Is there harm in waiting?
I think I've hit my quarter-life crisis. Grad school hasn't exactly been going well this semester--I found out on Friday, actually, that a requisite class that I actually dropped this semester on some good advice won't be offered again until Spring '09 (note that I'm theoretically supposed to graduate in Summer '08). Personal failings--whether they be based off failed actions, incorrect assumptions, whatever--have been hitting harder than usual. Even when I'm told I did something well, all I can see are the mistakes I made or the simplicity of the task. Example: I'm consistently told I do a very good job running the projector at Riverview, but really, how hard is it to pay attention to what's going on and figure out when to click the mouse button? Rocket science it ain't, y'know? And projects--I always wait until the last second to meet my deadlines. I already missed one deadline (I don't feel too horrible about it since it involved a bit of misinterpretation on my part), but I'm waiting for the deadline that I completely miss. Heck, I'm procrastinating on two projects by writing this entry.
Who do I want to be? I'm sick of being the lazy, disorganized slob I tend to be when given the opportunity. Procrastination isn't horrible, but I'm sick of allowing myself to ignore projects almost completely until just a night or two before the project is due. Is this going to characterize my entire life? Am I going to be sitting there at an office job twenty years from now pulling all-nighters because I didn't have my crap together? I'm sick of disappointing myself.
From The Penultimate Peril:
"You've seen your share of wicked people, Baudelaires, but you've seen your share of people as noble as you are."
"I'm not sure we are noble," Klause said quietly, flipping the pages of his commonplace book. "We caused those accidents at the lumbermill. We're responsible for the destruction of the hospital. We helped start the fire that destroyed Madame Lulu's archival library. We--"
"Enough," Dewey interrupted gently, putting a hand on Klaus's shoulder. "You're noble enough, Baudelaires. That's all we can ask for in this world."
The middle Baudelaire hung his head, so he was leaning against the sub-sub-librarian, and his sisters huddled against him, and all four volunteers stood for a moment silently in the dark. Tears fell from the eyes of the orphans--all four of them--and, as with many tears shed at night, they could not have said exactly why they were crying, although I know why I am crying as I type this, and it is not because of the onions that someone is slicing in the next room, or because of the wretched curry he is planning on making with them. I am crying because Dewey Denouement was wrong. He was not wrong when he said the Baudelaires were noble enough, although I suppose many people might argue about such a thing, if they were sitting around a room together without a deck of cards or something good to read. Dewey was wrong when he said that being noble enough is all we can ask for in this world, because we can ask for more than that. We can ask for a second helping of pound cake, even though someone has made it quite clear that we will not get any. We can ask for a new watercolor set, even though it will be pointed out that we never used the old one, and that all of the paints dried into a crumbly mess. We can ask for Japanese fighting fish, to keep us company in our bedroom, and we can ask for a special camera that will allow us to take photographs even in the dark, for obvious reasons, and we can ask for an extra sugar cube in our coffees in the morning and an extra pillow in our beds at night. We can ask for justice, and we can ask for cupcakes, and we can ask for all the soldiers in the world to lay down their weapons and join us in a rousing chorus of "Cry Me a River," if that happens to be our favorite song. But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or two, somewhere in our travels, who will tell us that we are noble enough, whether it is true or not. We can ask for someone who will say, "You are noble enough," and remind us of our good qualities when we have forgotten them, or cast them into doubt. Most of us, of course, have parents and friends who tell us such things, after we have lost a badminton tournament or failed to capture a notorious counterfeiter who we discovered aboard a certain motorboat. But the Baudelaire orphans, of course, had no living parents, and their closest friends were high in the sky, in a self-sustaining hot air mobile home, battling eagles and a terrible henchman with hooks instead of hands, so the acquaintance of Dewey Denouement, and the comforting words he had uttered, were a blessing.
And now for something completely different: One of these things is not like the other... one of these things just doesn't belong