Tired. Happy. Most of All: DONE

Done with what? Y3U3, for those of you who know what that is. For those who don't, think "90 page paper single spaced" and you'll have it about right.

You know it's unit edits week when:

1. Office humor just keeps getting weirder. Don't believe me? Check out the "Flight of the Conchords" episode entitled "Jenny" on youtube.
2. Fixes that should take 20 seconds take 20 minutes; fixes that should take one hour take two or three or six hours. Etc.
3. Anything, anything that can be a break is a break. Including planning the next unit.
4. You may literally roll out of bed and work all day and be going back to bed around midnight or later before you realize that you never stopped for a shower. Yuck. :-P
5. Something that is long-term and totally irrelevant to the unit edits suddenly has to be decided now, and it takes hours to process that decision because at least four people are involved.

Sufficient to say, we're always super happy when one of these weeks is over. And, for me, it basically is. I only have one thing left: tomorrow morning at 8 AM, Brittainy and I are having a race to see if either of us can complete a day-long project in 3 hours. What is the day-long project? Well, it's writing two pages. I'm not kidding: novel summaries are two pages long and they take a day to write. Only we're going to try to do it in 3 hours. Um... yeah.

Then Brittainy leaves for Thanksgiving with her family and fiance, and I get a whole weekend to---goof off? Don't be silly! I'm going to write an exam and a couple of articles on historical backgrounds of literature, and then start reading Crime and Punishment for (gasp!) the next unit. But don't feel sorry for me, dear reader. First of all, I'm completely hardened to my schedule. Second of all, I have three scrumptious new pleasure books coming in. :-D

Speaking of pleasure books, the one that interests me most right now is Ursula K. LeGuin's latest, called Lavinia. It's about the girl who married Aeneas (think Virgil's Aeneid, the thing that goes with Homer's Odyssey and Iliad). I've never seen any author tackle the subject of Lavinia before (besides Virgil, of course), but I have more faith in LeGuin's ability to handle it properly than I would anybody else's... with the possible exceptions of Rosemary Sutcliff or C.S. Lewis.

So I'm looking forward to reading that. Then there's one or two others from the Christian fiction market that I want to get my hands on, mostly to see if they're any good. Hope springs eternal. It's a funny thing, though----lately I find myself wanting to write the kind of story that I had least use for in college: gritty realism. I couldn't really explain why, but I'm pretty sure Crime and Punishment will only increase the impulse. So don't be surprised if you see both realism and grit showing up here in the next few weeks.

Let me see... what else can I tell you? I should say what else will I tell you; there are all sorts of things I can tell you, but won't, because you are a very public person and I really shouldn't trust you with any secrets. That being the case, I think I'll stop here. May your shadow never grow bulkier, dear reader---except on Thursday. ;-)