oh all right. not still bloody feeling like dying, although this is not a sunny day. what the hell. have just got to go on. the melanie kicks in after awhile to make you do that. wish i weren't so listless and uninterested in school. it's not exactly senioritis, i just think perhaps someone might have mentioned festina lente to me earlier on. was reading poach's blog where she says college life should be about "friction, reaction, energy, conversation." i think my first year was like that, except over the last few years i've been drawing further and further into myself, finding it harder to be energised by others and drawing my knowledge and happiness and purpose from a few people and from books and from solitude and making quiet space. and that was to a certain extent good too. but this last year has been uninteresting and uninspiring for me, and i've almost given up even the motions of going to school and working. nohrnberg suggested at the end of third year when i turned in 3 consecutive late papers that it's a case of early burnout. i really don't think this is it. heaven knows i haven't done a day of serious work since i got here. i think it's getting ahead of myself early and too fast and then being frustrated because i am not ready to move to the next stage but too impatient to stay where i am. bob reeder, the other day, introducing me to his roommate, said "minz is an undergraduate - but only just barely!" and i think that was very astute. i remember nohrnberg telling his spenser class, a class i now regret taking, that you can always learn something from graduate papers, but with undergrad papers you've seen it all before. what i want to know is, how do you get from one to the other? do we automatically become? or is getting through academic exercises to the next level of knowledge or skill like being promoted to the highest level of our incompetence? i can't quite get my work to the next level, but i'm not content to stay where i am. i regret the spenser not because it didn't help me, but because i could have waited. i got ahead of myself that time. to have done things in the right order would have got this albatrocity of a lit hist survey over with at a time when i was greener, and it probably would have prepared me better all-round too, at a time when i would have been less impatient with myself. now it's there four times a week, exciting me little and burdening me much, and without which i can't graduate. spenser was a glimpse of the promises that grad school held out and then you had to go back to where insipid competence was required. and perhaps i hadn't benefitted as much from spenser as i could have if i had waited till i was more experienced. because there is no getting out of the requirements. you only put them off for what is most exciting at the time, and then they came back after you'd worldtoured the department and told you to stop dreaming of travel.