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…they keep Conor sane.

I’m a shadow of a person. My life is in a state of disarray of immeasurable proportions. My bedroom is upside down, and I make Lindsay Lohan look like she’s got her s**t together. No amount of Red Bull or attempts to inject any form of structure into my life with iCal are making it better right now. However, before Sarah, my editor in the Graduate Admissions & Services Office, requests a page-one rewrite, I’d better turn this around.

These last few weeks, we’ve been lost in the throes of end-of-semester assignments.

In Business & Legal we’ve had to prepare in-depth analyses of studio structures and independent film marketing strategies and present solutions to a series of real-life film related legal scenarios.

For our Writing for Producers class, we submitted a comparative analysis of both the 1946 and 1981 adaptations of The Postman Always Rings Twice and just handed in our final set of formal producer’s notes for the semester, on a feature currently in production.

Cinema Studies 1 required a ten-page aesthetic analysis of an adaptation. I wrote about Brokeback Mountain as a revisionist Western.

And, in our Acquisition, Development & Presentation class, following a guest lecture last week on transmedia storytelling, we are devising and will present a transmedia project later this week. We also just submitted production binders for our fall semester productions.

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To round it off, I spent four days last week on the set of a short film I produced called The Articulators and had my first development meeting with my feature film writer.

Taking this all into consideration, here is the first draft of a letter I would like to file with the school:

Dear Columbia,

I did not come here to learn this much stuff. Stop it.

Love, Conor.

In the past, I’ve somewhat implied the weight of the workload and level of commitment required for this program, and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. However, if my primary concern right now is that I’m simply learning too much, that’s not a bad thing at all. Just be prepared to buckle up!

I can’t overstate how much I’m looking forward to the winter break. The fifteen of us are counting down the days. It will be good to get some distance from this first semester and reevaluate all that we’ve taken in, but mostly we’re looking forward to some much-needed rest. I may even watch some movies.