The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought

So I'm feeling anxious about the change of term at DU, which happens in only a couple of weeks.  For starters, I cannot get used to ten week quarters because I'm ingrained and programmed to 16 week semesters, and it feels like I never finish anything.  The feeling is accurate because I never finish anything, because by the time I realize what needs to be finished, I've started another round of ten weeks of not accomplishing anything.  Guh.  The spring term is particularly grueling due to its one week off between terms and this makes it all worse.  I've been on the student's version of sabbatical this year, using my research hours in large quantities because of other demands, and thus I have to take 12 credit hours for spring to make up for it.  In case you're out of this loop, the average for a graduate student is more like six, even though DU likes you to take 10 hours.  At any rate, it's a lot to do and I'm certainly not up for it.  I already know this.  I'm even venturing into new territory by taking a fiction workshop, and while I'm excited about this, I am also nervous.  I feel confident in my fiction writing skill, but I'm fairly conventional about it all and I was raised on pre-postmodernists so I still believe in things like plot.  Haha.  But seriously, I often appreciate the writing of my peers in the program, but I often don't get it; I love the idea of a single sentence on a page as a chapter, but don't know how to make that work and not sure I want to.  Mostly, it's the pressure of creative writing undertones in our department in general that dictates we stay in our respective camps and shut up about it.  I've never been one to do such things; I was the kid who bought Ice-T's Body Count CD because it had the song "Cop Killer" on it.

I've been reading like crazy lately, which is something new for me since the onset of The Program at DU.  I read all the time of course, but never for enjoyment; my latest foray into contemporary fiction (of which I must admit to being woefully out of the loop) is Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which my sister requested as a birthday present and turned up on a reading list for said upcoming school term.  I didn't even mean to read it right now, but I picked it up and read the first page...the next thing I knew I was sobbing only a few hours later and closing the completed book, turning it over in my hands, reading the back, hoping there was one more little bit I could read.  It was staggering, sublime, unflinching, merciless, and powerfully human.  I admit that I adore tales about the strength of the human spirit - as cheesy and overplayed as the sentiment is - and ones that are done well are rare.  What is it about us that allows us to endure atrocity?  To endure at all?  Perhaps this is why I love Hamlet so much; he asked the same question and we have yet to answer except that "conscience does make cowards of us all."

I wanted to swallow this novel whole, consume it, absorb it, and let it live inside me forever.  I don't think I'll ever stop thinking about it.