Computers are the Devil.

I had a near death experience yesterday. While finishing the final revisions on my thesis before submitting said thesis to my committee I had a bit of an emergency. As I was doing the final alterations to format the documents to the grad school requirements, and check word usage and style when the impossible happened: my file corrupted. I sat in horror as I watched the text in my draft turn from the most intelligently written explication of Philip Roth ever into nothing but OOOO++ and other symbols. I was mortified to say the least. To make things worse I had saved the thesis to several other places and I could not get ANY of them to work. My Judas of a computer had betrayed me.

I immediately went into full tilt panic mode. All I could think for a solid twenty minutes was "Fuck it, I Quit. I fucking quit." I thought "this is divine intervention of the most nefarious sort telling me that I am simply not meant for graduate school and that it is divinely ordained that I will never graduate or finish this freaking program." Basically I shat my pants and then regrouped. I even ran down the hall and interrupted my advisor's graduate course to tell him to come to my office immediately during break because it was an emergency of the most erroneous sort.

Luckily, however, I regained my wits, cleaned my shorts, and remembered that I had the thesis saved on several disks, and that it was also saved in cyberspace. Thank God for email attachments. Whoever invented the internet (Al Gore?) and the email attachment deserves a place in Heaven right next to the German Monk who invented beer, and the dude that invented the breast implant. He was from Texas, by the way, proving once again that Texas freaking owns. And do not give me any of this feminist mumbo jumbo about that remark being sexist. It is what it is, and I am not going to apologize for loving big boobs. I am a man and I like girls with big boobs. Learn to cope.

Anyway, it also turned out that the OOO did not actually destroy any text but merely put about ten extra pages between the spot it started and the next word of text. However when it mucked up the text I had to go back an do all the revisions on word choice again because I had not saved the last bit of thesauras check that I had done. At that point I was more than happy to only have to redo the revisions on style and word choice.

With that in mind I should be ready for the defense of said thesis on Wednesday, and everything is on schedule. Let's just hope that my committee does not decide to take after Judas here, and betray or forsake me at the last moment. To say the least a disaster was of the rankest sort was avoided and so far things have come out ok. Although I think a certain Director of Graduate Studies has my total humilation scheduled for exactly 2 pm on Wednesday, April 5th. It is a very wierd coincedence that they are happened to end up scheduled at the exact same moment in time. However, I am not scared because I can give just as well as I get.

Things to do this weekend:

1. Go see my girlfriend. We are having a date night tonight, and I must admit I am really looking forward to spending some quality time with the little woman. We are going to dinner and movie (Ice Age2: The Meltdown). I am actually looking forward to this movie but I am letting her feel like this is her choice so I can use it later when there is an action movie that I really want to see. I can use the action movie as a "make up" movie for watching Ice Age 2.

2. Help her the little woman's dad fix her grandmother's fence tomorrow, and help clean the yard. That will be a good time. However, I must admit that when I complete/participate in projects like this it is always a reminder why I quit the construction industry to go back to school. I always end up with a much stronger appreciation of grad school.

3. Write the literacy interview for Literacy. I had to ask for an extension on the assignment so I could get the thesis ready for defense. It should be fairly easy to do. I alos need to prepare for the presentation in Shakespeare. I will do that Tuesday before class however because I got that. I also need to talk to the professor in said class about my 95 on the mid term. I think she took five points for something that was not very fair. I want my 100 dammit.

4. Do laundry some time this weekend. I have 7 weeks worth of laundry piled up in my closet. I will also be going commando if I don't wash underwear sometime soon. Luckily I have done sock/undies laundry in between the last time I have done colored/white clothes laundry. I really need to find an apartment with a washer and a dryer so I don't let this laundry gang up so much. The pile actually looks a person standing in the closet when it is dark at night.

That is all. You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog.