Show Me the Way to Go Home...

I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.

I had a drink about an hour ago,

And it went straight to my head...

Somehow I got that old camp song in my head while I was walking from the bar where I was having my one celebratory drink (and potstickers! oh, how I love thee, potstickers!) to my car, and it stuck.

Tonight, dear friends, I handed in my last grad school paper EVER. I can't say I'm officially done, because I still have one class to attend tomorrow night at 5, but I can say that I do not have anything left hanging over my head, and that is not a feeling I have had in a very very very long time.

More later. Sleep now.

By the Numbers: an update

Past:
2 - papers written today
1 - hour of babysitting a screaming 5-month-old with his 2.5-year-old sister saying, "Call Mommy and have her get him."
1 - powerpoint presentation created for tomorrow's adventure
5 - enjoyable hours spent on Friday night not thinking at all about school

Present:
3 - classes left
1 - presentation to do
1 - policy paper to be written
1 - group project paper to be edited
1 - take-home test about death and dying to be finished

Future:
1 - week until I (hopefully) hear about the much-desired fellowship
2 - sleep-deprived nights left before the end of my grad school career
12 - days until graduation

Please Stand By

Fibby is in the process of writing the last papers of her grad school career and has very little time to do much other writing.

By the numbers, her life looks like this:

2 - days left at her internship
6 - classes left
2 - presentations to do
1 - paper about family preservation and reunification to be written
1 - policy paper to be written
1 - legislative testimony to be written and read to the class
1 - group project paper to be edited
1 - reflection paper to be written about above-mentioned group project
1 - take-home test about death and dying to be finished
10 - hours of sleep in the past 2 nights
5 - interviews for desired fellowship in the past week
1 - remaining interview for desired fellowship sometime this week
1 - interview for an upcoming hospital position today
6.5 - hours of playing with C. on Thursday to make her laugh (including up to 2.5 hours of nap time)
2+ - hours of playing with M. (and possibly newborn Z.) on Saturday night to make her laugh

Check back for regular updates on her progress throughout the week.

Best Laid Plans

So my plan for the weekend was this:

Friday evening - get some work done

Saturday morning - get some work done

Saturday afternoon - go see a friend in a ballroom dance competition

Saturday night - meet up with friends

Sunday morning - hang out with friends

Sunday afternoon - get some work done

Sunday evening - get some work done

Monday morning - get some work done

Monday afternoon - watch the marathon

Monday evening - go to trivia night


Here's how my weekend has actually gone so far:

Friday evening - stay at home because I'm too exhausted from my week to get any work done. Kick some ass in Scramble (without any help).

Saturday morning - get up late, do some laundry, go for a run

Saturday afternoon - realize there's not enough time to get any significant amount of work done before the ballroom dance competition. Invite a friend over to hang out. Head to ballroom dance competition. Enjoy immensely.

Saturday night - meet up with a friend for dinner, then head to an improv show. Then meet up with friends from out of town.

Sunday morning - breakfast with friend. Get home... start feeling sick.

Sunday afternoon - sleep, be sick, sleep, watch West Wing on DVD.



This brings us to Sunday evening (now). I really need to make up for the lack of work done so far this weekend, but my splitting headache and wonky stomach aren't motivating me all that much to do so. And there are multiple West Wing episodes to be watched, and Monk and Psych are both on NBC tonight, and... and... and...

But it does leave an unbelievable amount of work to be done tomorrow if I do nothing tonight.


On a side note, if any of you ever get the opportunity to attend a ballroom dance competition, I highly recommend going (especially if it's free). It's fun. As the level of skill increases, so does the level of complexity of the costumes. It's just like you would imagine, only you're there in person to witness it, and you can't stop grinning because it's so surreal and yet so cool. And the dresses... wow.

Also, watching ballroom dancing is a lot more stressful than you might think - especially when watching from high up in the bleachers. From that angle, you see very clearly which couples are heading for a crash with each other, and it gets quite anxiety-producing (especially if the couple you're there to see is involved in such a crash).

Favorite dances: Quickstep (because - wow - that takes some skill) and Viennese Waltz (it just looks so grand with those long, flowy dresses).

