Bad day gone Good

Dear Friends,

I will not be proof-reading this entry, so I apologize for typos, bad grammar and bad writing.

I had the worst day today, but now everything is okay.  

For the past four days, I've been slaving away, compiling the written defense portion of my honors thesis.  When all the roomies are in the living room around homework hours after dinner, I kind of feel left out or lazy (even though I'm not).  For the past three semesters, they've been furiously typing their 80-100 page theses and editing and re-editing them every night.  I feel like a lazybones because I haven't been constantly writing a written thesis, despite the fact that I know I've been doing my fair share of work.  I spend about 3 hours every day in the ceramics studio sculpting, firing and thinking (the creative process is time consuming), and all of this is my contribution to my thesis as a studio artist.  And while I know that I am anything BUT lazy, I can't help but feel the pressure from my tendency of comparing myself to the pursuits of students in other disciplines.

Anyway, the important part is that for the past few days, instead of going to the studio, I stayed in the apartment and actually got to work towards my thesis on the computer like everyone else!  You see, my thesis mainly consists of a substantial body of art work culminating in a conceptual, themed exhibition.  But, it also requires this:

Studio artists must also create a written defense which more fully articulates the technical excellence and content of the  work. Such a defense, which could generally be completed in 15-20 closely-edited pages, plus notes and bibliography,  must conform to an appropriate style guide. Both the public presentation and the written defense must situate the work  in the context of other artists and thinkers working with similar techniques and content.  The written defense should be  a thorough exploration of both the technical and content contexts of the work, and must show how the work makes an  original and valuable contribution to those contexts.

I decided to buckle down Monday afternoon and begin writing the paper.  Having already made most of my artwork (I began firing the other day, the total count of sculptures is 16, and eventually all I will have to do is figure out how to treat the surfaces of the sculptures), researched artists and thinkers to relate my conceptual ideas to a context, and completed an annotated bibliography, all I really needed to do was put all the parts together.  And that's exactly what I did.  

It felt weird, let me tell you, to not stay in the ceramics room until my fingers started to prune, and, instead, sit on the couch and type until my back started to ache.  One day, even, I stayed up late just to squeeze in some studio time because I couldn't resist (that's what I'm gonna do tonight too).  But it has all payed off because, as of now, I have finished my first draft.

However, the bad news happened before I finished the paper.  Last night when I was working on it, I came to a stopping point and left a few pages to be written in the morning before I emailed it to my thesis mentor.  I thought all was well and I saved it on my computer.  When I woke up, I returned to my computer and tried to open the file but my computer told me that it was either corrupted, truncated or destroyed, meaning that my computer could no longer read it.  I started crying because everything I did resulted in the same, scary message that my computer had eaten my paper.  Even the copy that I had emailed myself (incase something like this happened) wouldn't open and said the same thing.

What was worse was that I couldn't find my keys.  I had to leave my door open and pray that someone would be in the apartment when I needed to get in.  Between freaking out at the library, freaking out in the piano practice rooms (I had a make-up lesson today), and freaking out whenever I could get back in the apartment, I could NOT, for the life of me, find either my keys OR my paper, and was running out of time.

I promised my mentor that I would be emailing him a first draft of the paper today, so I had to completely re-write the entire paper.  

JUST KIDDING, that would be impossible.  23 pages in a few hours?  I don't think so.

The great news is that I downloaded a text program from the interwebs and somehow, it was able to de-code, open and read my paper.  The bad news was that it completely destroyed all and any formatting, punctuation and left, scattered through the paper, what looked like words and letters from an alien manuscript.  Bizarre.

It took me two hours to copy and paste my poor paper into microsoft word and re-format.  Then I spent three hours finishing the paper and proof-reading it before I sent it to my mentor.  I felt terrible because I couldn't do this until after my piano lesson, despite the fact I told Mike I'd have it to him in the morning.  I sent it to him at 7:30 pm.

Anway, I ate a yummy thai dinner and then was let into my apartment by Stephanie.  I still hadn't found my keys at this point, but David is really good at it.  He usually finds them in about three minutes, but this time it took him 20 minutes.  They were in the laundry basket (I must have thrown them in there when I was putting some dirty clothes away).  Anyway, I was still really stressed out because all the drama surrounding my paper was clouding my happiness of having finished it.  The only way I was able to get giddy again was when Mike sent me an email after having read it saying that he thought it was a "great start!"  It made me feel great and made all the trouble worth it today.

Now I can enjoy spring break.  Not only do I have the Art-to-Art finale play to look forward to on Sunday, but I also have my interview in D.C.

Wish me Luck!