Monday, October 06, 2008

Procrastination Makes Me an Idiot

My graduation with a Masters has probably fallen back to May 2009. If I’m lucky, I won’t have to pay double (becoming a stupid tax). If I’m lucky, I can still finish my graduation exam and the final, final paper this semester (Unless they have a more awesome way to graduate next semester).

How did this happen? Part of it was the week lost to Gustav. I had planned for that week to go to SLU and get everything in line, instead, the state went into emergency mode for a week.

Yeah, but you could have picked up all planning on September 8th? This is where I was a damn lazy git who floated along with inertia. Kept telling myself I’d find a paper tomorrow, I’d email tomorrow, I’d go to campus tomorrow. Until it was October and I woke up.

So now I have three emails I’m waiting for responses on, and have scheduled a trip to the campus on Tuesday to turn in my study carrel and see if I can still use the gym (I paid through Dec. 2008 but I’m not taking classes). And I’m going through the computer files for a paper I’d like to expand.

I guess there lies the rub. I don’t really want to do any of them. Did I have my heart set on the fiction thesis too long? Is it fear that I’m going to be exposed as a horrid scholar and I’ve been faking it for my entire life? (This is an actual psychologist-studied fear. I just can’t remember what it is called.) Am I burnt out again or just bored and want something new? All of the above?

Regardless, I still want the diploma that I can hopefully use to leverage more pay at the DOI (not holding my breath though). If not, other opportunities maybe enhanced by being able to say “I have an English Master’s.” And I do feel a little disappointed in myself. It’s the exact same behavior I showed as an undergrad when my Scholars’ College these would not gel. But I don’t have the option of switching colleges and scraping by this time. Which is a good thing, I’d rather not reenact the nervous breakdown on the Dean’s secretary.

I’m not beating myself up about it, just ruefully wondering if I need an assistant/keeper. Maybe I’d be better with schedules if I worried about disappointing someone. Disappointing myself hasn’t made much of a difference. :p

Found four possibilities for final, final paper and the need to reorganize my SLU folder holding all the written drafts. Apparently, some semesters I didn’t bother with making a folder for the class. I wanted to have at least five and I should make it six since two choices have the same professor. My computer is acting up again: deciding what programs I should go to and not opening what I tell it to open. And it usually comes back to a script getting frozen in Firefox. Or Firefox deciding to freeze because I have too many tabs open. I can’t close them if I can’t read them! Add computer tweaking to the list of things to do.

Cleaned up the folder and I give up on the paper search. If I can’t make one of those four work, I got bigger issues.

Read Free!
The BookWorm

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