Finals

Can one die of tired? Caffeine certainly. Prudent, I thought, to stay out of her way during Finals Week in December, observing things from a safe distance. Reed was supposed to turn her into a more competent, efficient human being, but the fact is she dealt with the increase in word counts (or page counts) by simply sleeping less, not working faster. Gum and coffee reacted in undesirable ways, and for some reason she thought it would be safe to dilute all her hot drinks with the 'French vanilla' latte from that grotesque machine in Commons. Heart burn reigneth. And beware of sorbitol in sugarfree gum.

This problematic relationship with coffee extended beyond digestion; on the Sunday before the shit hit the proverbial fan, the idiot knocked some syrupy concoction all over her Dell keyboard (more than anything a caveat against adding sugar, thank you Baz), and the P, B, M and space bar keys were at once unusable. This occurred just hours after completing that irony paper for Knapp. For at least 15 degrading minutes the idiot scrabbled at the keyboard in an attempt to type her Windows password (containing two out of the three redundent letters), eventually surprising everyone (me and her) with success. But from this point on, the computer opted for flight over fight, trailing incoherency in its wake: bdlsjdgjdpppdssfppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppfuckerppppppppppppppppdsaljfbsfmmndppp. So after a deft USB rescue-job, she was forced to spend the entirety of Finals week camped out at the ETC (the computer center) on the other side of campus.

Even in the early stages of the week, the library was too sweaty and strained to deal with: Eye of the Tiger playing in the foyer once an hour, 6am glazed looks in passing, and the rapidly atrophying 'stim' table - raisins, energy pills, spaghetti, cereal, regular pills, tobacco, nutella, the smell of small animals dying. The ETC, on the other hand, just a few steps to the East, was a bed of calm. She stayed there Monday through Thursday morning, sleeping intermittently on that sofa in front of the fire, the one everyone sleeps on, and only once or twice returning to dorms for a wash. On Tuesday night we saw a tiny hummingbird in the 7/11, sucking syrup from the syrup dispensers at the coffee counter.

You know it's the last week of school when the News Feed on facebook becomes more active than usual, as competitive idiots all over the world - not merely mine - vie for the most stressful work situation. My idiot, for example, wasted a lot of time translating the Reed system of page counts into the equivalent UEA word count, just so she could stick out her negligible chest in gloatation at having to write 7000 words on one essay. She sent that one off to Knapp on Sunday night, so there were then three whole days in which she could write something barely passable on James and Derrida. Most of that time was spent in panic, not understanding 'Form and Meaning', and not understanding The Sacred Fount, and then trying to combine these obdurate blocks of bemusement into a 10 page paper. By the early hours of Thursday morning, it was done.

Reed looked beautiful at 8am, all in fog and sunlight. We walked around for a bit. Then a celebratory breakfast in Commons with the last of the semester's board points, then daytime sleep and packing and, in the evening, our first sighting of a corona moon. She said something about an overwhelming sense of achievement. I didn't make fun.

Consette x