I was working on a paper today. I was having the most difficult time with this paper--it's just a five pager, no big deal, but for some reason it's been a huge mental block for me. The paper is a critical essay on Marianne Moore. I was up until three in the morning yesterday, doing research online to try and come up with a topic. I came up totally dry.

I have done every particle of the reading, and I have soaked up every lecture-- my friends think I'm mad as a hatter, but I love this class. It's challenging and demanding-- exactly what I want out of a grad class. Which is part of the problem--I want to impress my professor. Which is why I decided to go to the UC Berkeley library and do some research.

That campus is huge. And I say this as a girl who went to a tiny university and goes to an even tinier graduate school. I wandered around, completely lost, until I found a building with "library" written on it. Each building has its name carved on it in giant letters. LIBRARY. I went in. I went up to Friendly Guy at the desk.

"So, I found this book in your online card catalog... I am not sure if it's here... is there more than one library on this campus?" He smirked. "We have twenty three, actually." "Twenty... THREE?" "Yep. Twenty three." He looked up my book. By some miracle, I had chosen the correct library. (Although I think I walked down the hall and around some corners and ended up in a new library. Does it count as two libraries if it's in the same building?)

I don't mean to channel Threesome here, but this library was an erotic experience. All those books. And... the smell of books. And... books everywhere. All kinds of books. Every possible book. You bookworms know what I'm talking about.

It reminded me of my university library, which was significantly smaller, but which I loved. (The LMU library had a neat setup with a fountain on the ground floor and big plush chairs around the fountain. As long as it wasn't finals week, you could always find a spot around the fountain to sit and study.)

The stacks at this library are on rollers. And they are all pushed together, so if you want to get in between some of the stacks you have to make sure you're not running someone over, then turn these cranks on the side of the stacks and roll them around until you've made an aisle for yourself. It's difficult to explain, but fun for the whole family!

After much wandering around, going back to the circulation desk (two flights up and about nine libraries over, I think) I finally found some books and decided on a topic: hyphenated words in Marianne Moore's poetry. It might not sound exciting, but the research was fun to do. Most of it is my own original thinking. Which I don't usually trust.

No, it's true. I don't usually write papers without some type of critical text backing me up. I don't think I'm a particularly original thinker in that way. I haven't decided if it's insecurity or realism that makes me feel this way. But I came up with my very own theories, and backed them up, and I guess we'll see. I feel good about my paper, and I am really hoping for an A.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Because keep in mind that it's now about 4:00 in the afternoon, I've spent two hours at the library researching and photocopying and my paper is due TOMORROW and I have to get it done. But I figure I have plenty of time. I'll drive somewhere, have some food since I haven't eaten, and finish my paper. So I leave campus and make the long hike back to my car...

...which is driving away from me on the back of a tow truck, revealing a pretty red curb that I had not seen when I parked my car.

I run. I yell. I realize this is doing me no good whatsoever. I watch my car disappear. I cry. I scream, "Why does my life suck so much?!" I get a weird look from a jogger.

So then I pick up my cell phone and call the Sprint people who seem to know who to connect me to regarding this whole car being gone thing. And then they tell me where it is, which is a ways away so of course, I start walking. And I stop at a diner and eat some lunch (a vile lunch, by the way) and write the first draft of my paper,

which RULES so much it gets to be its own paragraph,

and then I decide to walk to the tow truck place. This will come as absolutely no surprise to my sister, but I remember the address wrong and I end up walking about three quarters of a mile in the completely wrong direction and ending up on Telegraph Avenue. Then I realize it's in the other direction, right across from the diner where I just had lunch. Once again, I realize I am an idiot. No wonder I don't trust myself to think independently.

So then I get my car back, and it only costs me about $75 plus the $35 ticket I have to pay, which totally sucks (I just spent over $700 on my car. As if I wasn't broke enough...) but it doesn't suck as bad as I was expecting. And they don't make me prove my current address which I couldn't do since all I have is my old passport, and they give me my car and let me drive home.

Yeah, so, yeah. I must have done something, somewhere, to the car gods to warrant this punishment.

Irony #1. I took my car into Berkeley because I was too impatient (and lazy) to take BART. "Oh, it will take too long." And then I wound up spending an hour walking in the wrong direction before I got my car back. That'll teach me. (By which I mean, of course, it won't teach me shit.)

Irony #2. I found out that I read the syllabus wrong. I thought we had to have two sources for our essay, but as it turns out, that's only for our term paper, at the end of the semester. So really, I didn't need to go to Berkeley at all.

At least I got to go to the sexy library. And that's certainly something.

"I tell you all secrets, I tell you the stuff
That the rest of them never will guess
You know about [censored] and [mmph mmph mmpph mpph]
And all about lesbian sex."