P: T-8 Days Until Draft 1 of the Novella Is Due

I've not been exercising for days. My novella, draft 1, is due to Ha Jin a week from tomorrow (50-100 pages). I read and give detailed feedback on 14 other people's short stories a week, while submitting a newly written short story every month for my workshop with Daphne. I've been eating all kinds of starches and drinking coffee-- decaf AND full-caf--just to stay awake. I'm getting pimples around my temples, I'm consuming way too much sodium, all of my lunch (and dinner) money goes to coffee, sandwiches, and wraps from Espresso Royale, and I haven't vacuumed or dusted for weeks (okay, longer than that).

Enter the life of a second-semester MFA grad student.

Today I wrote something ridiculous like 12 pages, which were all kind of nonsensical ramblings, before shooting off to class to lead a discussion for 3 hours to a room full of undergrads that get progressively more bored as each hour ticks by (I swear, these kids start packing up their bags with a half-hour left of class).

My back aches from carrying around my (albeit ultra-portable) laptop, notebooks, papers to grade, stories to write/read, sneakers, gym stuff, lock, tupperwared breakfast (plain yogurt, oatmeal, honey, banana), tupperwared lunch that I will probably ignore (I have finally HAD IT with veggie burgers, rice, and cabbage--my body is staging a rebellion), water bottle, winter gear (earmuffs, gloves, etc) while trudging about in fleece-lined winter boots and down coat. My body also aches from scrunching my shoulders in front of my computer, my wrists ache from typing on a small keyboard, and my eyes hurt from staring at a laptop all day long.

WAH WAH WAH.

I'm also kind of getting off on all of this work, which I suppose is a good thing. Write now I'm in the midst of writing a scene from my Jane Eyre reinterpretation where Jane (the main character, who's an au pair to an academic family living in Crown Heights), her employer Ed Rockport (who will later make a pass at her), and his adopted daughter from China named Devon, all sneak off on a joyride to McDonald's. It's Thanksgiving night, and Ed's wife Beth (a Marxist feminist professor of cultural and media studies at the New School) just cooked an elaborate Sustainable Foods vegan Thanksgiving menu, where everything had the consistency of baby food.
(n.b.: "Mr. Currer Bell" was a pseudonym Charlotte Bronte gave to herself. Note the initials...)

Beth (Ed's wife; Devon's adoptive mom; Jane's employer) even projected a Powerpoint presentation before the meal, to show the path the food traveled (measuring the carbon foot print, etc etc). There is a still shot of the menu that casts an electronic blue glow over the serving platters of mush that constitutes their dinner. She staged the evening to impress the guest of honor--her grad school thesis advisor--an academic hot shot who shoots down the meal and accuses Beth of reverting back to "19th century paradigms of female hysteria." Then he tells Ed to "wipe the dated New Criticism crap from his eyes and join in the post-modernist dialogue."

So: best case scenario, the dialogue is sharp, insightful, academic, and witty; OR ... it sounds stilted and it flops. The scene culminates when Ed's mom--a sassy blue-collar lady from south Brooklyn, who's now in a nursing home--tells the thesis advisor, "You leave my son alone, you motherf'ing c*unt face." And Jane, Ed, and Beth, all drop their respective jaws/forks/knives. And...SCENE.

I'm so exhausted. I'm on my second library of the day (everyday I'm the last one to get kicked out of the theology library, which closes at 9). I need to go to bed.

And....SCENE.