Hi, my name's Jeremy, and I'm a fucking dumbass

A post from another blog reminded me of the greatness of my all-time favorite movie. For those of you who have not seen it, I highly recommend it. In a nutshell, the film is about a decorated war hero who has a bit of a problem with authority. He finds himself working on a prison chain gang from which he escapes several times. It's got just enough humor in it to make you laugh a bit, and enough disappointment to make you a little sad. But it's all about non-conformity. Of all the movies I've ever seen, perhaps no character is simply as cool as Luke. I don't have many man-crushes, but Paul Newman is the shit. Cool Hand Luke is the guy that guys would like to be.

Unfortunately, this is more the way I'm feeling at the moment, with George Kennedy (aka Dragline) representing the graduate school and the massive workload that I've been fighting all week. As you can tell by the pic, Luke is getting his ass kicked. But even though he goes down about twenty times, he keeps getting back up. I only hope I have that same fortitude.













I received some bad news via email today regarding my submission to the South Central MLA conference. I was denied. It probably wouldn't bother me too much, except that I thought it was a pretty good paper. Anyway, it turns out that they are only putting ONE panel together (I misread it earlier today) and they received over 25 submissions for the panel. I'm sure my standing as a graduate student didn't do me any favors. The panel chair said that they could have put together four or five really good panels, but I guess there just wasn't room. Needless to say, I hope the conference is a failure and that the hotel catches fire. Okay, not really, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little bitter. Fuck it--Life goes on.
Right now, I'm just beginning to work on my research proposal for American Lit. I do have an idea of what I want to do, but I can't say I'm all that enthusiastic about it. I have received a ton of help from my friends and colleagues (thanks for the stuff on the short story/composite novel, A-train). But it is 11:30, and I haven't read or looked up much of anything. Generally I don't wait until the last minute to start when I have research to do beforehand, but I kept finding better things to do than busy myself with this process. On the bright side, I did get a pretty good nap today from about 4-7 this afternoon/evening. So what did I do after that? Well, naturally, I watched the first two episodes of The Sopranos (courtesy of Rick) and the lastest edition of Lost. Which leaves me sitting at the computer after 11:00 with jack-diddley-shit done. So despite the difficulty of the week, I was able to take a break today and relax and enjoy myself a bit. I even took my wife's advice and had lunch today, which is something I'm often not able to make time for. I only wish I could work out my schedule so that I could do it everyday, but what do you do? Life is just too fucking busy, and there's always something else I should be doing.

I will likely be back on later . . . but for now, I've gotta seriously get this shit started.

*************Update*********
It's about 2 am, and I haven't written a single word. Nor have I done any more research for Dickinson tomorrow. I think I may do my paper on Hemingway. I feel pretty good about that. He's a hell of a lot more interesting to me than fucking Gertie. But I'm going to bed. Hopefully I can find time tomorrow afternoon to get this shit done. Until tomorrow, then.