When the World Gives You Snow, Give the World Cookies

First, let me say this: I AM DONE. DONEDONEDONEDONEDONE. No more classes for a month. It still has not set in that I won't be in class every night of the week, but I already feel the weight of the 6,000 papers that have been handed in is off my shoulders, and I'm looking forward to a day in the not-so-distant future when the fog of exhaustion has also lifted. Soon.

Second, I will say that as exciting as it is to be done, it is also a bit anticlimactic, since our final two classes were cancelled last night because of the snowstorm that swept through. Now I'm all for snow days (especially since I haven't had one in over 10 years), but to have one on the last night of class with a professor I really like and who I may not have again next semester was kind of a let-down. (Nerd alert: I'm also bummed to have not gotten my final papers back from her, because I would have been able to know my grades)

That said, I managed to have a most excellent adventure last night with three other friends from school. We went out for a celebratory dinner, and then headed back to a friend's house who lived nearby. From her apartment, we could look down on the street below where the cars were not moving. At all. For 30 minutes we looked down at the chaos below, and cars didn't move.

And so we four social workers started feeling bad for the people stuck in their cars, and decided that we would make cookies for them. So off we trekked to the supermarket a few blocks away (stopping to help push a minivan into the parking lot on our way) to buy a few tubs of ready-made Tollhouse cookie mix and some candy canes, then back to the apartment to make the cookies, and then out to the street to spread our cookie-love.

It was fun. There were many drivers that ignored us, or rolled down their windows, heard that we were offering free cookies, and then shook their heads and rolled them back up. But there were even more drivers who got big smiles on their faces and thanked us. One man said he'd been in his car for 3 hours, and he had only come from 2 miles away. Another woman said she'd been in her car for 9 hours trying to get home. These people were exhausted and though we couldn't get them home any more quickly, we could at least give them a moment of happiness with a chocolate chip cookie or two.

Weekend Highlights

So I went up to Maine this weekend to celebrate my Grandmother's 90th birthday. That in itself was a highlight. Also a highlight was my uncle asking my grandmother if she had found a use of a "For Rent" sign she had purchased a month or so ago when they had been shopping together.

"I'm trying to figure out whose door to stick it on," she answered (she lives in an independent living facility). Brilliant. My 90-year-old, prankster grandmother. I love it.

I also got in a beach walk, which was really special, and I managed to fight off some sort of mean-feeling sickness with sheer determination, Emergen-C, and Zicam. So I'm feeling particularly proud of myself for that.

Oh yeah - and watching NESN's coverage of the Friday night game - or more specifically, watching NESN's coverage of after the Friday night game, when they were waiting on the results of the Yankees/Orioles game and they couldn't show the game live, so they showed the fans who had stayed in Fenway watching it on the jumbo-tron, and then gave commentary on their reactions, and then 10 seconds later would show the "instant replay" of what the fans had been reacting to. A funny way to watch a game, but totally worth it in the end.

In other news, my fantasy football team kinda sucks. It's funny, though, because it really isn't a bad team - it's just that I keep going up against teams that have a couple players who have out-of-this-world weeks and end up scoring rediculous points. I'm 0-4 and starting to get depressed. Thank goodness the actual, in-the-flesh football team I root for is 4-0.

Highlight of the week so far: My professor last night telling us that if any of us were able to get tickets to any of the playoff games, that we should absolutely, without question, skip class.

The Paper that Wouldn't Die

Let me just say this: if I were to choose a movie to watch when the mood struck me to sit down and watch a movie (you know - with all my free time), Requiem for a Dream would not be it.

Yet 2 weeks ago, I found myself sitting in class, watching this disturbing film, all the while taking notes so that I could write a paper on it. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of watching this movie some highlights include: an obscene amount of drug use, electro-shock therapy, prostitution for drugs, manic episodes, a refrigerator that comes to life, and an amputation. Yeah, good times.

So sorry about the lack of updates. I've been too busy retraumatizing myself by replaying the scenes over and over in my head in order to be able to write about them, and haven't been able to post anything fun, lighthearted, and entertaining for you all to read.

For those of you who are interested in rediculousness, feel free to check out the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra Website.