woke up as usual at 6.45 and felt like death. drifted back to sleep and woke again with a start to find it was a quarter to ten and my limbs were still lead and my hair needs washing. (isn't that curious? you wake up sick and knowing you will be late for class and you have time to notice your hair needs washing) struggled into clothes and gathered my old english things and set off, but just a street away from class i stopped and said this is hopeless i can't concentrate and i am not prepared to face another room full of people after yesterday's debacle and i don't remember anything i had translated on saturday. so i went to dudley and hid in a hole and felt sorry for myself until it was lunch time and i could emerge from truancy and melt into the lunch crowd. i found some first year english grad students in the dining hall and so ate and listened and laughed and chattered for a while. felt awful like hell inside though, and came home instead of going to the afternoon class. it's ridiculous to miss class because seminars only meet once a week - so to skip one seems incredibly slack and irresponsible, and yet at this point what i need is a courage pill and to go to sleep and after yesterday's debacle i am not brave enoguh for more potential humiliation, not until i've got my wits together. yesterday i had ruined my first grad school presentation which i had been working on madly - i hadn't realised i was expected to make a five-ten minute report with some commentary, well how was i to know? (a: you should have asked) i've never seen anyone give a presentation in any class yet, and thought i had to present a semblance of a paper, and that's what i tried to write, a 40minute proto-paper, and obviously this is too early in the semester to put together enough research for such a thing. so that the more i read the less i knew, the paper got more and more out of hand as i took in overmuch information from too many different sources, and by the time i had to go to class i still hadn't sorted out my thoughts and the argument had got too complicated, and although i meant to give it a shot anyway i started out apologising to the class and the more i apologised the worse i felt and in the end i simply said when called on that i couldn't give my presentation. harris was very understanding and kind about it after class, and said i took things too seriously, lighten up and don't think about it anymore. but i feel it as a sharp defeat. this whole course has been full of defeats so far - and i feel, as i was telling someone else this morning, that it is as if only by doing all the possible wrong things that i can learn to do the right thing.