It's 5 a.m. and I still have four (FOUR!) pages to write of this 12-15-page midterm. It makes me long for those lovely in-class midterms that never last more than an hour and a half and don't have steadily mounting requirements coming from the professor from hell. Challenging? Whatever. That's far too positive a description. She's irritatingly smug yet concurrently irritatingly encouraging (how does that happen? She tells us all we've done a wonderful job -- then gives us all C's). She gets all kinds of random ideas about how the projects we do could be SO ... MUCH ... BETTER! and then makes the new ideas a required part of the assignment (at least if you want to make up for that C). The class is early in the morning and too much work for too little credit. I hate it but I can't afford to drop it since I need to finish certain requirements before I graduate. I know, scary, graduation. But it creeps up on you a lot more quickly when you know you'll be missing a quarter next year.

Terrific. I'm hearing the birds chirping now. I just wish I could e-mail this stupid midterm to the prof and then skip class tomorrow to sleep.