The System

Here is my new system. Every day of the week will be assigned to a particular task. On that day of the week I will do no other task, so that when I finish the assigned task I will be done for the day and I can read cheerful books and watch cheerful flims and TV shows without feeling any guilt whatsoever. If I do not do the assigned task on the day allotted to it, the task will not get done at all and I will have to pay the miserable consequences.

Sunday will be my American Literature reading day. I will read my American literature book or poems and prepare a presentation if one has been assigned to me for that week. (This is going to be a miserable day because from here on out there are no good authors for us to read, except Sylvia Plath. And she is only one author, and it is only one week, and the other weeks have things like Beloved and Native Son and Light in August, God help me.)

Monday will be my day for working on papers. Today, for instance, I have begun doing research for my Early Modern Culture paper. You can see already that the system is foolproof and absolutely prevents procrastination. While I type this, a PDF file is downloading that will be extremely useful for this paper. (Okay, the PDF file finished while I was typing the title of the post. But if it were much slower it would still be downloading.)

Tuesday will be my day for working on my dissertation proposal. This means reading lots of books about sodomy and the Victorians. Tuesday will be a lovely day, except for the American literature class that takes place on that day, since as I have noted nothing good will come of American Lit class from now until ever again.

Wednesday will be devoted to Early Modern Culture and Symbolic Imagination. As neither of these tasks can be expected to take a full day or even a half day (I can knock them out in a few hours), I will also permit myself to work on papers or my dissertation proposal on this day. Additionally, if I have an extremely long book to read for my sociology and literature and history class, I may begin to read it on Wednesday. (See below.)

Thursday will be the day to read my book for my sociology and literature and history class. This week I am being tortured with Robinson Crusoe. The only copy the library possesses is 383 pages long, which leads the reader to imagine that it will not be that bad, 383 pages, it’s longish but not unbearable and everything is going to be fine. But see, that’s just a trick to lure you into a false sense of security, and then you open the book and BAM they hit you with the smallest and most depressing typeface ever. A very regular-width pen covers three lines when you lay it down on the book. Three lines! Apart from how long this makes the book that I have to read for Friday, this also means that I will probably be blind by Friday.

Friday, as anyone who has spoken to me on a Friday this term knows, is the day on which I have SIX HOURS of classes. One, two, three, four, five, SIX. That is most of my courseload right there. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were six different classes, or even four different classes; but it is three classes, which means that each class is two hours long. Two hours is much too long for a born and bred Catholic girl to spend in any one place at a time. I can just about manage an hour and a half, but when the classes start to be two whole hours long, my brain goes AWOL. Sometimes (as this past Friday) it invents exciting and useful Systems for Life, but sometimes it just totally craps out and starts making my hands write “my eyes are falling shut” and transliterate poems in the Arabic alphabet in the middle of note-taking sentences. One of the pages from last term has three hymns so transliterated rather than useful notes about Coleridge. Anyway, since I have six miserable hours of wretched classes on Friday (from 10 to 12 and then from 2 to 6), I’ve given myself Friday off. Friday is the day on which I will read books that I feel like reading. I just read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and although the ending was a bit of a let-down, I enjoyed it very much.

Saturday is the day to do my Top Secret Research. If I told you more about this, I’d have to kill you, so we’ll just leave it at that.

(I’m not crazy, I’m methodical.)

Now, back to the Witch of Edmonton, which mainly inoffensive play I will grow to loathe and despise in the weeks to come. Let me say while I am still sane on the subject that I never liked it that much to start with.

THIS IS A GENIUS SYSTEM. You may admire my brilliance at your leisure.