remindmeofthe | (no subject)

I discovered a couple of days ago that there is a Kindle application for the iPod Touch. My iPod is now full of books I am assigned to read this semester. (Which are mostly public domain, so it's full of FREE books.)

This is less "ooh, shiny!" and more practical, because guess who's taking three three hundred level classes this semester? With two of them being English classes?

Yup. I am finally experiencing that reading workload English majors are always bitching about. This weekend, for example, I have four plays and somewhere around a dozen essays to get through. By Tuesday. I am only writing this post instead of reading because I have one play and a couple essays left at this point. Ugh, and some more shit by Yeats that I forgot to include in that dozen (I was including the analysis of the plays, which I don't really read that closely because Cathleen ni Houlihan is not a dense and layered work, thank you very much), but those are short. As are the plays, which I hope is why he assigned so many in one week. The essays for British Literature, though - they're not superlong for the most part, but they are the kind of academic nonsense where the writer appears to believe that "historicize" is a word. IT IS NOT A WORD, PEOPLE. What "historicize" is, is a red flag normal people use to spot academic BS a mile away. If you use it, I automatically do not take you seriously.

But anyway. I've been plowing through them madly in part because I have awesome plans with

sotto_voice tonight, possible birthday lunch plans with my grandmother tomorrow (her birthday was yesterday, and no, I haven't once forgotten it in the last eight years), and I'm doing the bartending post at

milliways_bar tomorrow evening. I can multitask during bartending, of course, but I think it would be rude to Lexie and Grandma to bring my books with me. XD So I've powered through most of it already, but in future will probably not try quite so hard to kill my brain by Sunday.

But just because I'm on top of the weekly reading . . . I have to have The Picture of Dorian Gray read by the beginning of October, Dracula toward the end of the semester, and Jude the Obscure and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or whatever the actual title is somewhere in between. And that's just for British Lit. I haven't even checked yet to refresh my memory as to whether there are any novels assigned for Irish Lit. So I need to be reading along on those when I can, to avoid trying to cram them all in at the last minute. Hence having them on my iPod, because five minutes' random downtime is a couple pages of a novel.

And I haven't even gotten into the chapters needing to be read for World Wars I and II by Wednesday, or the article reviews we're supposed to be writing for Sociology. Which is my one hundred level class.

I am starting to understand the point of multiple vacation periods within a semester. It is so we do not explode.

I tell you what, though, this is forcing me to be more organized and motivated than I've been since my very first semester back in 2006. I have separate binders for each subject again. I'm thinking ahead and setting aside time for schoolwork. I NEVER think ahead. About anything. Ever. But if I don't this semester, I'm dead. And I kinda like it. For all I'm generally a disorganized mess, organization actually appeals very much to me as a person with ADD. It means I know where stuff is and what's happening when and why, and with Attention Deficit Disorder you can never, ever get too much of that. (So why don't I get organized and stay that way? Dude, why do you think it's called a disorder? Hint: Not because it makes things that are good for me easy to do.)

So. I'm gonna go read an essay before work. And, uh, I'll probably be posting a lot about school when I do post, but that's better than not posting at all, right? At least this way you know I'm alive. And, despite the complaining, happy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, god, Jude the Obscure. *facepalm* It killed my soul a little.

I'm already thinking that a reading heavily augmented with Sparknotes is the key. The class is about Oscar Wilde, after all, not Thomas Hardy.

Although Hardy does go into some of the sentiments that you expressed in your last (?) post, viz. 'Really, now? Academia and pretty words? THERE ARE POOR PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY, YOU KNOW.'

Hmm. That does sound encouraging. Maybe Sparknotes will explicitly point those bits out so I can read them properly.