So, you know how I said I didn't think it was a good idea to change the focus of my non-fiction essay the day before it's due?

Well.

I did. I sat in the coffee shop across the street from campus for over two hours, just writing. I knew when I walked in the door that I wasn't happy with my rough draft, and I knew I had to change it. Ten pages later, it still needs some polishing, but I'm much more satisfied with the general product. Let's hope my professor thinks the same.

Speaking of writing - my English lit professor just sent out an email announcing the topics for our next paper. Our last paper was due before spring break, and with this essay due tomorrow and another course paper for my World lit class due on Friday, I'm definitely getting burnt out with writing and staring at computer screens. I guess that's what I signed up for when I chose an English major, but in my first year and a half of college I never wrote more than one paper per semester.

I need another spring break. But someone said the other day that there's only seven weeks left in the term (which is crazy), so maybe there's hope.

I feel really lame for not settling in to do homework until now. Once the sun goes down, I have less motivation to do work, and I the pressure to get it done within a reasonable amount of time is higher. But today is Monday, and on Mondays, I have class from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM. Not back-to-back, but four classes with less than an hour break between any of them. It's exhausting, so by the time I get home a little after 6:00, I can't bring myself to do homework until I crash for a while.

Today, I turned in the rough draft of my creative non-fiction essay for my creative writing class. I really didn't feel very confident about it. I started out with one idea, and by the time I finished the draft last night I had totally changed directions. In hindsight, I'm not sure if it was the best idea. But the final draft is due Wednesday, and I don't have the energy to start from scratch, or to completely re-do the work I've done so far; also, I think it's just good practice to get in the habit of following through with my writing projects, even if I don't end up liking them very much.

I was up until 2:00 this morning finishing it. I called Jordan right before I went to sleep, because he was still up writing a paper, too.

"Jordan," I said, "I'm already getting burnt out from writing. I feel like this shouldn't be this hard, and it makes me feel like a bad writer."

"That's just because you don't have a lot of practice at it yet." Jordan often jokes that I lack an "inner logician", that voice inside my head that supplies me with logic and common sense. So, I've decided that Jordan is my logician. And I knew he was right. But I jokingly replied,

"I give up. I'm going to switch my major to art." Of course, I'm already so behind on my major as it is that switching is not an option. I'm going to be in school forever!

Man. Writing is hard.

For the past few hours I've been working on a creative non-fiction essay for my creative writing class. It needs to be seven to ten pages long, a rough draft is due Monday, and the final draft is due Wednesday.

Currently, I'm writing about my experiences in theatre, and what I've come to see as my coming of age as an actor in last semester's "The Dining Room." I hope that doesn't sound too melodramatic, but I really feel like last semester was extremely formative for me, and "The Dining Room" was definitely a part of that. I've been wanting to write about it more extensively; I wrote a reflection about the play last semester, which I turned into my first podcast, and I've been wanting to revisit the subject.

I've got four pages written, but I still don't feel like I've really started telling the story I want to tell.

I'm learning this semester that I don't have the best time management skills. It's strange; in a way, I almost don't feel like I'm really in school. I know it has to do with living at home and going to school in state, versus than going to Biola and living at school.

When I was at Biola, my life felt very divided. When I was at school, I was all there - eating in my school cafeteria, studying in my school library, hanging out with my school friends, sleeping in my school bed at night. Most of my time and energy was devoted to the Biola world, and in some ways, New Mexico felt very far away.

And then I would come home.

Home was the place I'd be for holidays, home meant seeing family and friends I hadn't seen (and maybe even hadn't talked to) for months. Home meant big meals, rushing around trying to make time for everyone, sleeping in a bed in a room that was "mine", but that had remained frozen exactly as I had left it the last time I was there. I'd more or less live out of a suitcase, not even entirely unpacking over the long Christmas break (although that was usually due more to my laziness than anything else). Home also meant isolated hours of stressful studying, as I had to keep up with my Torrey reading even on breaks. My first Thanksgiving home I spent several hours in my room, reading and taking notes on Leviticus and Deuteronomy, only able to freely relax after I had checked everything off my list: themes, questions and answers, outline.

So even on vacations, a good portion of my mental energy was dedicated to my Biola life.

But now, things are different. Home is not an island escape in the sea of homework and commitments and paper deadlines. It's still a place I can relax and see my family, but I no longer feel justified to spend the majority of my time at home doing so, because every morning I wake up and I have to go back to school. I still have to confine myself to my room and tell my sister that I can't watch TV with her, because if I don't, then I'll fall behind.

In a way, now that I'm living at home, I almost feel worse about not spending time with my family than I did when I was at Biola. Since I'm living in the same city as most of them, I feel more guilty about not seeing them, whereas at Biola, email, phone calls and Skype were the best I could offer.

Which brings me back to my first thought. Now that my school world and my home world have collided, I need to step it up on the time management front. Granted, I had a lot to juggle at Biola: a demanding honors curriculum, all my other classes and homework, friends, church, a long-distance relationship, and, last semester, a play with three hour rehearsals (at least) four nights a week (at least). This semester, I've got school, church, spending time with family, being with Jordan and wedding planning and everything that comes with that (pre-marital counseling, meetings with vendors, entire afternoons devoted to addressing envelopes).

