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Once upon a time, when I was but a wee lassie in community college, all-nighters were upheld, in my mind, as some sort of sacred college ritual. I envisioned them to be all things personifying the essential college experience - physically draining, psychologically intense, geeky in a chic sort of way, racing against The Clock and The Man, and, especially, filled with insightful comments in MLA format, born of sleep deprivation and desperate intellectualism. I was sure my muse would be found in three cups of coffee, munchies by the desk, and ten flat hours of brainstorming and sentences. And oft it surely was.
For years I found deadlines to be particularly fabulous motivators for greatness in writing, my tired head swimming with utterances of the fanciest and most beautifully succinct degree. I churned out grade A paper after grade A paper in Bible College on a single night's worth of knuckle-grinding, all returned with delicious results. The prizes came in two forms - millions of underlines and stars in red, outlining the high points of my work and intensity, and the paper returned with absolutely no markings throughout until the end, coupled with the grade, saying, "Wonderful! Promise you will someday teach English grammar and the intricacies of its syntax to my as-of-yet unborn child!" Or something to that effect.
Consequently, this fed the obsession.
I became addicted to the high of the caffeine evening, dimmed light illuminating the paper topic at hand, my scribbled college-ruled notes smudged and reordered a thousand times in a complicated but perfectly understandable manner (at least to me). I ate up the rush of anticipation - Will it be done? Can I do it yet again?
The answer was fairly clear at that point. It will, and I always did.
Always did... Until that day in spring semester, my brain foggy and unorganized, when I went to nursing class and my classmate asked me if I had finished my rough draft for a literature critique and comparison class on "Literature of Identity." I balked. I, the student who never handed in anything late or halfway done! I was late! The class was in but an hour and a half! I flew into the computer lab and without the usual putzing around, fell into The Groove so smoothly that I never truly came out of it. My inspiration was undeniable. It was divine. The paper flowed, all eleven pages of it (not including title page and reference!), out of my fingertips. I looked up at the clock with ten minutes to spare, frantically tapped out a hasty ending sentence that I thought might do the trick, printed, stapled, kissed, and broke for the door. While walking to class from the lab, I realized that in my haste, I had utterly and completely forgotten to put my name on the paper, which I then scribbled on the front along with a sincere apology for the roughness of the paper.
Handing it in, I reiterated the paragraph of apology verbally to the professor, who, as the head of the English department and a formidable presence in the state of New Hampshire's public English curriculum revision team, I was not willing to take many chances with, even with my prior good luck with all things term paper related. He nodded, took it. I could tell: he's heard it all. Shut up, shut up! I went home that day sulking a little and secretly worried that I had taken such a non-kosher approach to this paper. This wasn't a paper born of love and hours of care intermingled with Doritos and warm tea, but instead was the bastard child of teenage collegiate irresponsibility and a critical approach to the texts in question. It just couldn't be morally right. I slept fitfully that evening.
Two weeks later, the papers were handed back and he noted that revisions and the second stage of the draft process should be handed in the following class day and that if extra revisions were needed, he would make sure to point them out. I received my paper with the apology written on the front and opened it to find Professor T's signature vertical lines denoting text of particular favor in his eyes. They crawled over every page, liberally and deliberately, interspersed with commentary on my insight, glowing praise for my textual analysis, picking apart my words and carefully deliberating them to find that yes, he too agreed! And how! It only got more delicious with each page until I reached the last which had the end-all, be-all of all words written by the head of the English department, "Needs no revision." After class I was pulled aside and encouraged to submit it to a literature analysis journal and advised to take up a minor in English.
Which is to say that I left class that day more than on cloud nine. Much more. After the elation wore off, however, I realized the implications of the events that occurred that day. Essentially, I had reached my peak, and at such a young age! As a figure skater when she finally turns her aged, twenty-five year old ankle at some residual, negligible skating competition in Skokie, Illinois, I had reached the utmost and there was no way to go but downward. Not only that, but I had transgressed the unmentionable glamour of the all-nighter. If it could be done in an hour and a half, what was left to be considered sacred? I hid my head as shame washed over me, my loss palpable in the air I was breathing out, as my Muse left me like some exorcised ghost.
And so I am to this present day. Spent and jaded from seven years of my practiced skill, I spend my evenings with my dim light and my notes, following some unbreakable but useless tradition in a halfhearted facade of scholarship. I can find no joy. It has become no more than an evening spent with little sleep, alone, with only wasted teabags mimicking those bags that reside underneath my eyes.