Welcome To Hampshire Post-Thanksgiving!

My friends, it is final paper season at Hampshire College. For those of you who think a school lacking both tests and grades must be a rather pleasant place to be toward the end of the semester, you are all kinds of wrong. I present you these lovely pictures of Jack and Katie working on the myriad final projects and papers that must be completed, and evidence of my own work.

In this picture, you will notice a very long color-coded list of notes on my wall. This is how I research things. Ideally, my wall would be a white board, and I could cover it with the various things I find in books and draw arrows and underline things and feel important. Instead, I make lists and try to pretend it’s enough. That list is for my WWWII paper, which is about Germans.

This picture shows an awful lot of books. These are the books I currently have out from the library, and I will give you a complete list, so that you may understand my life.
Left pile:
Ethnic Drag
A Traveler Disguised
Adventures in Yiddishland
Queer Jews
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
Eros and Jews
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Unheroic Conduct
People of the Body
Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction
(pile of papers is an article called Queer Yiddishkeit: Theory and Practice)
Another copy of the Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer because I got confused once
The paper at the bottom is my Yiddish syllabus
Right pile:
Hitler’s War and the Germans
Tagebuchblaetter (Diary pages)
Ich glaube an den Fuehrer (I believe in the Fuehrer)
My planner
Copies of the Dybbuk and God of Vengeance
Shiksa: the Gentile Woman in the Jewish World
Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchenouff and Argentine-Jewish Writing
The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas
Outwitting History
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Notebooks from 2 classes
A really giant pile of things I either have read for Yiddish or need to read for Yiddish because the general homework doesn’t stop in the midst of writing a paper
Also I guess there’s a copy or two of the Omen cause they got mixed up in there

Sure, I love my life. I’m 5 pages into my 15 page Yiddish paper, and have used exactly 1/3 of the notes I took from all my research, so I’m confident, if I can only find the time to finish the paper (and the mental stability). My WWWII paper is at 7 pages and needs to be 10, so there’s some editing to do there, but not until after Thursday (when the draft of the Yiddish paper is due). I will get through because I actually have way less work than most people (due to very good planning on my part) but giant piles of books scare and excite me.