grateful for: crayola bold-color thin line markers

As the semester's end nears (two weeks of classes left! then a week of finals!), I find myself in the tangle of my own ideas for three separate papers all due at the same time. This year the tangle is complicated by other strands of responsibility, including keeping the writing center running during finals, prepping some pieces to send off for publication consideration, knowing that I must study enough French over break to take the exam next term, and choosing my comprehensive exam fields and committee for those heartwrenchingly important tests this time next year.

Thank goodness for markers.

I've loved these markers since middle school, colored the ink out of several boxes of them. Who could resist azure, copper, and raspberry? What brainstorming page isn't made more comprehensible by notes in teal and primrose? How could plum and emerald help but nudge a plan for the future toward brilliance or make a to-do list less impossible? (The only letdown name is golden yellow. Really? Golden yellow? Couldn't it at least have been goldenrod? Nevertheless, it's a gorgeous shade of yellow and has made many a nuanced sun and flower-center on my doodled pages.)