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It's no shame to be poor... but, on the other hand, it's no great honor either. --Sholom Aleichem 4 days until my birthday! |
Thursday, May 6, 1999 The Library Saga Concludes Oh, dear me. The past two days have been such an emotional rollercoaster, I'm having trouble just sitting down to write about it. Wednesday feels as if it happened a month ago. But let's give this the old college try, if you'll pardon the expression.
So I went to the bank on Wednesday, and withdrew ten bucks, so I could pay my fines at the college library and finally take out all the books I've needed. This left just over seven dollars in my account. My mother thinks I should just close the account altogether, but I've had it for almost half my life now, and I feel a bit attached to it. At any rate, I went to college. At the library, I was informed that they'd examined The BFG, and while the inside pages were okay, the book would have to be rebound, so, in addition to the $1.50 in overdue fines I owed for that book, they'd have to add an $18.00 rebinding fee. In the meantime, I still couldn't take anything out. Meep. I paid the other overdue fines, and then slunk off to the building with the English Department, my metaphorical tail dragging between my legs, deep in despair. It was thus that I was discovered by the professor whose book I'm supposed to be proofreading, who asked me why, in fact, I was clearly sunk deep in despair. I explained that I'd lost my borrowing privileges at the library. Why? he wanted to know. So I started to explain about The BFG. He interrupted just as I was getting started, and asked how much they wanted. $19.50, I replied. He pulled out a $100 bill and told me to bring him back the change.
(Note to any IRS auditors in the audience: No, I don't have the impression that he usually has $100 bills to throw around. It seems to have just happened to have worked out that way on this occasion.)
So... with that crisis behind me (and, trust me, I had much I wanted to say about that, but there's too much to come in this entry and the next one), I proceeded to take out a bunch of books on Marlowe and Shakespeare. The most promising titles in the catalog were already taken -- clearly, at least one other student is thinking along the same lines as I am, at least as far as Shakespeare is concerned -- but I was able to find nine that were in the right ballpark. And class came and went, and I spoke to my British Literature I professor about the essay I'd gotten back earlier in the week, and, alas, I have to grant that my analysis of the sonnets in question just wasn't quite good enough. Anyway. From there, I went home, and went to sleep shortly thereafter. This weird "sleep at night and get up first thing in the morning" sleeping pattern is still with me.
I got up early Thursday morning, and switched off between trying to paint an abstract representation of "spring," and writing my column on the Littleton school shootings. To get me in the mood of the former, I started by listening to Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" a few times, and then switched to the Brady Bunch Movie soundtrack. Neither the painting nor the column was ready to go by the time I had to leave for class, although the former was at least in the right ballpark (except for one truly horrendous corner.) But, still... I went to class, in which, perhaps due to my feelings of frustration in not being able to get the column to work, I got a bit more combative than I usually have in the past; combined with one other classmate, the discussion veered seriously off track. Oh, well. I'll watch it in the future. Anyway, I told the current Opinions editor at the school paper that while I hadn't finished that week's column yet, I'd e-mail it over to her by the end of free hour. She wasn't thrilled about that, but agreed. She also mentioned that the Editor-in-Chief wanted to cancel my column altogether. Great. Anyway, I ate lunch (peanut butter on a bagel), then went to the Mac lab and finished my column. I wasn't quite thrilled with the way it turned out -- I'd had to wrap it up too quickly, and I did so by folding in the start of an earlier, failed draft, and using it as an ending, with mixed results -- but at least I got it done, only a half-hour late. So I e-mailed it over, and went to class. The professor was a bit surprised to see me show up at all, as I'd told him last week that I had an awards ceremony to go to during class time this week. I told him that it started at 4 PM. He told me to just take the class off, as, by the time I got my paints set up and everything, it'd be just about time for me to start cleaning up, and I wouldn't really have time to do any serious painting. So I left.
The awards ceremony itself was very nice. There's more to say, but I'm writing this on late Friday afternoon, and sundown is only twenty minutes away, so I'll have to get to that in "Friday's" entry, which will appear late on Saturday night. Stay tuned... (For new readers: For religious reasons, I can't use the 'puter from sundown Friday until nightfall Saturday.)
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