So...this is REALLY geeky...but...

It's the third of May, 2008.

Which is exactly 200 years to the day from the events portrayed by Francisco Goya in his painting "Third of May, 1808" (which he actually completed in the year 1814).


Oh yeah. Art History is my life.

Oy.

I'm lame. But every time I've checked the date today, it's come into my head.

So...


I'm done.


Like. Forever.



All of my papers have been turned in. All of my exams have been taken.


And in super cool news, before the exam today, my professor was talking about how he'd finished grading all of the extra credit papers from all of his classes and said that the best papers were from our class (go History of Prints). Then, he singled me out as having the best paper of them all. Wow. Flattering. He also mentioned how I hadn't missed a single class and proceeded to "bow down to me."

A little embarrassing, but I'm not going to lie, I love getting recognition like that.

Then after I took the exam and was handing it in, he asked me to send him a copy of my paper by email so he could use it as an example for the future. Sweet. He also lamented the fact that I'm not going to grad school (as my other art history professor had), but said I should keep in touch.

So, nice.


I am having a bit of trouble with determining when I "graduate." I'm not walking or attending the ceremony, but do I still consider May 3rd to be my "graduation?" Or, since I'm done with all the work I'll ever have to do for my undergraduate degree, have I graduated already? Certainly, it can't be when I receive my diploma in the mail...that could take months.

Eh, fuck it. I'm done, I've graduated.

Yesterday was a spectacularly brilliant, yet fairly uneventful day.


When I left for class at 8:30am, it was 56 degrees outside. Brrr! And it was lovely (and about the same temperature as back home in Chicago). It made me cheerful.

I handed in my final paper for American Cinema and because we have no final exam...it was our last class meeting ever. So I'm done with that class entirely. Hopefully I'll clinch an A for the semester. Additionally, class let out 20 minutes early, so I had plenty of time to run to the post office and drop off a Netflix, go to Best Buy to pick up Juno (which Colleen and I watched later that night), and even go to Panera during the lunch rush to get a sandwich to go. I knew I was in a cheery mood because the ridiculous lines and even more ridiculous people at the Panera did not make me annoyed, but rather amused.

I ate my lunch with due leisure at home before heading back to campus for Theory and Criticism in Art History. It was a note-intensive day, trying to cram in the last of the material needed for the final exam, while clarifying some of the material that got lost along the way. It was interesting, though, and there were many ideas that struck a cord.

After, I met with my professor to discuss my thesis. I was supposed to turn in a revised copy this week, but she said the draft I gave her two weeks ago was close enough to being finished that I don't need to give her anything else (it was completed, just not fully polished). She's giving me an A for the semester. Sweet. I still plan to revise it, and incorporate her comments, just for my own obsessive perfectionism.

Later, I went to my last lecture of Geography. We have an exam tomorrow (on the last day), and if I'm satisfied with my final grade at that point, I don't have to take the final exam next week. (I don't plan on taking the final exam regardless of my grade...I will be leaving at 2am that morning to drive up to Iron Mountain, Michigan for my cousin's wedding. So a 3pm final doesn't really work for me.)


What's really cool about all that? After tomorrow's Geography exam, I will have completed 3 of my 5 courses this semester...before finals week even starts. Sweet.

So I'll have the weekend to study for my two art history exams, which are Tuesday and Wednesday. And then I'm done. Forever. Whoa. A week from today and my college career is finished. Crazy.


Today, my only plans are to finish polishing my thesis and then study for Geography. I need an 83% on the exam to get an A for the semester. To this point, my scores have been 88, 87, and 94, so if I study hard enough, I might be able to clinch that. But if I end up with a B, I'll deal.

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In other news, I adore Michelle Obama. Not gonna lie. Love her. I think she'd be a kick-ass First Lady. Hillary-Clinton-circa-1993 style.

I mentioned before how I watch TV only during meal breaks from writing my thesis and term paper, and just now I had It Could Happen to You on one channel, while A League of Their Own covered for commercials on another.

It kills me to have to turn them off...who doesn't love mid-90s chick flicks?


But I have been SUPER productive last night, and already this morning. My term paper is nearly finished, and it's to a point now where I can put it aside until after I finish working on my thesis.

