--from Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

I'm still catching up, but rather than write about any of the topics I said I'd get to at the end of my last entry -- and, indeed, rather than writing anything new at all -- I'm going to continue the narrative by giving you most of an e-mail I sent my Provocative Language professor on Tuesday night. We were supposed to have met earlier that evening to review my first essay. Here's what happened instead:

MONDAY NIGHT:
  Shmuel works on his first Provocative Language essay at the I Building on campus. The text is flowing pretty well, and shortly after 9:00, he decides to go home and finish it there.
  He walks home, picking up some essential groceries (okay, root beer) along the way. He's around the corner from his apartment when it occurs to him that he forgot to delete the file from the computer he'd been working on. Somebody could open it and see everything he's written about dirty words!
  Oh, well, he decides. Not the end of the world. He walks on.
  He's just down the block from his apartment when he realizes that he also forgot to upload the file to his Internet account, which is how he transports files to and from school. The only copy of the thing is trapped at school, and the lab will be closed long before he could make it back.
  "Oh, shreck," he says. The Yiddish term seems oddly euphemistic under the circumstances, but it serves.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON:
  Just before his drama class, Shmuel runs into the I Building, and begs the student at the appropriate computer terminal to let him use it for just two minutes, so he can transfer the file to his Internet account. The student agrees. The transfer is made. Shmuel scurries off to class.

LATER TUESDAY AFTERNOON:
  During his drama class, Shmuel scribbles a bunch of corrections and notes onto a printout of the previous night's draft.

TUESDAY EVENING:
  Shmuel gets out of class, quickly grabs a slice of pizza (long-overdue fuel), and zooms off to the computer lab, where he types furiously until 6:00 PM, at which point he stops the essay dead in its tracks, ties it off roughly, saves it, prints it, uploads it to his account, and runs to his professor's office, only to find that he's a bit too late. Oops.

TUESDAY NIGHT:
  Shmuel decides to take advantage of the situation, noting that the essay he'd been writing really wanted to be two separate essays. There's an obvious weld in the center in which he tried to join them, but given the chance, he figures it'd be much better to cut 'em apart and expand 'em both. So that's what he's doing now.
  Both essays are introductions to the semester's work, but in two entirely different areas.
  Essay #1 is autobiographical, and has little (if anything) to do with language research as such; rather, it gets into the effects this research (and related matters) has had on the author. As an outgrowth of English 211, it's not entirely inappropriate, and Shmuel seems to think it needs to be part of the project.
  Essay #2 gets into the language issues, starting with a flaw in the analysis found in "Effing the Ineffable" that's been nagging at him ever since writing it, and continuing to sketch out some questions that he'd like to explore this semester.

Tonight was to have been spent further revising said essays and cleaning my room, but it hasn't worked out that way. Alas. Still, as it stands, "Essay #2" is pretty close to finished. "Essay #1," on the other hand, keeps expanding on me. It's clearly fissioning into two more essays already, and I have a feeling it has further to expand from there.

This, however, makes the difference between the two seem more dramatic than it is. My feeling at this point is that both aspects of the project -- the autobiographical and the linguistic -- are going to end up being about equal in emphasis. The difference is that in the case of the linguistic stuff, I'm starting with a short essay setting out the general outlines of what I want to explore, and posing a few questions I plan to grapple with. There'll be plenty to fill in from there. (And I plan to make sure the linguistic stuff in itself would fill the course requirements. I've been waiting for this chance, and I'm not about to squander it.)

In the case of the autobiographical stuff, on the other hand, I'm writing it from the inside and working my way out. And I'm starting to wonder if any of it is going to be ready for a critical eye before I finish expanding the whole thing. It's not so much that I mind anyone seeing it in an unfinished state as it is that the more I add, the more I realize how much I'm leaving out, and how much context is required to make sense out of what's there.

Our next meeting is this Tuesday night. This is gonna be interesting.