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I’m really starting to look forward to when I graduate and get a full-time job. You know, so I can relax.

There was a time when getting a 9-5 sounded scary. Eight hours a day, five days a week? The repetition alone was enough to make me cringe. However, once I stop and actually take my current schedule into consideration, 40 hours a week is starting to sound like a fantastic way to wind down for the next 40 years.

For the last month, according to my very rough calculations on a sleep-deprived mind, I’ve been averaging something more like fourteen hour days, six days a week, or right around 80 hours every week. The last two weeks have been even worse than the average. I get up between 7am and 8am, do homework until it’s time for work or meetings, spend the next six or seven hours on campus working, and then come home and work until between 2am and 3am. Sure, I take breaks in there. I eat one to four times a day. I go to the bathroom to expel the exhausted caffeine. I pull the cat out of the sink or off of my laptop. I think I might even have a girlfriend around here somewhere. But I figure I’d probably take breaks working a 9-5, too. What a sweet deal.

And the weekends aren’t any better, either. Last Sunday, for example, I decided I was going to sleep in. I stayed up extra late, until 3am or so, just to make sure I was good and exhausted, and then headed to bed. My mind had me back awake by 8:30am. So, I got up and started working. There’s just no winning sometimes.

The good and bad news, of course, is that I’m almost done. I’ve something like eight weeks to go until I’m graduated. Some weeks will be worse than this one. I don’t plan to sleep between March 18 and March 22, for instance, as I’ll be planning a major conference presentation while simultaneously working on my creative component, developing a technical communication teaching unit, and working for the grad college. I might have a freelance gig in there too. However, sometime in mid-April, I fully intend to exhale. My creative component will be done, and I’ll still have a 30ish page annotated bibliography to turn in for my class, but that doesn’t sound as scary as the rest.

Of course, that’s when Dana will be getting ~really~ stressed. So maybe I’ll wait to celebrate until May. Graduation is May 6, I think, by the by.