13 Minutes

Crap! I only have 13 minutes left to write my last entry for March... and I'm so not ready (Argh! It just turned to 12 minutes)... what is going with time? It's going by entirely too fast... so fast, in fact, I don't even have time to put my very profound thoughts on the smorkin' labbit into a post. Oh no!!

April is supposed to be far away! It can't be April already. April is the month immediate preceding May... and well, if May comes, then summer is going to be RIGHT THERE! And then before I know it, it'll be November! And I haven't yet made it to Fassil's this year.

In fact, I'm not even sure I made it t Fassil's in all of 2009. Where did it go?

AAAARGH!!!!!

Two bad surfs...

I had been hearing all day Thursday about how wonderful the surf was... so I went out as soon as I got off work. It SUCKED. I went straight out from the trail and was going to get some lefts on the middle peak at Cox... but as soon as I got out, I realized there was actually nothing out there... so I went further in and further left, and then after not catching one wave, I came up almost right next to the rocks in the corner. Blargh! The rip was so strong it took all of two seconds for me to get from the middle to the corner. It sucked... and sucked me right into the rocks, even.

The report said it was going to suck all weekend (super short period)... but this morning, when I went out to walk the dog, it looked okay. I wasn't going to go, because I have a pile and a half of school work and several piles of work work and so many piles of business work that I wasn't going to go out unless I knew it was going to be good. Two bad surfs would just be demoralizing.

But then I talked to RR and he said I should definitely go out... being one to always take RR's advice (perhaps too consistently and too seriously), I went. The parking lots were full... both of them! Even the crappy scary one. There were a lot of kooks everywhere, so I wondered whether or not it actually was good or whether it was just weekend traffic. I ran into people whose opinion I trust, and was told that it really was good... and that I didn't need any gloves.

So, never a fan of gloves, I had my first gloveless surf this year. It was howling offshore winds... which is probably good for some people... but not good for someone who has to keep her 11' board from getting blown out from under her. The beach was frighteningly crowded. There has been this odd photoshopped photo of a super crowded Long Beach tossed about on the internet... ULTE2 thought it an excellent photo... but it seemed to me to be some sort of Hieronymus Bosch horror show... right at one of my favourite beaches. That's what Cox Bay looked like today... a Hieronymus Bosch horror show.

Wasting Time

I had always suspected that one has to do barely any work to get through school.

A friend who worked in the battery industry once told me that it costs x dollars in R&D to make an amazingly complicated battery... and that it costs x times 500 to improve that battery by another 2%. I think the same thing applies to school work. It takes x effort to get a B+... and it takes x times 500 to get an A-. Maybe the difference is even greater than that.

I've been aiming to pass... and I've been overshooting the target. The worst paper I ever wrote (which is considerably worse than the second worst paper I ever wrote) turned out to be a B+ paper. I could have spent another 2 weeks on it... and I probably would have ended up with an A paper... but that would not have been rewarded in any meaningful way. I am no longer striving for excellence. Mediocrity takes a lot less work, and in the end, no one is going to ask to see my transcript.

Any forays into the academic world of Slavic philology will be preceded by extensive, fresh undergraduate work, which will cancel out any doubt that my current academic standing casts upon me. And MFAs are all about portfolios anyway. This particular masters really is just passing time. By the end of this month, I'll be a quarter of the way through. And by August, I'll be a third of the way through. It'll be far too late to quit. It is far too late to quit.

YAY!!! It's OVER!!! (for a few weeks, anyway)...

I just threw up my second midterm paper in the instructor's lap. It wasn't pretty... but I'm now only looking to pass. For both of the past two weekends, I had be trying to write two midterm papers. I was mostly unsuccessful... in that I did everything but write those papers, until hours before they were due (luckily they were not due on the same day)... some of the fun activities I engaged in instead included:

• reading T.S. Eliot out loud... very loudly
• parsing Hail Mary in Latin
• watching Catherine Breillat movies I've already seen and not liked
• changing my Facebook interface to Russian and seeing it all like it was the first time
• looking for David Foster Wallace articles in scholarly publications
• joining an online dating site called "brainiac dating" or some such thing, and then writing inflammatory comments at the pretentious losers found there
• reading the OED (did you know that to procrastinate means to put off until tomorrow? this means that if you intend to do something later on today, you are, strictly speaking, NOT procrastinating)
• signing up for twitter (which is so lame that despite the fact that I really was looking for ways to waste my time, could not actually bring myself to wasting time there)
• tuning my lute
• watching an episode of Marriage Ref... which is probably contemporary US television at its best?

But now it's all over... and I'm back to putting as much surf in my life as possible... until the finals are here, that is.