The end is near.

I honestly can't fathom how two years can go by so quickly. It actually scares me a little bit. I mean, time is suddenly flying. Is it my age? Does it just go by faster and faster and faster? I've heard from older folks that this is the case, but the last two years -- really...too fast.

So I found out today that my committee approved my MA film studies certificate. I should explain: the film studies program, while within the English dept, is technically an interdisciplinary program, so my MA is English Lit, with an MA certificate in film studies. And while I didn't take all film seminars -- I did take some lit seminars, and quite a bit of theory -- my MA should probably be in film studies with a certificate in English lit/theory instead. But whatever. They don't do it that way. Anyway, it feels good to have that done and official. And since I wrote my MA thesis last semester, I just need to write a couple decent papers for my two film seminars this semester and get a B in my required intensive French translation class (not as easy as it sounds -- it's actually a lot of work, but so far I'm pulling about an A minus, or a B plus, I think), and then the old MA will be complete.

And as a little cherry on top -- actually, "cherry on top" is not really a treat for me because I hate maraschino cherries...I do love bing cherries, but those aren't the kind they put "on top" of things -- one of my seminar papers might be published as part of a book on film adaptation (a film studies book, not a book on adaptation as craft). The paper I wrote centered on the use of nondiegetic sound in Sofia Coppola's film adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, The Virgin Suicides. (I know, it probably sounds really dull to most of you.) I'd been wanting to write about the book and the film for a long time, because I thought the film was a wonderful interpretation of a wonderful novel -- I think it's somewhat rare to love both a novel and its film adaptation -- and both Air's hypnotic music and Giovanni Ribisi's amazing voice-over blew me away when I first saw the film. So my Adaptation seminar last year was the perfect opportunity to write about the book and the use of sound in the translation to the screen. But I'll need to revise the paper a bit over the summer, and then it will be submitted to be published in the fall, along with some other grad student papers from that seminar, as well as some essays by a few established film scholars. So we'll see what happens...

But yeah, two years = not such a long time.