To read, or not to read

Lame joke, I know. Forgive me. I'm sleep deprived and trying not to acknowledge the precipice upon which I stand.

I just had a meeting with my professor who will be administering the Shakespeare exam...and the first thing she says is that the list is too long, and that she'd like to shorten it. I just stared at her, wide-eyed, and said, "I've already finished." She started apologizing because she had always wanted to shorten it, but I actually didn't follow-up on scheduling a meeting with her last semester. That was my fault. So we started laughing because what else is there to do but laugh at this point? She did give me a more narrow focus for when I study for the exams over the next couple of weeks, which is a relief.

I believe I have come up with a pretty good idea of how I need to study. My one examiner (for the general drama list, consisting of no fewer than 90 plays) has given me a pretty big clue for the direction his questions will take. I think the wisest thing for me to do now is rather than try to read every single word of every single play, I'm going to read until I get a good idea of the writer's style and his/her thematic approach and move on to the next. I can use SparkNotes or Twayne Notes for the plots. (For those not in university, the Twayne Note Series is sort of the academic version of SparkNotes. It gives a much more academic approach to explaining the texts than SparkNotes does.)

We've basically gotten to a point where the name of the game is not to run myself down. There's a lot of crud running rampant in the English department right now, and among my students, so I've been trying not to touch anything other people have touched...except for this keyboard and mouse, doorknobs, and the elevator buttons. That's a lot of surfaces touched by quite a staggering number of people, actually. But anyway, I'm trying to go to bed before midnight most nights and I'm trying to ensure that I'll get eight hours of sleep. So far, so good, but I have a feeling that when the exams come, I'll need to start relying on my Unisom more. I think that on Feb. 22nd, I'm going to be hit with the flu. It wouldn't surprise me in the least. And it's fine if I get the flu on Feb. 22nd. I just can't get the flu before Feb. 18th.

Anyway, that's the new reading plan for these two lists. I have a meeting with my third examiner (the one doing my major list, actually) on Monday afternoon. Here's hoping she doesn't tell me she wanted to chop down my list, too, lol.