I Pity Da Foo

Last semester was extremely busy for me, much more than I had expected. This semester has been a lot closer to what I was prepared for, though I did manage to fall behind. However, I'm happy to say I've pretty much caught up, and with two weeks to spare! It's been an intense couple of weeks, though.

I had to catch up a lot in my ceramics class. Most of this semester, I've been walking to school, which takes about half an hour. The ceramics building is on the farthest corner of campus, so tack on another ten to fifteen minutes travel time. We were supposed to come in and work on the pottery wheel for three to six hours a week, but most days I was just too exhausted by the end that I didn't have it in me, and it took too much time to go back and forth on the weekends. Finally, I remembered one weekend to repair the flat tire I'd gotten on my bike during finals week (back in December). Suddenly I had time to work on my ceramics projects. I didn't have time to get very good, but I spent a large part of a Saturday catching up. But that was only the beginning.

For the past two weeks, I've been wearing my increasingly splattered ceramics pants and carrying the same shirt in my backpack almost every day. This last Saturday, I was the only one in the lab for several hours. (Building locks at 10 pm, I think, but you can stay if you're already there. I was there until 2:30 or 3 am.) I had already finished my cylinders and bowls (none of which ended up particularly spectacular), so I was working on my final project, which involved one part thrown with the wheel. It was due yesterday (Wednesday), so it was crunch time. I got really close a few times, but the piece broke every single time. It was quite disheartening. I did figure out what I was doing wrong for this piece, and I managed to throw an extra cylinder and get some studying done while I was there, but boy howdy was I there a long time. Then came Sunday. I was still finishing El informe de Brodie, which I not only had to read but write a report on for my Spanish Lit class (the paper that made me skip the Festival of Colors). Writing it in Spanish added somewhat to the time necessary to actually write the paper, though the real problems were that I wasn't sure what to say on it. I'm not amazingly good on going that in depth on a subject, though I'm great at making strong connections between several subjects. Unfortunately, he wanted in-depth analysis on two or three things of my choosing. So I was still reading come Sunday, which meant I'd be pulling an all-nighter. That I was incredibly tired did not help me write any faster. When I get that sleepy, the best I can do is often nothing more than remember that I had a great idea that I wanted to develop into a strong portion of the essay. If the professor reads nothing past the first two and a half pages, maybe skipping from there to the conclusion, I think I have an A. If he reads about the two other subjects that I covered in the other two and a half pages, well... my score will be significantly lower, to say the least.

In summary, Friday and Saturday nights I was up extremely late and Sunday I didn't sleep at all; was working on my paper still when it was time for class, so I turned it in late and just hope I don't lose points for that.

I then had a few hours I could do things, or could have had I not already been so bloody tired. Unfortunately, I also knew that a nap would turn into several hours of sleep and that that would mean missing the quiz in my world religions class. So I had to stay up until at least 4 of the clock for the quiz. I thought at that point I might just go home to take a nap, but since so many people skip out on the second half of class, he postponed the quiz until then, and I just drifted in and out after that. I still had a lot of work to do for my final project for ceramics (having failed to produce anything of value on Saturday), so I took a nap and then went over to the ceramics lab. When I got there, I realized I was far too tired to be creative and it was somewhat crowded. Maybe I'd gotten used to having the building all to myself. At that point I just went home. Now, a wise man might have just gone to sleep at that point. Not this guy, though. I decided I needed a break, so I played video games for a few hours first.

I have a vague recollection of hitting the snooze button on my alarm the next morning and seeing that it was already 9 (meaning I'd been hitting it every ten minutes for about an hour) and thinking I needed to hurry so I could get to campus by 10. I had to read for my writing group and I wanted to work on my ceramics project during the day. My next memory is of waking up and seeing that it was already 1 in the afternoon. Oops. I then went about my usual slept-through-all-my-classes routine, though arguably, anything I did at that point could be termed "usual" since I can't clearly recall any other times I've ever done that. Basically, I just read my group's submissions for the week and then met up with them on campus. Afterwards, I went to the ceramics lab (yes, again) and was there working until maybe 2 am (again). I finally managed, however, to make that piece that kept breaking on Saturday.

Wednesday was the closest thing I've had to a normal day in a long while. Except that I had to finish the project that night, and since it involved a whole lot of intricate carving in the clay, I was there once again until 2:30 in the morning, long after everyone else had left. Seriously, if some little bit of trapped air ends up breaking that thing, I will be so mad. Still, I'm kind of sad to see this class end. I was finally starting to do decently on the wheel, and now I won't have time to actually make anything on it since yesterday was the last wet clay day. It's all glazing from here.

Things should be relatively easy from this point onward. I'll still be undesirably busy with all this silly school stuff, but not to the same degree of intensity. No more working in the ceramics lab past midnight. Heck, I might even get back onto a somewhat normal schedule. Then again, maybe this whole thing is an April Fools' Day gag... like today's snow, which I'm pretty sure is just Mother Nature joking around (she even got me to wipe out taking a turn on my bike this morning).

Looking forward to General Conference this weekend! The end.