These are little teacups of the Macallan Whiskey Brandy Pudding that Silver and I made for our birthday party (ignore the dirty bread pans in the background). It was sooo good -- very, very dense and cake-y, more like I imagine British pudding is like instead of the Jell-o-y stuff we mean when we say "pudding" over here.



And I officially have seven full pages (that's double-spaced) on my Cormac McCarthy paper!

That sounds like nothing, but you have no idea how good it feels to have something for sure -- finally.

I now have twenty-five solid pages done. For good. I have one-quarter of my plan WRITTEN. (Well, I have a helluva lot more writing than that, but this is just counting what's in an order that I'm going to use and that makes sense).

It's not the 25 new pages I'd hoped to get written during spring break, but a LOT happened (losing everything on my old hard drive, and getting horribly sick with some terrible sinus-thing) that dashed those plans.

I'm also more at peace with the realization (which I always knew intellectually, it was just hard to feel it) that if I have to finish my plan over the summer and come back for my orals, it's not the worst thing ever. It'll be a little disappointing (and my grandma will probably think it's the end of the world), but a) I don't think it'll hurt me any financially, and b) It won't even really be "late" because I'm technically on track to graduate a full year early right now.

It's sort of like when I would get overwhelmed with schoolwork as a kid, and mom would ask me if it was too much, and if I should be taken out of the Delta Program (the gifted program at my elementary school), and I would freak out and burst into tears. Why? I don't know. There wasn't any sense in it. It's not like I was (or am) some extreme over-achieving A-personality-type. I think it was just something that I thought maybe would mark me as a failure (worse, somehow, than if I had never been in the Delta program to start with) -- that would mark me as incapable.

I'm still always afraid that it's true that I'm horribly incapable of so much -- incapable not in the way that I'm not "bright" enough to do something, but that I'm not... resilient or strong enough. That I'm just an emotional ninny.

Which is maybe sometimes true, but right now I'm feeling pretty good with the work I've done today (a lot of integrating older material, particularly my Bible and Qur'an paper on Cain and Abel), and I think later on this evening (once the library closes) I'll go home, eat some dinner, and make some tasty blueberry-lemon-zest-muffins.