Finals Week Is Coming

Today was the final meeting of my Rousseau class. We toasted our now-beloved (I hope!) Jean-Jacques Rousseau by holding class at my little house, just steps away from the campus, where we discussed the final five "Walks" in his beautiful late-life collection of essays, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as well as eating food mentioned in some of his books (crusty baguettes, creamy French cheeses, grapes presumably gathered during the grape harvest at Clarens in his novel Julie, and cherry turnovers to commemorate the cherry-picking idyll in The Confessions). We also played my favorite Rousseau-themed game: I taped names of various Rousseau characters to students' backs, and they had to guess who they were by asking yes/no questions of the others in the class. Some of these were very tricky, especially "Monsieur Dudding," which was the alias Rousseau assumed when he decided to pretend he was an Englishman on one of his travels.

So now finals week is practically upon us. Everywhere is evidence of serious study about to begin. Gobin United Methodist Church has a midnight breakfast for late-night studiers; the Blue Door Cafe has a special menu of "study snacks"; the Prindle has extended hours, and I believe that milk and cookies will be available.

I've decided that I'm going to play the role of bad student trying to salvage the semester. Readers of this blog know that I've spent my semester at DePauw having tons and tons of fun, and being (if I may say so) a wonderful citizen of the university and community, but getting very little work of my own done. I have been a party girl, and now it's time to become a grind.

I think I'm going to throw myself into my own finals week, trying to get done some of the projects I've neglected all term. I can fuel myself with the Gobin breakfast, the special Blue Door snacks, and the abundant milk and cookies on offer all over the campus. This will not help with the weight issues I've been writing about. But it may well help with the work issues. And, heck, finals week is not the week to think about losing weight, right?

Milk and cookies, here I come!