march 22, 2000.

Yesterday was the craziest of days. I'd finally run out of time to produce a history essay. All my weekends were used up, and the due date was last Wednesday. I thought I had one more ace up my sleeve, though. In January, when my first gender-in-history essay was due, I sat at my desk and made prose. Nobody every figured out that I was writing a school report, and I was able to grab close to 3 hours of quiet composition.

Well. I'm still learning this job, and the former occupant of this occupation is in another department now...all of which means that people kept coming up to me with pieces of paper, saying nonsensical things and expecting me to do something. Whenever I could get help, I had to take it right then, and never mind my essay schedule. Not only did I not get a covert hour or two to write, but I also managed to cut my lunch short and miss both coffee breaks. My one period of productivity resulted in 240 beautiful words of introduction...and then the file became corrupted and unreadable. After an agonized time spent trying to rescue my elegant paragraph, I gave up & started again. When I came home, that file was corrupted as well.

Thus in a 12 hour period, I began the same essay 3 times. The only thing I was able to recover from any version was the following sentence:

"Percy Shelley once made a statement that has become famous to the point of cliché, expressing his conviction that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'"

My last chance evaporated, I went to last night's gender class with a heavy heart. I was able to use one of the university computer lab machine to nail down the first 800 words, but since the damned thing had no text program and wouldn't accept a disk anyway, I had to write it in Hotmail and retrieve it as an email draft. At home I was blessed by a benevolent fugue state: I remained undistracted by temperature, hunger, thirst and boredom until my essay was completed, footnoted and printed. It was a very lucky break: usually I can't manage late nights to save my life. But last night I didn't look at the clock until I went to bed.

So today I may be coasting on 5 1/2 hours sleep and I may be continually confused as to my role here in the office, but I'm still pretty happy. The idea that this was my last essay for the University of Toronto gave me a funny turn; but the idea that it's my last piece of homework for 5 1/2 months makes me ecstatic. I've actually shaken off a great deal of the paralyzing depression of recent weeks that made me so fun to be around. The high watermark of my improved spirits is that yesterday, for the first time in weeks, I was actually looking forward to getting married. Things are always darkest before the dawn, they say. For me, my dark time will always begin in the gloom of February and end with the completion of my last essay.

I'm killing time right now, partially to compensate for yesterday's death march and partially because there's nothing particularly urgent sitting on my desk right now. As one of the characters in Dilbert would say, I'm taking a brief in-cubical sabbatical. Fun stuff.

As part of this sabbatical, I'm catching up with my correspondence. For a girl who used to pride herself on waiting 3 hours to check her email, I've certainly come a long way. Now I can barely remember to check my email three times a week. Of course, when I was at my peak, I was looking for emails from Paris. Nowadays he never writes me at all. That's not why I've stopped checking so frequently; it's just something to think about.

Yeah. So anyway, I'm checking my email and it occurs to me that I should let Q know that I've broken the unspoken rule of his party Project Mayhem by misplacing my complimentary, hey-it's-family ticket. (It's not really my fault...they're very small, very slippery tickets.) As I was doing that, it suddenly struck me how weird my life is. When I started reading Stacy's journal(s) and becoming acquainted with the people in her orbit through her online writings, it never occurred to me that I would in effect be marrying into them. The idea that I first became (briefly) acquainted with my future sister-and-brother-in-law through a stranger's online diary is incredible and a little scary. Maybe it's the 5 1/2 hours sleep talking, but I'm suddenly finding my own life strange and alarming.

Yeah. It must be the sleep dep. These things happen to everyone, right?

a paraphrased conversation of 2 weeks ago, between myself and Stacy

"Who's coming to the party?"
"I'm going to invite your future in-laws. (pause) That's weeeeeird. You actually like your boyfriend's family."
"Yeah, they're great. I like his aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, too."
"That's just weird. It's like you're actually marrying into somebody's family. So old-fashioned."
"Sorry...?"

I was talking to my mom last night about this. She said that she'd always wanted a kindly father-in-law who would to some extent ameliorate the effect of her own rather strange dad. I'm not about to adopt the Boy's father - he's a nice enough guy, just a little strange. But I do like his grandfather a great deal. I've had pretty limited contact with grandfather-type people so far - my mother's father was, as I've mentioned, a strange guy who I saw maybe once or twice a year, and my father's father died long before I was born. My grandmother's second husband has been a suitable grandfather throughout the years, but although as a child I thought he was great, there was always something unsettling about the dynamic between him and my mother. it never felt entirely right...somehow I never forgot that he wasn't my "real" grandfather.

I guess I feel like the Boy's family represents something of a new chance - a way to improve on the family I was dealt by the nature/nurture tug-o-war. A buried impulse, but present all the same.