laffy taffy

I'm feeling quite bad about myself at the moment. I've stayed up too late wasting time. Tonight was the first Italian class taken in preparation for the summer trip to Italy. This has made my day into a 12 hour learning extravaganza. I know that I am going to be tired tomorrow. I called and cancelled my doctors appointment in the morning because the thought or huffing up and down Chicago Ave. all day fills me with horror. Meanwhile, there is a backlog of reading piling up for Friday. Least of this reading includes the gazillion poems that I am supposed to have read in order to teach them. Also, my prof for Afterlife of Marxism suggested an extra session for grad students (even though it became an open invitation) for which we are supposed to read Society of the Spectacle. Now this little treatise is quite complicated because it is so enigmatic. It deals with the organization of the economy and society into images that produce or incite desire. There is a somewhat well known French philosopher coming to campus. This requires reading as well. There is no worse feeling that staring dumbly at the people sitting around you at a talk hoping they have hung on to a thread of the paper long enough to say something. All of these pressures have to do with the pressure I am putting on myself to "professionalize." This basically refers to the process of turning your will into laffy taffy (not the rump shaking kind though). There are stupid jokes involved in this process. Basically it means running around campus and sitting in ill lit corners of the university frantically reading materials that are too dense to be read with your back up against the wall (this reminds me of an article in the Times I saw about Airbus' plans for standing room only seats on planes: instead of groundlings of the old theatres I guess they'll have to be called "airlings." Why don't they just develop enormous ziplock bags and sling shots and just hurl people across time and space?). Oh and I'm supposed to be studying for oral exams. Right now I'm racing through Woman in White by Collins. Its a lovely novel (fortunately I read it before). But now that I've learned my committee is going to be comprised of two profs I barely know and one who has a disarming propensity to be simultaneously hot and cold. Needless to say, I'm a bit concerned. Everyone says that I will do fine on the exams. Surely I will. I have experience since January, however, a recurrent feeling that I cannot retain information in my brain. It is as if some thrifty shop mechanic went into my skull with a diamond bladed grinder and just made my brain resemble the chicago bean. (Note: I realize that link is a bit overkill in so far as it is meant to show/reveal what the bean is, but I digress...). BAsically, my complaint boils down to the genre of the "grad student's lament." There is nothing new to this. Only now it is my turn to be jostled down the gauntlet of self-doubt, inscrutable demands, and pressure.