It is now seven o’clock on Wednesday morning, meaning that in half an hour I will have been up for exactly twenty-four hours. This is the first time I’ve pulled an all-nighter since coming to England, and I must say it’s refreshing to know that just because I’m living in a new place with a new, presumably more rigorous, set of academic standards doesn’t mean that I’ve learned new time management skills. I pulled my first all-nighter in seventh grade (without the aid of coffee, so it was doubly impressive) to complete the infamous USA project for Mrs. Mason’s Geography class. I’m still proud of the fact that I got a 110 out of 100 on that project, despite the essay that I wrote at five in the morning on To Have and Have Not where I repeatedly referred to Ernest Hemingway as Mark Twain.

My last twenty-four hours have been consumed by the following tasks: Getting my room ready for room inspections, scraping a presentation together for my Shakespeare seminar on Coriolanus and John Dollimore’s Marxist interpretation of the work, going to class, going grocery shopping to replenish my oh so empty larder, and polishing the same three papers that have been haunting me since last week. If it was only two papers I might have gotten to sleep around four or so, but that last damn paper on deception in Defoe killed me. This is the problem with having all three papers due at the same time. By the time you get to the third one you can barely see straight, let alone say anything perceptive about narrative devices.

Fortunately, because the assignments are assigned by word count I have to take an electronic word count once I’ve finished writing. I’m usually twelve to seventeen words over the limit, which forces me to re-read each essay very carefully in order to decide which twelve to seventeen words are superfluous. The problem is that if I find one superfluous seventeen word sentence in the first paragraph, then I have very little motivation to keep staring at the screen.

I’m happy to report that I passed room inspection (although, I must say it weirds me out to have room inspections in College, it makes me feel like I’m at camp or boarding school). I don’t think the inspections carry much water, though, because we’ve failed three kitchen inspections over the past three days and they haven’t done anything about it. In theory they call a cleaning service if you fail repeatedly and then make the residents of the flat pay for the service, but my flatmates told me that they failed every inspection since the beginning of the year and nothing’s happened. I know that they’re exaggerating, though, because I can remember two kitchen inspections in recent memory where we got a solid “Needs Improvement” instead of a straight fail.

My presentation on Coriolanus was a little more hairy. I left getting the presentation together until the last minute because I spent most of yesterday reading the play, and then this morning when I thought I would have time to prepare I had to clean. I scraped together a few presentation notes, though, and had just enough time to run to the library to print them out before I had to run across the bridge for class. When I got to the computer lab, though, the printer was out of paper and I didn’t have time to stay until it was replaced. So I ended up sprinting to class without my notes and gave the presentation extempore, for it was nothing but roaring. Under the circumstances, though, I think it went pretty well. There were three people scheduled to give presentations that day, and I was the only one out of the three who showed up so I think I got brownie points for that. I also got commended for not relying too heavily on my notes and for making eye contact when I spoke, so everything ended up being for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

I know it sounds like I’m not taking my education seriously, what with the off the cuff presentations and the all night paper writing, and the dashing off to Madrid and sometimes I wonder. But in all honesty I’ve often remarked that no longer how long I spend on papers they always seem to be unfinished at the last moment. When I left for Madrid I did have three pieces of writing that might charitably be called drafts, but I’ve found that work expands to fit the time allotted. Coincidently, Betty Friedan found the same thing when she looked at housewives and housework. When stay-at-home housewives have all day to do their chores they barely got everything done in time, and felt like the work was getting away from them. Women who got jobs outside of the home found that they could do the same amount of housework as when they were full time housewives. The moral of the story? One makes abstract connections when one is sleep deprived. And that Betty Friedan was an amazing woman who wrote an amazing book, and I wonder if it was as big a deal in Britain as it was in the US.

Of course, when it comes to comparing British and American feminisms, I would put my money on Virginia Woolf over Betty Friedan any day, but that’s just me. And right about now I’m despairing for the quality of that last paper. Do you know I haven’t brushed my teeth in twenty-four hours? I’m gonna go do that now. And then I’m going to print out my papers, because I want to avoid a reprise of the Coriolanus debacle, but I can’t turn them in for another three and a half hours.

And the moral is: Coffee good. Sugar free Red Bull, better.