Whew
Well that was a long week. I'm never procrastinating again. Three papers due between last Friday and yesterday, and none of them at any particular stage of development when I went to my final seminar meeting eight days ago. So I sit down to read the six books for paper the first (a review essay, meaning, well, you really have to read the books) when my asshole brother sends me linkage to The Adventures of Pete & Pete on YouTube, which pretty well fucks my concentration and my planning. OK, to be fair, I was almost done with the review essay by the time he sent it. Still, serious sabotage. I try to read about Mary Rowlandson, but Pete is a rangeboy in a bear suit, so you gotta do what you gotta do, you know?
Three or four episodes later, I've completed a miraculous 5 p.m. Saturday completion of the Mary Rowlandson project (which it now occurs to me would be an excellent title for a science fiction novel) and begin my propspectus for my MA thesis, by which I mean I watched Rushmore and wasted time. Sunday it seemed to me that the words draft and proposal obviated the need to do any serious work on my prospectus. I checked out a stack of books from the library and contented myself with tracing the lineage of serious historians who signed the 60-year-old cards in the older books. Monday it seemed to me that the word thesis outweighed draft, so I got nervous got coffee and began furiously scribbling notes and downloading review articles, all the while cursing Dan to the heavens for the Nickelodeon diversion.
At about 1 a.m. it occured to me that Canguilhem and Foucault already said pretty much what I was suggesting I might discover, but decided that was a minor difficulty and that I could always just throw in a footnote. Made some more coffee.
But somehow the slapdash draft failed to quite dash as I wanted it to, and I wrote without repreive--without so much as YouTube--between dinner and around 11 the next morning. At which point I didn't so much 'finish' as submit the paper, and realized that sleep was going to be problematic, given that I just finished my third or fourth pot of coffee in a 24-hour period. So I watched this bear eat a caribou on YouTube, and more Pete & Pete, and walked in the mist by the lake, grateful to the fog for obscuring Indiana from view.
I am absolutely not working on revising that paper today (asshole professor wants a revision on January 3, can you believe that? What, am I supposed to work in December?) and, being out of practice, welcome notes on how to actually do something fun, as opposed to just procrastinating.
Three or four episodes later, I've completed a miraculous 5 p.m. Saturday completion of the Mary Rowlandson project (which it now occurs to me would be an excellent title for a science fiction novel) and begin my propspectus for my MA thesis, by which I mean I watched Rushmore and wasted time. Sunday it seemed to me that the words draft and proposal obviated the need to do any serious work on my prospectus. I checked out a stack of books from the library and contented myself with tracing the lineage of serious historians who signed the 60-year-old cards in the older books. Monday it seemed to me that the word thesis outweighed draft, so I got nervous got coffee and began furiously scribbling notes and downloading review articles, all the while cursing Dan to the heavens for the Nickelodeon diversion.
At about 1 a.m. it occured to me that Canguilhem and Foucault already said pretty much what I was suggesting I might discover, but decided that was a minor difficulty and that I could always just throw in a footnote. Made some more coffee.
But somehow the slapdash draft failed to quite dash as I wanted it to, and I wrote without repreive--without so much as YouTube--between dinner and around 11 the next morning. At which point I didn't so much 'finish' as submit the paper, and realized that sleep was going to be problematic, given that I just finished my third or fourth pot of coffee in a 24-hour period. So I watched this bear eat a caribou on YouTube, and more Pete & Pete, and walked in the mist by the lake, grateful to the fog for obscuring Indiana from view.
I am absolutely not working on revising that paper today (asshole professor wants a revision on January 3, can you believe that? What, am I supposed to work in December?) and, being out of practice, welcome notes on how to actually do something fun, as opposed to just procrastinating.