Is it me?

If I want to graduate by September (and have the possibility of getting the Visiting Lecturer position in Rome) I have to complete one spread a day for the next thirty days. I guess each spread will take between ten and fifteen hours.

By the logic of this school, I should need no more information than this - my course becomes absolutely clear. I work between twelve and seventeen hours a day for the next thirty days and then I will work without stopping for three or four days to complete formatting, lay out, text, and redlining.

By any other logic deserving the name, the task is impossible. The total hours between me and completion are around 450 - 500. That is a quarter of a working year, not a month. Forty hours times fifty weeks is two thousand hours. Five hundred is one quarter of two thousand.

The advice I get from people within the school is - put in the time and graduate with what you have. This seems morally wrong to me. I have been working on this for the past twenty months; do I really want to do less than I am able just to meet and arbitrary date?

Of course, there is something very significant attached to this otherwise meaningless date. Two things if you count tuition.

Is my task to finish or to finish the best possible product?

Is it better to live a in a self-destructive way for a short period (and hate doing it) or allow myself longer and work in a way I enjoy? If I allow myself this latitude am I ever going to finish?

Given that I am here so that I can continue on the cursus honorum towards a professorship, does everything else become secondary to whatever advances me on that path?

Is it me or is this becoming much more complicated than it ought?

I try to live by simple precepts - don't cross picket lines, don't touch women who are already with someone, don't fuck with a streak, do what's in front of me to do, eat when I am hungry sleep when I am tired. And so on. The great secret of most things is while they are all enormously complicated, what we ought do about them is very simple. In most cases we ought do nothing. In this school I have never found the advice "get some sleep and eat more" to be inappropriate. I find it very perplexing to be in a situation that perplexes me.