also I am not getting enough sleep and the dishwasher at Bruff is broken AGAIN

I think I am studying more, right now, than I did during fucking finals last semester. And I am still behind, and barring an act of the gods, it is pretty damn unlikely that I am going to be caught up on the reading before my seminar tomorrow, although I am still of the faint opinion that if I can just organize my time better, I can do all the reading this semester without any problems and do all the papers and get As in all my classes. Did I mention I need As in all my classes? I need As in all my classes.

Here is where it gets awkward: I think, although I haven't quite done all the math yet, that I have as much reading per week for my seminar as I do for all my other five classes put together. The majority of my other five classes are reading intensive, guys; yesterday I read 200+ pages and not one of them was for my seminar (also, that would explain why my brain was fried last night). However, I really, really don't want to drop the seminar, I think it's awesome, and I like the professor and I like the subject material and it's something I'm really interested in, but I also don't want to drop anything else, since dropping anything else, I feel, is unlikely to have a noticeable affect on my workload, and I really really like all my other classes.

Now I have to go read five hundred pages of ancient Greek philosophy and/or whatever the fuck I'm reading, I'm not even entirely convinced I'm reading the right thing, since I think I have a different edition (although the right translation) of The Politics, since the page numbers don't match up. But at least the professor put down the book numbers and not just the page numbers.

(no subject)

Paper just arrived in my school inbox from another seminar member; we're required to send out papers to the entire class list if we're doing reports that week. One paragraph in, I stopped and went, "He must be British, he writes like aella_irene and also he used the British spelling for one word." Which makes me curious, again; I know aella_irene and I have talked about this a bit, but is there a real, actual difference in how the UK and the U.S. teaches essay-writing? Because that -- for lack of a better term -- the paper's self-knowledge of it as paper, as artificial construction, has jumped out at me, and I know that at least the way I was taught essay-writing was directly counter to that. One never says, "The purpose of this paper is to do x, y, and z by means of a, b, c." One has an introduction, and then a thesis statement, but never in either one of the two does the writer say, "The point of this paper is x" or "It shall be demonstrated that Y." My high school English and history professors would have had a fit if I'd ever done such a thing.

Which is not saying that writing a paper that way is wrong! It is just by no means the method in which I was taught (and in fact counter to how I was taught) so seeing it in an actual formal paper kind of blows my mind. So is that a UK-ism, or was I just taught in a really bizarre style?

ETA: Also, oh my god, person who wrote this essay, who the hell taught you to cite? That is not Chicago! That is not even MLA, though that is the closest it comes to! Where is your works cited page/bibliography? FAIL. FAIL A LOT. Also, you used too many quotes.