Gloria

           

            On Monday I got up at 4:00, but didn’t return to working on my essay till about 6:10. I guess I hadn't gotten a good night’s sleep though because my brain didn’t feel fresh. A tired brain is okay for correcting spelling and grammar but not for generating ideas. I went back to bed, feeling that I might only need half an hour, but it felt so good I stayed there for another hour. I had a mechanical dream about arranging the paragraphs of my essay but that the paper was about the Madonna song “Borderline”, which I remembered hearing in the supermarket a couple of days before. I woke up feeling energized and in exactly the state I needed to be in to work on my essay. I was thinking that it would be nice if we could just keep several brains or heads recharging on a shelf and just change them whenever they run down. I ploughed through my essay for a few hours and was actually enjoying the writing process. I didn’t know if it was philosophically correct but I felt good about it. I felt sleepy again in the early afternoon and took another siesta. I woke up though after seventeen minutes feeling as if I’d slept for two hours. I got back to it and the time just sped by. My submission deadline was 20:00. At one point I was stuck and just couldn’t figure out what to write, so I got up and tried walking around but I realized that I live in a distracting neighbourhood and looking out the window onto Parkdale doesn’t help one organize one’s thoughts. I went back to the computer and just pushed ahead. I decided that I would have to stop composing at around three hours before the deadline, so I could edit the paper and do the citations. I finished the final paragraph at 17:30 and started editing. I read the essay out loud and whenever I made a correction I started reading the paragraph all over again until I could read it through without finding an error. By this time I only had an hour to go. I worked on it till 19:51 and though the citations were only half done I had to give them up to get ready to upload my paper. I changed the name of the file to “Arguing with the Unreasonable” and went on Blackboard. I uploaded my essay six minutes under the wire.

            I had eggs and toast for dinner with the last beer I’ll be drinking for a while because I’ll soon be beginning my annual fast.

            I watched three episodes of the first season of Dennis the Menace. It was certainly a well cast show but the stories were not very interesting. It seems as if the writers would just get pitched a situation and then all they had to do was write a story around it based on how the distinctive characters would predictably react to it. Gloria Henry, the actress that played Dennis’s mother was pretty hot though.