Wake me when it's over*

You know it's bad when a friend calls and asks, "How's life? What have you been up to?" and you kind of half mutter/grumble/murmur, "Studying," unable to think of what else might be going on in a life.

She had to prompt me: husband, cats, garden, knitting, cooking, visit from the bro-in-law, flu shots, cats clawing around in the box spring of the bed... oh yeah. That "life" stuff. I've actually been doing small amounts of it, here and there. You know you're stressed when you need prompting. Somewhere on Sunday evening, buried under a mass of notes and a seemingly-endless project of sorting them, I kind of forgot about that other stuff. I just keep saying, "it will all be over soon... Friday, my exam will be over and I will be done!"

After Friday, I might begin to remember how to answer such questions as "What's up?" Currently, I'm suffering from what now seems like a bit of dementia: "I'd really like to deal with this historiographic category because it's been important in shaping my understandings of blah blah." Um, yeah. What was I thinking?! Said category can only be divided from numerous close cousins by a very fuzzy piece of mohair... I mean, fuzzy line. Why did I want to answer this particular question, again? How on earth am I going to talk about it clearly under pressure? Why did I think everything seemed clearer when my advisor said thus and such, and now, for the life of me, I can't organize an outline?

Regularly scheduled knitting and other fun content will return in a few days, including a posted copy of the speech from Thursday (which went well - thanks for your comments!) Until then, I just need to remember that I only need to answer the question (well, 3 of 6), not to reinvent the discipline.

*I meant for this to be a "I'm not posting much and this is why" but it came out a bit more, um, negative than I might have intended...