Feeling: relieved
Listening to: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
Reading/Watching: Chocolat

I have learned that sappy Oprah-book-club-movie-adaptations are effective at driving away ghosts.

Once, while fantastically bored back in high school, I watched Where the Heart Is on HBO one night. I fell in love with it, in a way I can't properly explain. I am well aware that the plot is melodramatic, the script mediocre, and the directing quite bad, but you've gotta love Natalie Portman in a long gross wig and fake pregnant belly, going into labor in Aisle 5 of a Wal-Mart.

I bought the video when I saw it on super-sale in Wal-Mart a couple years later, and watched it until I could practically quote it from beginning to end.

When I moved into the Haunted Dormitory my sophomore year, I used to get the creeps after the lights went out, because the building was over a century old, and had noisy joints, as most ancient structures do. I tried any number of things to block out the sounds so I could go to sleep in comfort instead of wake up anxious every few hours: prayer (temporary; I still could hear the noises afterward), ear plugs (they convinced me that I just wouldn't be able to hear the ghost come in), and playing music (I started dreaming the ghosts were singing to me).

Then one night, after a singularly creepy event when I woke in the wee hours with a chilling dread that I couldn't shake, I popped in cheesy Oprah-book-club goodness, and the various bad Southern drawls and pop-country soundtrack lulled me to dreamland.

After that, it became my soothing white noise of choice. I had a television/VCR that would rewind and restart every time it reached the end, so I could sleep to the mellifluous voices of battered slutty Ashley Judd and Jeebusloving Stockard Channing all night long.

When I moved into my apartment, I no longer had a television in my room, so I had to settle for playing classical music to drive away creepiness. I played the CD of sample music from my counterpoint class so many times, it now skips like crazy.

Last night I decided to finish my thesis, come hell or highwater (or haunting). I planned to take a nap early, then wake up and work through the night. I took my very last leftover loritab to make me nod off, forgetting that it tends to give me trippy nightmares. From 8 to 10, I slept fitfully, waking every ten minutes or so. (It always seems to be worse when I know I'm alone in the apartment- Nimsay is staying with her family this week.)

So I moved to the living room couch to sleep, and put Where the Heart Is in the VCR. By the time pregnant Novalee Nation is deserted at the Wal-Mart and Willie Jack Pickens is picking up the hitchhiker, I was dead to the world.

Mon coeur woke me up at midnight by calling to ask how the writing was going, so I got up and actually started working. I drank cup after cup of Earl Grey, ate chocolate-covered espresso beans, and occasionally had to get up from the computer to wiggle around and slap myself awake. From then until 9:50 AM, I cut, extended, defined and refined.

The printer choked on the 37-page draft, so I e-mailed it to myself to print at the honors office, showered, and took another 45-minute nap before going to school at noon.

It might be horrible, it might need lots of revision, but by golly, I've done the majority of the work. That feels good.

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