If you came this way, taking the route you would be likely to take ...
Getting old, Karen Lee. Though not old enough. Sometimes, nowadays, it seems to me like all my friends have grown up and moved on past these things, leaving me still enmeshed in adolescence, a strange feeling for me, having grown up convinced that I was not only (secretly) older and smarter than everyone else around me, but better than them too.
Sometimes when everyone around me has finished a paper and I am still working on it at 2am - an increasingly common experience for me, in recent times - I get this hysterical, malign feeling that I am beginning to see in a broader context. What have I been doing all this time? There's never a good answer. It's always, gee, I don't know ... and it's not that I hadn't seen that I would come to this pass either (black coffee, night without sleep, fluorescent lights in my room blazing), it's more that I didn't believe that this could happen to me. Another common theme. Somehow, I always think confidently, I will be propelled to the end of this paper by unseen forces, in a painless manner and without any effort on my part. ... doesn't happen. As with so many things.
I think the sense that something is inevitable - it is inevitable that I will finish the paper, because everyone else has, and in any case, because I've got to do it - is one that I have always easily confused with the notion that it will happen to me. If that makes sense. Because something must happen, therefore it will happen, and if it must happen, then it can surely happen without my doing anything! So I don't do anything. Faulty reasoning, I guess, things happen because you make them happen. Write your goddamned essay.
Similar situation: the rest of my life. No one wants adolescence to last, we're all about getting on, growing up, moving on, there's a sense that this isn't the real world, always we draw that dichotomy: things don't work like this in the real world, when I'm out there ... and really, it isn't the real world. But it's something, no? It's all we've got, anyway, and ... in any case, that's not my point. It is inevitable that this (whatever it is) must end, that whether we will or no, we are to be thrust into that real world, and subsequently endure our going hence even as our coming thither - something wrong with my grammar there - so many things are inevitable. Growing up is inevitable. When people say this too shall pass they're right, all things do, that is also inevitable. You'll get over it, another inevitable.
These things are about as inevitable as finishing my paper, however, and as you, my procrastinatory comrades, well know from your own lives, while that is inevitable it is also going to be excruciating. Sleepless nights, black coffee, lights blazing: tired, incoherent and dead-eyed for days. It has always been my mistake to assume that the universe will order my life for me, that because something must happen, is inevitable, why then, what need I trouble myself with it? I read too much in my youth. Determinism! Anything that must happen will happen, however you try to avoid it, or, by extension, if you lie back and wait for it to happen, and refuse to work for it. Burn all the spinning-wheels, dip your child in the Styx, pierce your son's feet and leave him to die lest he kill you: why trouble yourself? The universe will have its way. By that same logic, if something must happen, why work to make it happen? Fate will painlessly see to it.
Well, definitional quibbles. "Inevitable", I suppose, simply isn't, if you have to work at it. Or maybe it's inevitable that you were going to make it happen. Point stands, though, that if I don't do it, this essay isn't going to get done. And that if I don't grow up, I'm going to be stuck here forever. And neither of these things is something that happens to you, they're things that you do. And (as with paper-writing) the longer you try to leave it to fate, the worse it will be for you when you do get down to it. Accept that fate isn't going to take a hand and life will be moderate, proceed on an even keel, on the acceptance, from the outset, that you have to take care of it yourself? None of this desperation. Typical of me, I suppose, to draw the analogy to schoolwork, but ... underneath my formal education a more useful course of instruction was meanwhile in progress; you know how it is ... oh, get on with it. Things to be done.
Sometimes when everyone around me has finished a paper and I am still working on it at 2am - an increasingly common experience for me, in recent times - I get this hysterical, malign feeling that I am beginning to see in a broader context. What have I been doing all this time? There's never a good answer. It's always, gee, I don't know ... and it's not that I hadn't seen that I would come to this pass either (black coffee, night without sleep, fluorescent lights in my room blazing), it's more that I didn't believe that this could happen to me. Another common theme. Somehow, I always think confidently, I will be propelled to the end of this paper by unseen forces, in a painless manner and without any effort on my part. ... doesn't happen. As with so many things.
I think the sense that something is inevitable - it is inevitable that I will finish the paper, because everyone else has, and in any case, because I've got to do it - is one that I have always easily confused with the notion that it will happen to me. If that makes sense. Because something must happen, therefore it will happen, and if it must happen, then it can surely happen without my doing anything! So I don't do anything. Faulty reasoning, I guess, things happen because you make them happen. Write your goddamned essay.
Similar situation: the rest of my life. No one wants adolescence to last, we're all about getting on, growing up, moving on, there's a sense that this isn't the real world, always we draw that dichotomy: things don't work like this in the real world, when I'm out there ... and really, it isn't the real world. But it's something, no? It's all we've got, anyway, and ... in any case, that's not my point. It is inevitable that this (whatever it is) must end, that whether we will or no, we are to be thrust into that real world, and subsequently endure our going hence even as our coming thither - something wrong with my grammar there - so many things are inevitable. Growing up is inevitable. When people say this too shall pass they're right, all things do, that is also inevitable. You'll get over it, another inevitable.
These things are about as inevitable as finishing my paper, however, and as you, my procrastinatory comrades, well know from your own lives, while that is inevitable it is also going to be excruciating. Sleepless nights, black coffee, lights blazing: tired, incoherent and dead-eyed for days. It has always been my mistake to assume that the universe will order my life for me, that because something must happen, is inevitable, why then, what need I trouble myself with it? I read too much in my youth. Determinism! Anything that must happen will happen, however you try to avoid it, or, by extension, if you lie back and wait for it to happen, and refuse to work for it. Burn all the spinning-wheels, dip your child in the Styx, pierce your son's feet and leave him to die lest he kill you: why trouble yourself? The universe will have its way. By that same logic, if something must happen, why work to make it happen? Fate will painlessly see to it.
Well, definitional quibbles. "Inevitable", I suppose, simply isn't, if you have to work at it. Or maybe it's inevitable that you were going to make it happen. Point stands, though, that if I don't do it, this essay isn't going to get done. And that if I don't grow up, I'm going to be stuck here forever. And neither of these things is something that happens to you, they're things that you do. And (as with paper-writing) the longer you try to leave it to fate, the worse it will be for you when you do get down to it. Accept that fate isn't going to take a hand and life will be moderate, proceed on an even keel, on the acceptance, from the outset, that you have to take care of it yourself? None of this desperation. Typical of me, I suppose, to draw the analogy to schoolwork, but ... underneath my formal education a more useful course of instruction was meanwhile in progress; you know how it is ... oh, get on with it. Things to be done.