just choking

Monday, dec. 9, 2002   |   0 comments

Fuck. Unlike Jay, who just finished his first marathon!, I totally choked! I didn’t finish my big fat term paper! And not because I was off swishing down the bunny slopes or whatever. I mean, I was WORKING on it, pulled an all-nighter, proceeded by a sleep-at-4-AM-up-at-8-AM-nighter, proceeded by a sleep-at-2-AM-up-at-6-AM-nighter. And I kept typing to the very last second, then half an hour beyond that. It just never came together.

The professor is letting me hand it in on Wednesday for a lesser grade, which is really nice, but it means I STILL HAVE TO WRITE IT! And I just, god, I just don’t want to look at it ever again, let alone come up with some sort of retroactive thesis sentence for the thing. Because that’s the problem: at about page 15, I realized that I had no idea what my paper was about anymore. That the research I’d done, the sources I was citing, none of them hung together in any cohesive way. I’m sure the total lack of sleep wasn’t helping, nor the insane coffee jitters. (I was drinking only about a cup a day, but after four months of nothing but decaf, that was enough to put me in the tense crouch of someone waiting for the ball, come-on-come-on-throw-it-THROW-it-to-me!, for like eight hours.)

But the sun has come up on me sitting at my computer in a full-sweat panic before, where I’m shoving paragraphs around and reading things out loud and … nothing. Then that peculiar brand of giddiness, both tearful and giggly all at once, kicks in and somehow it all comes together. I mean, it wasn’t always great, what I came up with. But things that absolutely had to get done got done. But not this time!

I think that’s what worries me the most. What if my fight-or-flighty panic, which has always been there to pull me up out of the nose-dives, has ceased to be? What if I’m too old for the all-nighter bender, which is the very core of my writing strategy? That would suck. But no. What’s way, way worse is that I still have to write THIS paper. There’s part of me, a big part, like my entire rack, that would prefer dropping out of school to finishing that paper. Fuck!