Easter Weekend

"good" Friday:

Woke up. Fell out of bed. Dragged a comb acro....oh wait, no, that was the Beatles. I woke up, did my standard blog reading/facebook checking/coffee sipping routine. And then started sifting through the (literally) thousands of pages of info I had downloaded over the previous week for this one paper I'm severely stressed about.

Went to the pet store with Ryan because we needed cat food and I needed a break. Ryan bought cat one of those carpeted house thingys, and it was very exciting because she totally loves it.

Spent the rest of the night listening to a crazy wind storm and working on three separate papers and spending way too much time on my various social media sites.

"non-religious holiday" Saturday:

Seriously...lame. Ryan slept until noon, I worked on things until he got up. On the computer ALL DAY. He watched like 3 seasons of The Wire, which I tuned in and out of.
Around nine at night we went for a walk to the Tim Hortons down the street to get him a pre-work (gross) coffee.
Back home, more work. Bed at eleven.

"Easter" Sunday:

Got up around seven, fooled around for hours. Ryan got up around eleven thanks to the neighbor boy playing with his yappy dog directly outside the bedroom window. He watched The Wire all day and I'm having trouble distinguishing that day from the Saturday except I was wearing different sweatpants and I figured out that my bangs are finally long enough to pin back.

I did more research stuff.

He made vegan "corned beef" which is so good in a rye-bread sandwich with sauerkraut.

Work work work bed

And today, Monday, I don't feel any closer to being ready for tomorrow, in which I submit one paper, and present my research in front of the class in one, and have a class discussion about how the other one is going (complete with fancy typed up outline)...AAAAAAAAAGH

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For those of you who went to school in the time before the internet, this is how I do things.

Supplies:

1.Internet connection.
2.Computer
3.Maybe like one book that I already had at home
4.Print card for school computer lab
5.Coffee
6.a 4-day weekend

Research method:

1. Scan all the PDF files I downloaded from the school's online library with my eyeballs, and see if any of the key concepts I'm looking for jump out at me. If they do, I don't delete the file. If it's irrelevant, DELETE.

2. Copy and paste the text from the remaining PDF files into a word document and then meticulously delete everything that is irrelevant, being sure to keep track of who was the author of what, for future citations.

3. Cut and paste info into groupings depending on subject matter. Usually by this time I have changed the colors or fonts so that I can easily keep track of who wrote what. For example, the red font was all written by the same person, the comic sans was another guy, etc.

4. Re-read info, and begin writing paper in sections.

5. Cut and paste sections of paper into one long crappy rough draft that makes no sense.

6. Go over rough draft and try to figure out how to make it sound awesome, and figure out how to make it lead to the point I was trying to get at in the first place.

7. Make sure I didn't accidentally violate copyright laws.

8. Make the sentences flow nicely together.

9. Write intro. By this time I'm soooo sick of looking at the stupid thing.

10. Write conclusion.

11. Spell check like a motherfucker.

12. Go over again, making sure it really does make sense.

13. Walk away.

14. Come back.

15. Re-write large chunks of the text because they sound totally stupid.

16. Go to website that reminds me how to write works cited list in MLA format.

17. Read website, and realize that I did my in-text citations wrong. Fix them.

18. Do Works Cited page, which takes like an hour longer than I thought it would because they're so particular about where the comma and brackets go.

19. Put paper away for a while.

20. Come back to it, read it and totally hate it.

21. Fix a few more grammatical errors that I somehow missed the first 80 times.

22. Put it away. E-mail it to myself and tell myself it's done.

23. Print it at school, hand it in. Tell myself it's not the best I could do but it's good enough, and I just want to pass the stupid class.

24. CELEBRATE!