Ah, a good thwonking headcold, that's what every girl needs the day before her Junior Comprehensive Exams start! Yessir, nothing can match the novelty of feeling the pressure shift inside your ear canals, learning about the exciting connection that exists between your sinus cavities and the back of your neck, the gambols of poking your swollen lymph nodes, or, best of all, at last being able to do a killer Janis Joplin impression!

HEAD COLD, I SALUTE YOU.

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On that note, my Comprehensive Exams ("comps") are as follows. For the next three days, at 9am I will walk across campus to my department's offices and receive somewhere around two or three questions, generally broad, somewhat open-ended essay questions asking us to relate multiple works from the syllabus we've covered over three semesters.

We answer two questions; we have 24 hours in which to formulate our responses (expected to be in the neighborhood of 5 pages each). Out of those twenty-four hours, three hours total can be devoted to the actual writing, during which we are not allowed to refer to our sources. After those three hours you can edit for spelling and grammar, but not make substantive or structural alterations. (Due to tendinitis I'll be writing by hand and then dictating, or getting a friend to type up for me later.)

I'm estimating that we've somewhere around 30-ish books of material to work from, combining several sources less than booklength; ranging from the 1970s back to Ancient Mesopotamia.

After we finish on Friday at 9 am, there will be oral examinations held in May, where for a half hour each student stands before the examiners (professors from other universities also responsible for formulating the questions) and defends or clarifies the 30 pages of material they produced.

So, yeah. Am I freaking out? No, I am not. I have studied and done work and am smart; really I'm more worried about my sinus passages and my tendons. This is going to be three days of very hard work, but I have faith in my own abilities, and realize that this stuff is mostly nonsense intended to make me critically review my education (which I've been doing for the past month in preparation), as opposed to actually "testing" my absorption rate.

So hell with it, I'm gonna go have fun and compare Homer to Thomas Mann and use slightly weird metaphors and revel in the fact that I, Dylan, have done all this work: and that the reward is tangibly mine.

I'll see you on Friday, kids. Wish me luck!