Paper writing is not my favorite. I had two papers due this week, one for each class. Actually, the one that is due today wasn’t so bad as it was an interpretive paper. This is my interpretation of an interpretive paper (ha!): “Here are my primary sources. Here is what I think they mean. There is no wrong answer, because it’s interpretive. The end.” So I wrote five pages on Confucius as an innovative thinker in about five hours, not counting the time I spent writing my outline and compiling my sources. Finished late last night, I don’t think it’s all that bad, and I do believe I should get bonus points for using “Confucius said…” in the very first sentence. My paper, the five page fortune cookie.

The other paper was…well, it was rough going. Ostensibly I was working on it all weekend, but the weather gave me a serious case of depression and I had real writer’s block as a result, to the point where I was considering dropping my classes because I was convinced I wasn’t going to get the paper done and then I would fail the class and oh my god! The sense of impending doom I have when I’m depressed is unbelievable. The good thing that came out of it was that I wasn’t going to let myself sit on my ass if I wasn’t writing, so I cleaned the apartment. The only two things still left to clean are the microwave and the stovetop, because I got everything else, even the medicine cabinet. One could argue that this was a form of procrastination, and one would be partially right. On the other hand, hey, clean apartment.

I did eventually get a handle on what I was doing, largely because one of my classmates and I compared thoughts on Facebook all weekend. And when we spent Monday night’s class discussing our papers, I started to feel like I might have gotten it right (it was not an interpretive paper, so it’s harder to judge). The depression has passed with a lot of help from the beautiful weather yesterday. The thought of no more paper writing for two weeks is also a wonderful mood-lifter. I’m just not going to think about the first draft I have to crank out after that right now.

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