I interrupt this hiatus in my blog posting to let you know that I’ll likely be posting even LESS often for the next two weeks. My appellate brief, worth eighty percent of my Legal Research and Writing grade, is due next Thursday*, and all I have so far is a sketch of an outline and a list of cases to read more closely.

I have a conference with my professor tomorrow afternoon, so I figure today is a fantastic time to start putting some serious effort into this thing. With only one weekend between now and the due date and 20 pages to conjure up out of this thick stack of cases, I’ll barely have time to eat, sleep, read blogs, check Facebook, keep up with my YouTube subscriptions, and update my Twitter feed.

I’ve just removed Solitaire from my computer, so who knows, maybe I’ll post MORE here for lack of a more absorbing way to procrastinate. It’s a crazy world.

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* The actual due date is the Monday after next, but that weekend I’ll be on a taiko road trip (squee!) to perform at the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival. What better reward for finishing a brief, eh?

I’d planned to bury my finished memo and not look at it until after grades came in—I knew that as soon as I looked at it I’d see a slew of obvious mistakes and be disappointed.

But now I’m applying for a part-time job at school, and they want to see a writing sample, which for 1Ls means our memo. I opened it to look it over. First paragraph, blatant comma error. Argh.

The scrimping and abuse I had to put this memo through to get it down to ten pages makes the writing . . . choppy, you could say. Not the best example of my writing. I’m thinking of sending my earlier ungraded memo. In addition? Instead? Hmmm.

Well, kind of. I has a rough draft, which counts for something. I’d hoped to be finished with it earlier so I could spend most of today editing, but what a silly hope that was.

All the work I’ve done up to this point has moved me from an F to maybe a C. I guess technically it’s still an F, actually, because there are stiff penalties for going over the page limit, and my “ten-page” memo is just shy of twenty.

M minus 11.5 hours and counting . . .

[UPDATE (1:22 AM): Seventeen pages. Down from 6551 words to 5614. Oy.]

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What can I say? Today has been a memo day. I spent most of the afternoon sipping tapioca tea and cranking out page after page of rough draft. I thought I’d get to the end today, but eventually I had to go home and attend to my puppy, and there went all my motivation. Working at home is hard.

Twelve pages so far for a ten-page memo, and I still have a whole issue (of two, but it’s the simpler one) to discuss. Oh boy, editing!

Halfway through NaBloPoMo, woo-ee. Not much to share today—I’ve been hanging out with my boyfriend and my dog in College Station, hacking away at that memo. It’s coming along, slowly and frustratingly. So many cases, argh!

The hardest part is figuring out how to organize it all. The ungraded practice memo we did earlier in the semester was much more straightforward. These are the three elements of the rule. The first element has four factors. And so on. All you had to do was plug through the analysis, and when you were done, a memo had magically appeared in your word processor.

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I don’t read Slashdot, but John does, and today he showed me one of the funniest grammar smackdowns I’ve ever seen. In a thread about New York City and Apple having similar logos and something happening and/or not happening blah di blah, one poster said

actually I hope it goes the over way. Apple needs to be shown that not every apple is their’s.

The two logo’s don’t look anything like each other. NYC’s is missing the giant bite for starters.

And a few comments down someone else replied

Damn, dude. An apostrophe doesn’t mean “Look out, here comes an S!”

Love it. Quick and awesome.

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Tonight I’m blogging from bed. This is apparently what it takes to get an update out of me these days, so you’ll have to deal. Besides, you can’t stop me; I’ve already locked the door. Though I guess if you had the time machine required to stop me publishing this *after* you read it, you could just get here *before* I locked the door. But clearly you didn’t, so nyah.

Sam is fascinated by the moving text. I didn’t think dogs “got” things on screens, but every time the little worm of words starts crawling across the page he perks up his eyebrows and stares at it. Hee hee, and he follows the cursor when I wiggle it around the screen. Hoo boy, I don’t know which of us is more easily amused.

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I’ve just submitted my final paper in Roman Historians. The three assignments together came out to 8309 words, in the end, most of which were written in the last 24 hours, of which I slept almost two. Let it be known that I do not recommend this experience to anyone.

It occurs to me that I am now done with spring semester, as my last final was yesterday. That’s a weird feeling. I’ll have more time to appreciate it in the morning—right now I’m drained, and my achy eyes can barely focus on the screen. I’m going to go email my professor my apologies for my tardiness and then crash. Kerrrrrrrplunk.

Today, writing about Polybius, I have seized an opportunity to casually refer to a certain stage in a government’s evolution as a metastable state.

This is easily the high point of my day. I have written about 2300 words of this assignment so far, and it has taken me five days. I have about 5000 words more to write in the next 25-ish hours. I have a final this afternoon, so even if I don’t sleep, that’s still only 20 hours or so. I wish I would write faster—I can do the math on this one, and it makes me want to punch things.

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P.S. Wouldn’t it be nice if metaphory (second-syllable stress) were a word?

Gritten? Gritted? Grit. This is the South, after all.

I have 1500 more words to write about Polybius, then 2400 more about Sallust and Plutarch. Then I really ought to learn some PDEs before tomorrow’s exam.

Suddenly I feel compelled to organize my kitchen. I can see the mess from here. I would also like a chili cheese coney and many many tater tots and a hot fudge sundae and some chocolate cake and a donut.

I will not get up. Will not will not will not.