Who Woke Up the Long Dormant Overachiever?
On Friday we have our first test in my Illustrator class. When I originally talked about taking the class, I asked Bob if I could take it pass/no pass. Maybe I’m high here but I seem to remember when I went to college, this was a choice you could make by checking a box on a form and getting your instructor to sign off on it. You could only use it in certain circumstances, such as when I realized I wasn’t going to make it as an engineering major and was never going to pass second quarter calculus. I converted my grading option to P/NP and my failure to understand whatever second quarter calculus is all about, did not tank my GPA.

This seemed the perfect option for the Illustrator class because I want to learn Illustrator and I’m confident I can pass the class by showing up and doing the homework. I don’t want to worry about it any more than that.

I guess there’s a failure to communicate or maybe I’m triggering Bob’s harried department-head personality but whenever I bring this up he gets this sort of vague look on his face and waves his arms around and makes it sound harder than a box on a form.

So now I’m taking this class for a grade and I have a test and I really don’t want to study for it. I keep saying, “I don’t care what kind of grade I get but I don’t want to do badly,” which sounds suspiciously like I care. And I do. But I don’t want to study. On the plus side, I was so busy procrastinating on studying that I got epic amounts of yardwork done this weekend.

Meanwhile, as you may already know, next month is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). You write a 50,000 word novel during the month. Of course I wouldn’t do that and decided to sign up for the much less punishing National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) where you write a post a day and no cheating with the dates. I figured I could do this and already have a list of about 12 post ideas to reach for when I get stuck.

I’ve been talking about writing another novel but haven’t gotten too far. I have a vague idea who and where and peripheral stuff but not a clear idea of what is going to be the thing that hangs the whole masterpiece together. When I wrote Little Friday before I wrote the first word I knew exactly where I was going to start and where was going to end up so at least I had a direction when I started to type.

Monday night as I drove home thinking about how badly I didn’t want to study for my test, I got the what. The whole thing started to flood my head. I came home and told Bob I couldn’t eat dinner right then because I had to scratch it all out while it was fresh in my mind.

So now I’m thinking, maybe I should just do this NaNoWriMo (the novel one) and go for it. It’s about 1600 words a day. I probably can’t do that every weekday, but if I wrote 1000 on weekdays and made the rest up on weekends … . But I already signed up for NaBloPoMo (the blog one) and I’m still taking the Illustrator class and the final project and another test are happening the first week of December. Thank God I didn’t sign up for that knitting class.

It’s not like they’re going to take my birthday away if I fail at any of the above. Or to stop me from writing my novel during the month of December, instead. But my inner schoolgirl wants to follow the rules and wants to do good.

I’m gonna think about it.