled.

What's my personal take on this? I think that the religion department could have found some place else to have their lecture. There are scant places on campus for the ensemble to rehearse, especially two days away from a concert, not to mention we would have to worry about hauling equipment back and forth between the auditorium and our alternate rehearsal spot. All of that, two days before a concert? I don't fricking think so!

All that's left for me to say is that this is going to make my 10:00 class tomorrow morning very interesting. See, the guy who was making this lecture this evening is coming to speak to my class, and odds are that my professor for that class was at the lecture tonight. And she'll most likely have something to say about what happened. And I don't know whether to out myself as a member of the "trouble-making" wind ensemble or not.

-Lady Iapetus, She of Many Identities

...or for an optional title, "Why it pays to have a Senior Seminar professor with Connections."

Said senior sem teacher has published a book of poetry and is working on her first novel. She also happens to know some of the authors of the books we're reading for that particular class. Somehow she got one of them, Fred Johnson (the author of Bittersweet and A Man Finds His Way if anyone's read them), to come to the college and speak to our class. It's funny, it started out that he would just come and speak to our senior seminar class. Then my professor got him to speak to some of her other classes, like my advanced creative writing class, as well as do a reading from one of his books for the college in general. By the time he actually got here, she had him speaking to a few history classes as well.

It was great. Fred read excerpts from his two novels on Monday night. Then this morning in creative writing we mostly talked about the writing process of his novels. At one point Fred had to borrow the book from one of my classmates since he had forgotten his copy, and she took that opportunity to ask if he would autograph it. He agreed to do it, which just goes to show how nice and open a person he was. In senior seminar we talked more about the book itself and some of the themes and stuff. I swear, we must have taken that man by surprise with some of the things we talked about that had been brought up in discussions during earlier classes. He also autographed the books the rest of the senior seminar students had (there's no way in heck I'm selling that thing back now!)

The whole thing made me take another look at my writing. For years that's one of the main things I've wanted to do with my life, which is why I think I latched onto fanfiction writing when I first actually got on the Internet. Two years ago I took basic creative writing and even though I wanted to write short stories I found myself deviating more towards poetry. The same thing happened when I took advanced creative writing this semester. Overall the reception among my other classmates is pretty good, and I've been reevaulating what I want to do with my writing. At first I wanted to be a novelist or a children's author. But now I think that poetry may be a good path for me.

Boy, just when you think you've got things figured out someone or something has to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

-Lady Iapetus, She of Many Identities

I had a weekend to get this thing done. Hell, I had more than a weekend; I had at least a fricking month! So why the hell am I sitting here at 10:30 in the evening trying to hammer out a 5 page prospectus for a 25 page research senior seminar paper the night before its due? Especially when I don't have a freaking thesis? Gods, I am so tempted to just go to Bruce and tell her I couldn't get the blasted thing done, and ask for help. But what really burns me up is that she told me that there's "lots of information out there" about the author I'm doing my paper on, so I shouldn't have any problems. Unfortunately the guy's got "III" after his name, which makes his dad a "Jr." His dad is also a famous author, so when I type in this guy's name I get info on two different people.

Gods, I am so screwed...

Lady Iapetus