The Susanne

Dead­line for the first draft of my essay was nine minutes ago. I handed in noth­ing like what I hope my fin­ished essay to be a month from now — in fact I have simply not been able to wrap my mind around the ques­tion. Either it must be ridicu­lously simple and only a matter of dis­cuss­ing how the char­ac­ters differ in their ruth­less self-​seeking, or it is as I think: much more com­plex and com­plic­ated. And I still haven’t figured out how to answer it. I have come up with an idea for a bril­liant essay on the dif­fi­culty of the ques­tion, but some­how I doubt that will get me that A…

I always feel strong dis­ap­point­ment in myself at times like this. I feel like a fail­ure, I feel like I have not put enough effort into it (although I have, of course!) I feel like I have no worth while thoughts at all and that I know noth­ing. Yea, I know. Sad. It’ll pass soon enough though. And when it does, hope­fully the veil that I know is hiding the answer I seek will lift and I will be able to finish my task!

In the mean time, I’ve got the layout job for Filo­lo­gen loom­ing. The first course night of the layout class was yes­ter­day and I found it inter­est­ing, if maybe a little dif­fi­cult and not com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing. There were ques­tions which I didn’t get answers to, and lots of stuff that is quite irrel­ev­ant to the type of pub­lic­a­tion we make. I’m going back for round two tomor­row and am excited about it: hope­fully things will fall a little into place and I’ll be able to learn most of what I’ll need so that when Monday rolls around and I have my meet­ing with the editor and the rest of the edit­or­ial staff I won’t be com­pletely clueless.

I must admit I eat quite well even when I’m busy with study­ing. The dis­trac­tion of cook­ing is the most wel­come to me of all dis­trac­tions, and I’m sure many of you can relate to my feel­ings on the sub­ject of dis­trac­tions and pro­cras­tin­a­tion: Yes please, no please, please leave me alone… So I allow myself the luxury of spend­ing an hour or two in the kit­chen cook­ing and eating. Yes­ter­day it was smoked saus­ages and sautéed veget­ables; today it was a lovely grilled tail piece of trout, with green beans and sugar snaps (as you know, my favour­ite combo), mush­rooms and a sweet bal­samic vin­egar glaze. Mmmm!  What I really love about cook­ing when I’m really sup­posed to be study­ing, is that I can ration­al­ise and tell myself that I must eat, I need brain food, I can’t very well starve to death over an essay! Plus the break is very refresh­ing and I always return to my work with renewed energy and much, much happier!

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