Blocks for Brains

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:03:15 -0400

I do want to tell you about my life. It's just that, ever since Paris, I wanted my next update to be about pictures of me and Anne at the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, at cafes with Julia and at Notre Dame on beautiful, warm Palm Sunday. Best laid plans, I supppose...

Instead I'll tell you about the project that has been occupying my days and nights (mostly days, as I've come to the conclusion that, for better or for worse, my body no longer feels capable of all-nighters, and gives up hope around 3 AM; quite a good thing it has only recently happened, as I got through my first year here as a creature of the night).
For the grad seminar I took this semester on representations in archaeology, I am currently powering through (hopefully) a final paper, with 13 pages down and hopefully therefore less than 7 to go.

Additionally, and I suppose consequently, I have become a creature of the night once again. I collapsed from exhaustion (borne from a day of field tripping) between 8:30 and 11:30 PM tonight; prior to falling asleep, I had consumed at least an hour of CNN coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, something which has held my attention since Monday. I have little to say of that as my response has been fairly standard--a mixture of disbelief, horror, sadness, fear and resentment.

My research on this paper spans over 20 different books, although I consulted possible ten more above that, and has been nearly continuous for five days. I've never put this much into a paper in my life, and I actually feel very connected to the topic at hand; because of this, the pressures I feel to do a good job are mounting. A positive is that this is actually just a draft, and I'll have a bit less than a week to edit including the professor's and dean's comments before I give the paper at a class conference on the 24th. I hope to make this paper the spring board for my senior honors thesis, especially if I can make it to Chichen Itza this summer to construct some visual representations of my own. I certainly have set the paper up so that I can continue to spread my coverage of the history of representation at Chichen into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and I have access to those sources; I felt that it'd be inappropriate to attempt such a survey within this paper, unless I was committed to doing an equally fine job for 30 - 40 pages worth of material, rather than a reasonable fine job (*fingers already crossed*) for 20 pages.

When I finish this paper, I will email it off into the universe and then I will clean my room and sleep. My semester is ending sooner and sooner, with next week containing my last grad seminar class, as well as my last Spanish class, and very soon thereafter I have my last material culture class, including a paper and a presentation. My very last class will be the dreaded sixties, (The Sixties without Apology), the only class I've taken here that I've actively stopped attending, and for good reason. The last requirement is merely a research paper. I'm going to take a look at Women Strike for Peace, an organization that popped up in 1960 against nuclear proliferation after finding strontium-90 in the milk babies and kids were drinking, as a result to fall out from nuclear testing. I've started the research for that as well, in that I've gotten some books together and they currently live on my book case, undisturbed at least until this is done.

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Blocks for Brains