The good news: I finished that paper and also, did pretty well during the presentation. We had ten minutes to present, which meant that the early people took upwards of 45 minutes (I am not making that up) for their own presentations, and then when I got up there, only half of the class had gone and there was only fifteen minutes left. So I micro-machined that bitch, skipped over almost everything I had prepared and did a very high level presentation and made people laugh (sometimes, it was even on purpose) and breezed through my seven pages of single-spaced notes in exactly seven minutes, complete with time to answer two questions/clarifications, both of which, I explained, were covered in my notes, but I had skipped over them for the sake of the remaining presenters (insert glare at 45 Minute Presenter here). Also, I had brought them gigantic overly-frosted cupcakes and found psychedelic frosted cookies in the shapes of butterflies, which I called slake moths in homage to one of the books we read in class. Yes, this is rampant bribery, but really, the final class needs to have some level of celebration. And when pressed, I explained that my personal utopia involved gigantic cupcakes. Despite my speed presentation, the final class lasted almost five hours and was, really, sort of unbelievable. As it turned out, I grossly overestimated the level at which the other papers were written. I had so many references that my works cited page was an embarrassing three pages long, while some of the others basically did book reports. I don’t know what to make of that, but hopefully I don’t sound completely like an idiot and don’t bomb too abysmally.
Before class, I met with Christie Clancy, who is like a breath of fresh air. I found out that if I had kept the other lit class, the non-Science Fiction class, I would have been able to make faces with her when people said something ridiculous. In my class, they were fixated on Deridas, in hers, it was all Foucalt. Apparently, this fish out of water thing in these lit classes is something that relates more to the Creative Writing program folks than it is me personally. Either way, I signed up for three different classes next semester, on the principle that I will drop two of them, but she’s in the one that looks most interesting, so I’ll probably end up there. We have a pact.
Also, we both almost got caught snarking about one of our fellow creative writers, and now we are bound by the shared guilt. We still don’t know if he heard us. Awkward.
She’s also inspired me to submit more. We talked about submissions and I admitted that I am weirdly adverse to submitting and only submitted to one thing last year. “One thing that… got published, right?That you were invited to read in NYC?” Um, well, if you put it that way, yeah, I’m really stupid. I have made a commitment to submit at least two things this summer.
Two things! Baby steps.