Things Continually Turn Out Better Than I Expect Them To

I just had a meeting about my Chaucer paper where I received my exploratory narrative. Y'know, the one I was worried about and caused a small rant? Apparently it was really good. So I walk back asking myself, seriously, how do I do it? How do I continually pull this stuff off when I feel like it's not going that well at all? I mean, last week it was the same thing with my Flaubert paper.

Although, I guess it's all tied into what both Neesha and Kasey have said about me needing to be a little bit more confident with my writing. Even if I know I'm quite capable.

I just need to stop thinking and worrying about things so much.

And stop trying to use "apparently" in every sentence of this post. Seriously. I had to remove at least two up there.

Meanwhile, there's a test in Chaucer today. And then the graduation dinner for English majors tonight.

Kay thinks it's funny that I can start sentences with, "The other day in Chaucer it was so funny when..."

Life & Literature

I really enjoyed the graduation dinner, but now I'm kind of depressed. You spend four years with a group of amazing people and then you move on. And, yes, I know that it's not as cut and dry as that, but I'm never going to sit in one of Tung's classes and listen to him read "The Waste Land" as Yoda or do his impression of Forrest Gump. And I'm never going listen to Bean get excited about grammar and bounce around the front of the room. Or have Weber discuss issues of translation or listen to Bullon-Frenandez read Chaucer with such joy. And I'll never see McDowell in his Donne and Shakespeare society/conference shirts or hear Koppelman sing bad poetry about her cat.

And that's what I'm going to miss. More than the students, who I don't feel odd keeping in contact with, I'm going to miss the faculty. I'm going to miss the actual classes and discussions and readings.

I don't know how not to be a student.

And I guess that's the thing about literature. (Well, and life.) You don't stop learning because you stop taking classes. You learn the things you need to continue learning and then you go out into the world and you read and interpret and write about everything.

After the dinner I left and then went back because I had to tell Dr. Koppelman just how much I appreciated her class last quarter. All of my college life, and before that, I've been interested in Regency and Victorian literature. Eighteenth century stuff. And while I'd had Survey of British Literature I with Dr. Bullon as a freshman, there's never enough time in those survey courses to really get a feel for anything. And then I took Masculinity in the Middle Ages and suddenly this whole world of medieval literature is opening up to me and it's exciting and I love it. That never really would have happened if it hadn't been for her class. So I had to tell her that.

I mentioned to Dr. Bullon earlier this quarter that I was sad that I was only now discovering this love for Chaucer when I'm so close to graduating. She comforted me with the fact that they've really only offered two classes that have focused on him quite so much and I've had both of them, so I shouldn't be too disappointed by the timing of this discovery.

In the end, the nice thing is that I can actually say that I have no regrets. I've loved my professors (even the ones that drove me crazy in class with their haphazard teaching methods) and my classes and my fellow classmates (except for a couple who were just odd, though they make for excellent caricature stories). I just don't want it to be over.