Parties with food.

It was my original intent to begin this with "This week has been a monster of a week."

But I can't say that. I've had worse weeks. Worse days. Worse months. And even if that weren't the case, this week has been full of too much good and I have smiled too much for me to call it a "monster."

It has been tough, though.

This was the last full week of classes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week will be the last three days of classes this semester, and finals week starts on that Friday, a week from tomorrow. Or today, considering that most, if not all of you will be reading this as Friday is well underway.

I pulled an all-nighter Tuesday. I was expected to show up to my pop culture class on Wednesday with a 10-page paper in my possession, and I had nothing written at the beginning of Tuesday. That paper was also supposed to have at least 16 sources, but since it was only peer review day, and the final draft was not yet due, I didn't even try to make that happen. I just decided to squeeze ten pages out of the sources I already had so that I would have something to present to my classmates.

Wednesday night, the plan I had made in my head was to cram for the music theory test I had the next morning. But after having been awake for a number of hours that I don't care to calculate, that plan fell through. I fell asleep in the early evening, and slept for at least 12 hours. Sometime in the night, when I woke up briefly, I told myself that I would try to study before class the next morning. The next morning, this morning, came and I tried to wake myself up on several occasions, but it wasn't working. I would wake up, read a few tweets, try to study the pieces of music I was supposed to analyze for the test, something, and I would drift off again. So I would tell myself, "Okay, surely if I let myself sleep just a little bit longer, I'll be able to wake up and still have time to get some real studying done."

I went through that process at least three times. Even with 12+ hours of sleep, my body did not want to be awake. All that sleep was probably why I was so groggy. I can't remember the last time I slept that long. I average approximately half that. So I imagine my body was greedily saying, "Hey, I like this. Let's keep going."

But at about an hour before I needed to leave for school, I was half awake enough to check the time, and when I realized how late it was getting and how much I really needed to study, I made myself stand up and go downstairs. Getting up and moving helped, but I was still half asleep for a while.

I studied as much as I could. Which wasn't much. And I walked into the test feeling immensely unprepared. Mercifully, it seemed to be much easier than I expected. I'm hoping I got a good grade.

My Facebook status from Tuesday read as follows: "Emily Lynn Harmon has all the symptoms of no time and high stress. Well, maybe not all of them." When I say not all of them, I was considering that fact that I have had neither a mental, nervous, nor emotional breakdown. Which is good. But one specific symptom I was thinking of was my complete disinterest in food. There are two things that push eating off of my radar: busyness and any feelings that could be put in the category of "not good," which applies to stress. Some people turn to food when they feel bad. Not me. I'm much more inclined to eat when I'm happy. And while I can't say that I've been unhappy, I haven't consistently been the jolliest person the past couple of weeks. Thus, my eating has been more sporadic than usual. I stopped long enough for a few minutes last week to think about what had been the last thing I had eaten, and I realized that in the previous approximately 40 hours all I had eaten was a little turkey sandwich and a few walnuts. And during that time, I had: walked all over my college campus; climbed a lot of stairs; carried heavy loads of books and whatnot; driven to another state and back, taking in a concert while in said state; and gotten even less sleep than usual. I'm pretty sure this isn't a good thing. I think somewhere I was told that a body isn't supposed to operate on such limited resources.

At the moment, I feel as if a great deal of pressure has been released. When that happens, it's easy to feel like celebrating, to forget all obligations and throw yourself a party. A party with food. That party doesn't have to have any attendants aside from yourself. Some really great parties happen solo. But whomever the attendants, a party is certainly longed for.

But in reality, there's still a lot of pressure on me. Pressure that I can't ignore if I hope to do well in my classes. It's just exponentially smaller than what it was. So I can't drop everything and party just yet. Although eating the party food before it spoils may not be a bad idea.

My prayer this weekend is that I will stay focused when all I want to do is go read a book, bake a cake, sing all day, or write for a few hours on a subject that has not been dictated to me by anyone else, in whatever form I choose. I have to keep reminding myself that there's only a week and half until it's done. That's one aspect of school that I'm grateful for: I know at some point it will be done.