intellectual endurance training.

It's finals week, and I've figured it all out: I need to write at least six to seven pages every day for the next ten days if I have any hope of finishing everything on time. This sounds pretty manageable, until you realize that writing six decent pages is not entirely a piece of cake, and that, once you've been writing that much for a few days in a row, the chances of remaining at the top of your intellectual game decline steadily. So, by next Friday, I will probably be writing in gibberish.

I've started to think of grad school as one very long intellectual marathon; using that analogy, I really need to work on increasing my brain stamina. Perhaps listening to bad pop songs on repeat, eating fried egg sandwiches for dinner every night and failing to do my laundry are not the best ways to train for this marathon? And shit, when you put it that way, my life sounds pathetic.