I really wish...

... I could wave a magic wand and just be completely and totally done with Harvard. I never find myself short of cartoon ideas or odds and ends to blog about--if anything, there are so many things that annoy/upset and/or interest me that I only wish I had more time to write or draw (for example, I've been meaning to write a really long post on the homicidal idiocy that is abstinence-only education for some time now).

And it's not that I don't care about my schoolwork--if anything, I care too much. I've been lucky that a few of my professors have allowed me to do alternative final projects that didn't involve large amounts of writing--documentary videos, or photo-comics, or sets of illustrations. But when I sit down at the computer and try to write a 10-15 page social science paper in a size 12 font with 1-inch margins, I start quivering with terror that my favorite professor is going to think I sound like an idiot... and I can barely force myself to write my name at the top of the paper, never mind write the first sentence. For example, I'm currently trying to complete a paper about attempts to understand post-colonial neighbors-killing-neighbors horrors like the Rwandan genocide or the India-Pakistan Partition. But faced with words like this... (from Mahmood Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers)

I asked [a survivor] whether there were no intermarriages in the secteur. "Too many." About one-third of Tutsi daughters would be married to Hutu... . "Tutsi women married to Hutu were killed. I know only one who survived. The administration forced Hutu men to kill their Tutsi wives before they go to kill anyone else--to prove they were true Interahamwe. One man tried to refuse. He was told that he must choose between the wife and himself. He then chose to save his own life. Another Hutu man rebuked him for having killed his Tutsi wife. That man was also killed..."

...I feel much more like crying than doing an academic analysis. But as I doubt a pile of soggy tissues would garner a passing grade, I'm just going to have to do my best to say something intelligent.