If you’re not constipated it’s not the end.

This is the story of the labour and delivery of the last thing I had to do for school, which was also the hardest thing I did for school.

For my entire university career.

That includes dealing with red tape, which if you ask me (of course you did you’re reading my blog) is the absolute most painful aspect of attending any higher education institution: bureaucracy. (p.s. Bureaucracy is the hardest word ever to spell. Not at all how it sounds.)

This paper was way worse than both the spelling of and dealing with bureaucracy.

Here’s how it went down:

I was ready to take the final final exam of my life…

and I was relieved…

but only briefly…

…because the worst was yet to come.

My task: to write a 25-page paper on the contemporary (now dead) literary mastermind David Foster Wallace (none of whose books are at all easy to read/understand [all of whose books are, however, fantastically rewarding to read]), which paper I had to start/finish in six days.

I mean, I did have like four months to work on it. And in normal semesters I would’ve at least gotten a head start on it. But this semester was not a normal semester. And although I did try to think about the paper in advance, by the time I got through with all the other crap I had to do for my other classes, it was six days to due date and I was stressin’.

I came home and plopped on the couch and only enjoyed it for like a second before I had a nervous breakdown because I had a 25-pager due in six days and people, I had nothin.

See: donning the face of stress.

I got a little desperate:

Then I got a little anxious:

It wasn’t pretty:

But poor poor Poor Kyle came home and like a good husband talked me down from my ledge (he’s a good man), and gave me a spark of an idea that got the academic juices flowing and before I knew it I had a very solid outline indeed sketched out: