Caution! Venting Zone Ahead!

Sometimes, even people who are detail oriented miss the details.

My thesis is due on Monday. As in, final draft. As in, convert it to a pdf and submit it electronically. As in, my whole committee, the chair of the English department, the Dean of the college of arts and sciences, and the dean of the graduate school have to sign off on it.

I didn't want to have to worry about it over the weekend, so I set myself a goal to finish it today.

I called the Dean's office to make sure he would be in his office today. I dropped the form off at 12. It took until 3 for him to sign it. No big deal, right? I was busy trying to convince Microsoft Word that it is not smarter than I am. Changing page numbers, margins, doing one final proofread.

At 3, the Dean's office calls to say my form is ready. Around that same time, I successfully complete the pdf conversion. Pick up the form, drive to the Polsky building (it's cold, I'm not walking 30 minutes round trip just to drop off some papers). It's now 3:30. I'm in a great mood because I think my thesis will be 100% finished in just a few minutes.

But no, that's just not how life works. I wait for fifteen minutes in the grad school office to hand someone my forms. She takes one look at my signature page and says, "Your margins are wrong. You're going to need a new form."

Great. Just flippin' great. Have I mentioned that I am in a consortial program? That one of my committee members lives in Youngstown and the other lives in Salem (which may as well be Pennsyl-freaking-vania)? Both of these places are at least an hour from Akron. And 45 minutes from each other. I'm instantly thinking, great, I'm going to have to drive around for 3 hours on Monday morning getting these signatures so I don't miss the deadline. I tell the girl with the ruler in her hand that I have a major problem with said ruler. She looks at me like I killed her puppy.

I apologize, say I didn't mean to be rude, it's just, well, I can't easily get these signatures again. No worries, the Monday deadline is just a submission deadline. You don't really have to have everything perfect until the day before commencement. Everyone has to make changes after they turn everything in the first time.

Okay, fine. But if everyone has to make changes, why on Earth do I have to convert it to a pdf first? And if the form has to be so damn perfect, then why don't they generate one for us to use? Seems to me, that would make everyone's lives a whole lot easier. But I'm just a poet, what do I know?

You know what else sucks? Not drinking soda for a whole week. Coffee is not the same. I miss my carbonated sugar.

Oh, yeah, and then I get home and there are 2 rejections in the mailbox. Hello salt, meet wound.

Aggravated in Akron

When I sign up for a class called Contemporary American Women Poets, I want to read and talk about poetry. Not feminist criticism. Just like when I sign up for a poetry workshop, I don't want to spend 15 weeks writing ekphrastic poems. I'm starting to think that all profs should provide their syllabus for prospective students when it is time to register for classes because I am tired of getting schnookered into classes that I'm not interested in.

So far, in this CAWP class, we've read Stein, HD, Marianne Moore, Rukeyser, and Bishop. But, during our class meetings, we've discussed Saussere, Derrida, Gilbert & Gubar, Cixous, Freud, Lacan, etc. I'm okay with using theory to supplement my reading, but it seems the other way around. Let's just talk about some poems, please!

Meanwhile, I am not keeping up with my goal to write one new poem and revise one old poem every week. That seemed do-able at the beginning of the semester, but already I'm swamped. It's the middle of week 4. There's only 11 left. Not enough time!! Well, at least that means there's only 11 weeks left until Ohio is no longer a frozen tundra. I don't know why they call this spring semester, anyway.

I'm sorry, faithful readers (all four of you), for being so whiny. I'll try to post a happy blog tomorrow.