Maybe what I'm actually learning here is that no matter what's going on in my life or where I am, things are always going to be very, very busy. Freshman year I had professors tell me more than once that as you grow older, you don't have more time. You have less. One of my Torrey professors put it this way: you will never have more disposable time than you do as a college student. Hard to believe sometimes, isn't it? I mean, college demands a lot! But I'm beginning to understand what they were getting at. Sure, college is busy, but when you get into marriage, and jobs, and added family responsibilities, not to mention having a family of your own someday, college starts to seem more and more manageable.

Nonetheless, I'm also learning that if I want to get sufficient sleep, and if I want to start being punctual instead of chronically late, I can't afford to come home, spend an hour watching television, and then spend another hour fiddling around on Facebook. I never watched TV at Biola, mostly because I didn't have one, and trying to watch something on a dorm TV just wasn't convenient.

Time management is an invaluable skill, and one that you learn as you go, it seems. It's just another part of growing up and becoming a responsible adult. I'm responsible for my work, I'm responsible for my time, and that includes time wasted.

Deathly Hallows trailer has been leaked!

http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=16023

I am very, very excited for these movies! I really need to reread the book, though. All I can remember is that they spend a long time camping out in the woods, a lot of people die, and I think I pretty much remember the last two or three chapters (I'll refrain from details in case anyone - inconceivable as it may be - hasn't yet read the last book).

Unrelated note: I've started a third blog, about the wedding/marriage-planning process. Check it out, I need some followers!

(Added 24 March) - I guess that Deathly Hallows trailer has been available for a long time. I didn't take the time to read what that website has to say or to check dates, but it seems that the trailer is included when you buy the Half-Blood Prince DVD. Oh well. I only saw it for the first time a couple of days ago. And it gives me goosebumps.

Note to self: tofu, fried in olive oil with assorted spices, salt, and bread crumbs = pretty good. The bread crumbs are a little, well, crumby, but the extra flavor compensates for the extra mess.

I'm taking a study break from working on my first real paper of the semester, an English lit essay about marriage in Jane Austen's "Emma". It's only five to seven pages, and I need to use about three external sources, so my paper seems to be filling up rather nicely. I don't have a completed rough draft yet, though, and I need time to edit tonight before turning it in tomorrow. But I have hopes that it will all come together in the end.

For dinner I am enjoying the tofu (described above), as well as my equally doctored-up butternut squash soup from Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's has great food, but this soup is a little bland. I remedied it by chopping up two red-skin potatoes, part of an onion that Hannah didn't use for her guacamole the other day, sweet corn and garbanzo beans. It's so good now, I actually crave it throughout the day.

Add some flatbread with hummus and a cool glass of OJ, and this is a meal that can see me through the end of this paper.

As if Mondays aren't bad enough already, my Mondays are always the longest, most tiring days of my week. I have four classes on Mondays - and in earlier semesters I've never had more than two classes in one day. World Lit, break. English lit, break. Creative Writing, break. Honors class. And today, I and another girl in my honors class are co-leading, which I'm a little nervous about but not nervous enough to really do anything else beforehand (although I may look over the readings again and jot down a few back-up discussion questions, just in case). My partner has never seemed too worried about the whole thing, so I'm following her lead.

I feel like I'm just doing work all day on Mondays. Most of the time I use my breaks in between classes to catch up on some reading I didn't finish, or edit whatever is due in Creative Writing that day. It takes about ten minutes to get from class to class because the campus is so huge, so a big chunk of my time is spent just commuting. At the end of the day, I'm mentally and physically exhausted.

On a sort-of related note, I'm going to post one of the exercises I did for Creative Writing today. We're focusing on setting, so the instructions for this particular exercise were to take a typical scene from your childhood and write about it using the long-shot, middle-shot, close-up method. If you're unfamiliar, it's basically a technique in which you begin describing your scene in a broad sense ("it was summer of 1995"), zoom in a little to the middle shot range ("the street in front of our midwestern house was deserted as usual") and then end on a tightly focused image ("I squirmed in my chair at the lemonade stand, shifting my legs every few minutes to unstick them from the hot plastic"). I don't know if those are the best examples (since I just made them up on the spot), but hopefully you get the picture.

Here's my piece. Honestly, it's probably my favorite bit of writing that I've done for this class so far.

The campus baked in the mid-afternoon sun, empty playground equipment and the metal sheeting of low-cost portables wobbling in the heat waves. There’s no bell, just a clock in every room watched by the teachers, and watched more closely by the students. At three o’clock it’s finally time, and we dart out of the low-ceilined classrooms, sneakers shuffling over the blue carpet and out onto the asphalt and dirt. Some parents are already idling in the pick-up line, and their corresponding students separate from the sticky herd, beckoned by air-conditioned vehicles. The rest of us make our way around to the backside of one of the buildings near the parking lot, a designated space of ground separated from the cars by a chain-link fence. I drop my purple backpack in the shade of the building, myself following. I wait, playing tic-tac-toe against no one, digging moats and constructing cities for ants until my mother’s minivan joins the cue of cars, kicking up dust, gravel crunching beneath the tires.