That's short for "I was up until four in the morning drinking with my friends on the last day of school, and then I had to get up and go to work, and despite fourteen shots of espresso and a Jamba Juice for lunch, I still have a hangover. Make the bad man stop."

Yep, school is over for another semester. Well, I have my last class on Monday, but I am going to be there in the teacher capacity, not the student capacity. My last class as a student was yesterday, my "Three Women Modernists" class. I finished my paper on Elizabeth Bishop and turned it in and that's all she wrote.

Elizabeth Bishop is my hero. She was a raging alcoholic, and kinda fucked up, but she was a genius. I especially love that she refused to be pigeonholed as a "woman" poet; she wouldn't allow her stuff to be published in women-only anthologies. And it wasn't that she was making some sort of raging feminist statement-- she just didn't get why there was a distinction. Over the break, I am going to have to get a copy of her letters and read them all. I love everything she says about everything.

Her methods of working, her theories on writing and life.. they exactly match my own. I find myself reading her and thinking, "Yes!" And she was funny. Here's what she said when an interviewer read her some quotes of hers that he had written down several years before: "They sound like things I might have said, but I don't remember having said some of them. I'm glad you wrote them down. Some of those remarks are actually rather good. Would you mind sending me a copy of them? If some day I run out of things to say, I just may start quoting myself."

Oh, Elizabeth Bishop. I adore her.

The paper I wrote was about one of her notebook "fragment" poems, which almost qualifies as lesbian erotica. This is completely unexpected; Bishop wasn't exactly out about her lesbianism. She once said she believed in "closets, closets and more closets." This poem is quite a find.

In the course of doing research, I got all this helpful information, helping me to prove my theory that Bishop wrote the poem in Seattle. You should have seen it-- two pages of brilliantly cogent reasoning as to why Bishop wrote this poem in Seattle, to her lover Lota de Macedo Soares.

Yeah. Then, the night before the paper was due, I opened a biography that I happened to buy at the last minute, which mentioned this exact fragment and baldly stated that she wrote it in Boston for Alice Methfessel. "Oh yeah, she wrote it here at this time, and it was inspired by this." And then I heard it: the sound of the torpedo, aiming straight for my paper's central hypothesis.

It wasn't so bad. My theory may be wrong, but I back it up, damnit. I back it up with the text, and if you do that, at least you've got a leg to stand on. I mean, the biographer guy didn't really explain how he reached his conclusion. He just sort of stated it. Short of going to Vassar myself and looking at the drafts, all I can go on is the information I have, which is that the poem is undated. My reasoning is still sound, except now there's a paragraph at the end that sort of says, "Or, uh, this guy could be right..."

I am hoping for the best with this paper despite somewhat sloppy research, but what are you gonna do? All the books on Bishop were checked out of UC Berkeley and I did hella research online, as much as I could do in the time allowed. I feel like I could expand this paper into a thesis, but I'd have to read every book on Bishop first, no kidding. It would be quite the project.

I really want an A in this class, though. I'll feel as though I've earned it. That's why I like Professor President so much, because he doesn't just hand out As to any old person. So if I get the A, it's like, an accomplishment. His As are about excellence, not adequacy. (Which reminds me, he said he was giving me an A+ on my Bishop mimesis poem. He went out of his way to compliment me on it. That rules.)

Next semester I have two classes with him, which will be a challenge for sure. One of them is a Shakespeare class, and I've always wanted to take Shakespeare. And he's all British and stuff, and he knows his Shakespeare, so I am psyched. It's probably going to be a great class.

It was so nice to be able to get up from my desk at three in the morning while I was writing my final paper and go make myself a cappuccino. It felt so decadent, somehow. Speaking of which, I named my espresso machine Rupert, after Rupert Giles. You know, cuz of the Taster's Choice commercials? The Espresso Pump?

Yes, I know I have a problem.

While I was in the middle of printing out my final paper, my printer decided that not only did it not want to print my paper, it no longer wanted to print anything, ever.

I tried everything I could think of, up to and including a reinstall of the print driver. But the printer won't print. It sucks up the paper about half an inch, and then the red light goes on. "Ha ha! Nice try! I am not printing any of this crap anymore! Go and find some other machine to do your bidding!"

So yeah. I am not sure what to do now. I guess I'll mess with it some more later, but I'm stumped as to the problem. It's not like I did anything to it. It printed pages one through six without a problem, and then just sort of got sick of the whole "printing stuff" thing and decided to mutiny.

It's fortunate that I've gone into a fallow phase of poetry writing or else this would be really frustrating; I can't handle not having hard copies of my poems. But luckily for me, I don't feel remotely like writing poems at the moment. We have a standoff. Either me or my printer is going to have to give in at some point. But for now, I can hold out.

Last night's drink-fest was in honor of Joey, who featured at the last poetry reading of the semester. She did so well; I think it was the best reading she's ever done.

It was a long night, though; there were three features, and then an open mic. The first guy didn't quite get the "open mic" concept and ended up reading for what felt like ten minutes. It seemed long, anyway. But it was fun, and the whole thing culminated in one guy playing a couple of original songs on a nearby piano.

We then went to the local bar and got collectively hammered. Toker (who is married to a woman I respect a great deal, so don't get any ideas) got drunk off his ass and flirted madly with all of us girls. I particularly liked the bit where he talked about my "gorgeousness" for about fifteen minutes straight. That was nice.

There was some drama as well-- of the usual "girl gets threatened by other girl who is friends with her boyfriend" kind of drama, but in this case, it's all quite complicated. Everyone has an agenda.

I'm half annoyed, half amused by the whole thing. At least I can apply the lessons I learned in the past. After all, this isn't the first time I've played the "femme fatale" in some sordid little drama.

I can't believe that grad school is going by so fast. As it turns out, two years isn't a whole lot of time. It seems like I just got here, but next semester is my last semester of classes. Can you imagine?

Okay, maybe you can. I kinda can't.

"Okay Monique. Okay. It's DOUBLE-you, DOUBLE-you, DOUBLE-you... you know, DOUBLE-you. Like as in WILLIAM. Three DOUBLEyous. Then a PERIOD."