Three down, two to go

It's been a long two weeks.  I hope Alec Baldwin was enough to tide everyone (all seven of you) over.  It still cracks me up every single time.

Today was the official end of my third semester as a graduate student.  Two more to go before I return to the Real World after what will then be a five year absence. 

Wow.  I have to let that sink in for a second.

This was a strange semester.  First, because of scheduling conflicts (the university's, not mine) I only took two classes, as opposed to three in each of my prior semesters.  Despite this, I felt much busier this semester than I ever did in times before.  I'm not really sure why.  I do know that my nonfiction workshop (my concentration) had more assignments than any other I've taken, and the literature class (on film, thank goodness) kept my interest, so I was always up for some work.

No matter how well I think I plan, the last few weeks of every semester always kick me in the back side.  First was a fifteen page paper on Eastwood's Unforgiven that I turned into eighteen pages. I had a lot of things to say.  Three days later I had a "profile" assignment due in nonfiction, one that I did not particularly enjoy and resulted in me spending more time on it than I anticipated because I thought it was crap.  I hate turning in crap.  It was received better than I expected, but I'm still not happy with it.  After that, I had to prepare for a final oral assignment on American Beauty. 

Right now, one of my ideas of hell is a double feature of Unforgiven and American Beauty.  Don't get me wrong, I love both movies, but I've seen enough of both to last until 2010.

Then on the 12th I had the Democracy Burlesque show (they might want to think about updating their website. I'm just saying)-more on this later.  After that, my final portfolio was due for nonfiction . . . blah blah blah.  Is this even interesting?

I did have a reading Friday downtown, and I nailed it.  Two "public" appearances in four days.  Obviously I am still asleep.

I'm looking forward to a little down time, but in all honesty I have a ton of stuff to do.  I have a pile of reading material in my basement that has to be dealt with before it spontaneously-combusts (which is what my wife will swear happened as she holds the smoldering match in her hand, and I can't say that I will blame her) and I have to start organizing my thesis since this upcoming semester is when I start turning in portions of it for review.  I have a lot of material written so I am not worried about content, but I am concerned about style.  Whatever.  It is going to keep me plenty busy.  The start of the next semester is five weeks away.

I need to do better at keeping this up to date as well.  I always write better in the other parts of my life when I visit here and update often.

Back to the twelfth: it was fun, interesting to see people performing something you wrote, knowing what words are going to come next (and cringing when they are messed up) and gauging reaction to what you thought was going to happen.  There were some lines that I thought were hysterical that got nothing, and parts that I thought were just filler that got a lot of laughs.  I got great support from my family, my brother, sister-in-law, mother and wife were all able to attend.

And, as we will see, my brother is quite talented with the video camera.  Here it is, in all it's glory: "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year."

(It does have some salty language, if that stuff offends you.  Not a lot, but fair warning.)