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Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
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9:56a
My grade anxiety manifested itself in my dreams last night.
I dreamt that my thesis defense had to have a modern dance component, and that I'd found this out only a couple of days before the defense.
A modern dance component might not be unusual for, say, a thesis in Sondheim or Twyla Tharp. But for Dante Alighieri, it's a little unusual.
However, slave to bureaucracy that I am, I pulled two all-nighters in a row finding 9 lithe, muscular Tyson Beckford look-alikes to dress in fishnet and gauze, exquisitely choreograph them in nine tableaux representing the circles of hell, and miraculously lose weight because the thesis author has to be principal dancer and me in fishnet does not evoke sultry. It evokes several Greenpeace members trying to push me back into the water. (Dancing with Academics! Noam Chomsky does a sultry tango with Jennifer Tilly! Gerda Lerner and John Stamos cut a rug jitterbug-style! Edmund Morgan may have won the Pulitzer, but can he take home the big prize when he waltzes with Tiffani Amber-Thiessen?)
It eventually came out that I got a C on my thesis. The scholarship was strong and original, my arguments convincing and well-proven, but my choreography was "too Cold-Hearted Snake."
And that is why I woke up exhausted. Because it most certainly was not.
maybe a little.
(comment on this)
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