You see, the term paper is due on Thursday, whereas the thesis is due Tuesday so you may think that I should have been giving the thesis priority. However, the term paper actually lays some of the important groundwork for the central argument of my thesis, so it was beneficial to work out all the logistic in one before plugging it in to the other. If that makes sense.

And so I have been adding to my thesis a great deal, taking largely from what I've already written for my term paper. I've also been editing my thesis to incorporate the comments my professor suggested.

I still have a lot to do, and only two days in which to do it. I'm more than a little nervous. There's a possibility I won't get it all done, but I hope not. I will be staying up late tonight (I'm sure of it), and then tomorrow I'm done with class by 9:30, so I'll have the entire day in which to write more.


And so I have used as my subject line for the post the immortal words of Will Ferrell to cover my bases and call upon all metaphysical beings to help me in completing this most difficult task. I really don't want to have to go into my thesis advisor and say "I know I had a month, and all of Spring Break...but it's not done." Yeah, I was irresponsible...but I was so done with this thing I wanted to shove a spork in my eye.

Well, I should probably get to work, because I don't have a lot of faith in Tom Cruise to help me get this shit done.

I am cheerful because my wretched Geography class was cancelled. And I used the time I would have been there to go grocery shopping. So well done, all around.

I have also realized why a) I am so disenchanted with the UCF film program, b) I hate gen-ed class, and c) art history has become my most fascinating area of study. And all are related.

It's theory. I love theory. I love discussing and analyzing and theorizing. It can be applied to any humanity, really. Maybe even sciences. But so far, the only classes I've been exposed to this kind of learning since high school has been art history. Gen-eds never delve that far into curriculum (actually, my Chemistry class bordered on it...which is why I obsessed over getting an A in that class....I studied 18 hours for the final exam because I wanted to make sure I did well...who does that? For Chemistry?).

Anyway, the film program here is SERIOUSLY lacking in theory. I even took Theory and Criticism in Film and we didn't get beyond the most basic formalist theory. We literally spent half the semester on Seigei Eisenstein's concept of montage (aka - what has become standard for film editing). It was revolutionary...in 1915. We barely scratched the surface of André Bazin, who had some interesting, critical ideas. We never once discussed anything like feminism, black theory, Marxism, queer theory. We never even looked at social or political context of films or discussed how the biography of a filmmaker can affect the work. (All of those are things we've covered in the first 6 weeks of my Theory and Criticism of Art History course). To it's credit, the American Cinema class I'm in currently is all about biography and social context. But it lacks severely in anything else. We don't discuss thinkers in film classes. And we should.

I was in the library today, picking up a book for a film paper I have due in two weeks (I'm highly doubtful that anyone else in my class will use an academic source. Maybe an online newspaper or journal article...but I'm guessing Joe Schmo's Film Review website is going to be their top source. But whatever. In the books I picked up (and when I'm in the film books section, I pick up many that are not related to my research...just to see), there were plenty of references to Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin (whose work Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is paramount to Marxist theory and any duplication-based art, like printmaking or photography or film). Yet has Walter Benjamin been mentioned in ANY of my film classes? No. Not once. Maybe back at Indiana, but definitely not at UCF.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much from a school whose art history department is slowly imploding while they build a new Biological Sciences building, but it's my education and shouldn't I be getting more than this?

I guess the bottom line is that if I want to learn it, I'll have to teach myself. Or go to grad school (I'm making the broad assumption that grad school actually teaches based on theory and discourse.

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In other news, Nilla wafers and vanilla frosting is the best snack ever. Plus, the frosting entirely defeats the purpose of eating Reduced-Fat Nillas (yes, I'm using that as a "plus").

My thesis is not progressing greatly, but I am having a great time reading through some of the books and articles I've found.

And now I'm taking a break to watch American Gangster, which I picked up from a redbox today (it was just released on DVD). Mmm...$1 movie night. Life is grand.

(As a sidenote, I think it's really sad that there are really only two prominent, black dramatic actors (Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington). I mean, I think you can make an argument for Jamie Foxx or Will Smith as a Denzel-follower, and possibly someone like James Earl Jones for Freeman (had his career been fuller in more recent years), but really...)