So you know the boring academic paper I posted yesterday?

Well, it turns out it isn’t due till next week. I thought it was due today, April 4, but it isn’t due till April 11. D’oh! Oh well, as sudden developments go, it’s a pretty benign one. Just means I have another week to work on it.

For example, I still have to add a bibliography. Whoopee.

This week is more or less the last week of class, AFAIK. After this, there’s only exams. I think I have exams in Canadian History (a take home one, which is rad), Ethics, and History of Popular Music.

I am not worried about them. I don’t sweat exams. I usually can do fairly well on them without even having to study. I will do a small amount of studying for these ones. Read over the notes and the texts to refresh my mind. But for the most part, as usual, I will just wing it.

It will be an emotional week for me. I know this going on. I like my profs, I have enjoyed my classes, it will be tough letting them go. And no amount of joy at being free of the academic noose can change that.

It annoys me that the transcript business is complicating things on the VFS front. Goddamn administrivia. I would be way more relaxed right now if I knew that Patrick at VFS had all the things he needed to push my application through. But I am going to have to deal with the messy and increasingly absurd world of paper record-keeping.

I am trying to work up the ambition to leave for school half an hour early so I can go to the Student Association office and see about getting the damned thing. Once I have it, I am seriously considering delivering it to Patrick in person. It would save me days of fretting about it getting to him by mail and give me en excuse to show my face on campus and look around a little.

Sounds better than leaving it up to Canada Post.

But first I have to actually get the damned thing. Good thing I just figured out (after the fourth time reading this web page, d’oh) that I can do the request via email. Then I will pick it up at school when it is ready.

At least, I hope that’s how it goes down.

Tomorrow night, I have my final test in Linguistics. I don’t think there’s an exam. Which is a godsend. I am struggling hard just to keep up with the week by week stuff. Having to remember all or even half of it at the same time would damn near kill me.

And there is no final exam in Creative Writing. I will have to submit my portfolio before too long, but that’s no big deal. All I have to do is concatenate some existing files into one PDF and write three fourteen line poems. Big deal. Poetry comes easily to me.

Oh, plus I have to do 4 writing prompts in lieu of the process journal I just couldn’t do. Also no big deal.

(—)

Back from school now.

I wasn’t the only one who thought that essay was due today. There was another girl, one I rather like because she seems as bright and brittle and perpetually confused as me. I told her that now she has another week to do it. She said “Oh, no, I am not going back to that thing. ”

Fair enough. To be honest, I doubt I will go back to it either. I should. I should sit down and fine tune the thing till it hums like a violin string. I know that I am perfectly capable of doing it.

But I don’t wanna. And I know I can get away with not doing it. So I probably won’t.

I have been thinking a lot today about the difference between what I know I should do versus what I know I can get away with. I think the question illustrates an axis of my personality issues. I can get away with a lot of things. I’m clever, I have a lot of natural ability, I can bullshit my way through things.

And that is, largely speaking, what I have done in my life. I didn’t think of it as “getting away with things” most of the time. It was just how things worked in my personal reality. If I had thought about it at all, the “Jagoff” me, voice sounding ever so pleased at its own cleverness, would have said “Hey, why work harder than you have to?”.

Well, for one, because there are a lot of things that don’t come easy to you and you might want stuff that requires some of those things some day.

Admittedly, I still have my dreams of an easy life. Like my hero Quentin Crisp. He’s my hero not just because he was openly gay before it was safe and not just because he was extremely witty, but because he had a life where all he had to do was be driven from one place where all he had to do was be entertaining and pleasant to another.

Oh, and produce the occasional book.

That seems like the perfect life to me. I know that I can charm a crowd and I know that I could be an entertaining speaker without too much effort. And I can write.

Writing in the very personal and biographical mode he used would be a bit hard for me. I would have trouble writing about my own life because my own life is very dull. I mean, I have done very little but the Axis of Depression…. read, play video games, and hang out online – for 20 years.

But I have a lot of anecdotes. Maybe those would do.

Next Canadian History class, I have to bring my big book of History articles AND, and I quote, “whatever you use to write”.

Well I am not lugging my PC there! I guess the tablet will have to do.

Hope I can find my good Bluetooth keyboard, because virtual keyboards suck.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.