Alive and kicking - or - writing under the influence

Wow...this past week has been a killer. Everybody in my household has been sick, sick, sick. Lynt was actually diagnosed with full on pneumonia and the rest of us didn't get official diagnosis but muddled through with horrible, awful colds.

Amid the fun of naps and orange juice, I also had some major papers to write for school.

Somehow I managed to weasel out a 10 page research paper on the education achievement gap and while it's not any piece of great literature, it's at least moderately acceptable.

But as I read over my essay for my literature class, I shuddered. Coleridge was able to write Kubla Khan while doped up on opium. My essay, while not as vividly full of imagery, is about as incomprehensible as Coleridge's poem. I blame it on the various cold medicine flooding through my system.

The first sentence of the essay had three major errors alone...MAJOR errors. I had verb tense change, subject change, and a complete breakdown of logic. The paper only got "better" from there. I've gone through and edited out the main grammatical and syntactical problems with the paper...but I can't easily fix the broken structural and thematic changes. I only pray that the professor will take pity on me. I'll be sure to 'try' and speak to him as I hand it in so that he can see by my lack of a voice (really, I'm very funny to hear, or so I'm told) that the illness I've mentioned was as bad as I made it out to be.

Honestly, this particular essay has been the bane of my existence for the past 2-3 weeks anyway. I have been struggling intensely to try and get my head around the theme and actually produce something I could work with. While the end result was not nearly as admirable as Mozart's final Requiem, I couldn't help but feeling like this essay was pulling me down the way the Requiem pulled him down.

Oh well, it's done now. And the cold is mostly gone (still very congested and my head aches from the pressure and I have no voice). So, things move on.