WASTED WEEKEND, AND BY WASTED I MEAN ...

This is why I have a limited social life.

Thanksgiving is coming this week.  Also coming this week are two open houses at my school, which means Monday afternoon and Tuesday night will both be tied up with students leading their parents around from classroom to classroom, showing off their work and doing activities.  At some point, I also have to get College Boy home.

So I plan my attack:  Saturday I will read the assigned text for grad class and write my weekly paper.  I will also start doing research (in earnest) for my final project that is due very soon.  In other words, Saturday will be spent pretty much alone, just me and the basket of chocolate and the ice cold beer in the fridge and sports on television.


This makes me feel like a loser.

So I decide to fill up my day with a few other things in between the grad school work. After I finish the reading, I start writing the paper.  A little way into the writing, I take a break and bring the Christmas stuff up from the basement.  I don't unpack it; I just make sure it's upstairs and ready.  I write some more of the paper.  I text my kids about Thanksgiving and chat with them for a bit.  Then I write some more of the paper.  I go through some magazines (I'm two months behind) while watching a Bruins game.  In between periods in the hockey game, I write some more of the paper. 


I contact College Boy, and we decide that the open house at my work is going to interfere with getting him home, so I opt to drive up to school, get him, bring him home, and have him take his car back to school so he can get home for Thanksgiving at his own mercy rather than mine.  I make a brief stop at a wine tasting (one table, limited quantity) because I'm searching for a good Thanksgiving wine.  I leave empty-handed as I do not find anything I would consider "good" nor "Thanksgiving wine."  I drive toward the college.

As soon as I pass the last exit before entering Boonesville, traffic halts.  I am crawling up the interstate at 3 mph, and the nearest exit is five miles north of where I am.  The trip that normally takes thirty-five to forty minutes has now stretched to almost ninety.  I pick up College Boy, and we head home, stopping to pick up pizza (extra cheese) on the way.  We watch the rest of the BC football game (Maryland coach blew the game in the final seconds) while I intermittently work on my grad school paper and drink beer and eat pizza.

Eventually College Boy leaves for school, and I get back to business in all seriousness.  I work myself up to seven pages of writing, and I've only covered one-third of the topics for this week's assignment.  I seem to be missing part of the readings, so I check online to my university email and see a new message.  It instructs me to go to the class website we've been using in order to retrieve my message.

Dear Students -- Happy Thanksgiving.  You do not have to submit a written journal this week...

Holy hell.  By now it is after 9:00 p.m.  Even if I had any friends, it's too late to try and get together or go anywhere or do anything.  I have a seven-page literary diatribe, one of my best, to be honest, because it's on an essay I've read and studied and debated numerous times before.  I feel like I'm ready.  I've got those fighting words all in order as I continue reading the message I opened.

... but if you want to send one along, you may.  Also, be sure to post on the website about the reading from this week.

I look through the seven page document.  Hmmmm.  I tend to be a little chippy when writing my journal papers.  I use words like damnit and crack, and this week I even put in the expressions bunch of latent pot-smoking hippies with LSD flashbacks, and some of us simply raise our hands to air out our armpits and not because we have an actual question, and this priceless gem: The emperor has no clothes!  No, really, he's butt-freakin-naked, people.  Naked.   

The further I read into my cutting stream of consciousness gone bad, the less confident I am that there's anything remotely post-able in the entire manuscript. 

Oh well.  Another weekend wasted, and by "wasted" I mean the time is wasted not that I am wasted.  But give me time.  I have an entire fridge stocked with beer and leftover extra-cheese pizza.  I might just make a weekend out of it yet.