I can’t decide whether or not this is reasonable crankiness. I think it’s unreasonable, because it is not Ben Jonson’s fault, and he probably never intended to inflict his elaborate compliment upon innocent schoolchildren. But my paper is not going very swimmingly. On the contrary, it is going so badly that I am constantly making up new reasons to hold off on writing it. For instance, writing a Very Important post in my blog. And finishing the chapter of my book to see if the married-but-unhappy Catholic girl would succumb to the advances of the non-husband artist bloke. And updating my away message every two minutes, so that the scads of people who were following the progress of my paper with interest would not be in any doubt as to exactly where I had got to:
Paper update: I was trying to use “bounty” as the noun form of “bounteous”, but it just kept on meaning “reward”, so I changed it to “plenty” and did a thesaurus search that brought up (among other things) “abundance”, “copiousness”, and “profusion”, and it seems perfectly okay to take out my original word “bounty” and substitute “copious profusion of abundance”. Don’t you think?
Word count: 1683.
(It looks much more like a copious profusion of abundance of words if I put in a comma, so 1,683.)
Paper update: I just wrote “posterior” for “prosperity”. I may be losing my mind.
Word count: 1,690
I didn’t keep that up for very long because it felt too much like actually doing my paper, so instead I did the following other useful things: thought of songs that I could put on a mix CD in case I decided to make a mix CD for someone I liked; checked the news to see what the scoop was on OJ Simpson and his vile confession–er, I mean book; made a very thorough mental rebuttal to Kieran’s argument that innocent people with nothing to hide need not have any objection to compulsory carrying of ID cards issued by the British government; checked to see whether my music was audible in the hallway (it was); investigated the seating chart of the theatre where Caroline, or Change is playing so I would know what kind of seats Steve and I were going to have; stared at my room hopelessly willing it to get clean without my having to do anything about it; and worried for five minutes that I was becoming a slattern like the Catholic girl in my book (I read the first book in the series, in which the heroine is in a convent school being scrupulous, and then the library hadn’t got the second one so I got the third one and the heroine’s name had changed! and she had become an actress! so I have no idea what happened in the thrilling second installment).
Word count: 2,468.
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This could be my diary entry right now. Except my paper is not on Ben Jonson but on Bresson (whom I mostly adore, but ‘L’argent’ was not a very good film, and that is what I’m writing about). And my word count is…shh…194. And my paper was due at 1330 Wednesday, exactly twelve hours ago, only my professor kindly gave me an extension to midnight, only now it’s past that and I haven’t really accomplished anything. And I slept about three hours last night and tonight’s not looking any better. And I haven’t really watched the scene I’m supposed to be analyzing, because I don’t feel like walking in the cold rainy windy dark to the computer cluster where I can watch it.
‘Moreover, in usurping the societal role of religion, the worship of money divests humanity of its compassion, mercy, forgiveness.’ I think I just wrote that. I don’t know what is going on in my brain, or why I’ve been able to write fewer than three hundred words in the last three days, many of which I’ve deleted.
I also don’t know why I’m posting this as a comment. Your book about the Catholic girl sounds pretty interesting.
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