Procrastination

It’s 2:32 a.m. I have an eight page paper due on the performance history of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” due in seven hours, and I’m watching Rick tell Ilsa to get on the plane at the end of “Casablanca” for the umpteenth time. Eventually, during the tearful finale, the propellers will buzz and Rick will say the immortal line “We’ll always have Paris.”
I stare at the television enjoying the performances by Bogart and Bergman all the while occasionally shooting a glance at the blank computer screen with the cursor blinking like the remaining seconds of a bomb waiting to explode in my face. Yet I sit there, watching my movie, pondering what reason I can give my professor to get an extension on this paper. Maybe I just won’t show up to class, and get it done, and then email it to her later. It won’t be a big deal. I’ll be able to get it done. Now it’s 3:32 a.m. Marlon Brando is waxing poetic about how he “coulda been a contenda” in the back of a car in “On the Waterfront.” The paper now has an opening paragraph, but is truly no closer to eight pages than it was one hour ago.
I tell myself, “I can get this done. If I just write two pages an hour, I’ll be in the clear.”
I never once thought that these bad habits I had cultivated, over these nearly eight semesters of college, would come back to bite me in the ass. So, I learned to procrastinate with the best of them because I didn’t think I had to work that hard.
Procrastination is one of those problematic little phenomena that college students have created to make excuses for why our homework isn’t done, and why we stay up until 4 a.m. working on a paper. We’ve made up little jokes about it and create Facebook status updates about it, and yet it’s something that doesn’t go away.
As a young student in elementary school and high school, the actual day-to-day homework part was easy. I barely had to break a sweat to get things done because either I got it done at home the night before, or there was enough time during the day that you could easily get things done before that appropriate class period.
This ailment has never been limited to just me though. We’re a nation of procrastinators who desperately want our pleasures right away, but who take a laissez-faire attitude about getting anything accomplished on time. Professors would rather continue doing their own research for their upcoming journal article on the obtuse influence of Balzac on Faulkner for the Publication for the Modern Languages Association than grade a stack of essays, Congress takes weeks at a time to call a vote on Washington D.C. snow removal because it can, and students just wait until the last possible moment to finish a short essay on the Franco-Prussian War.
I am no different. Instead of doing my homework, I found other things to occupy my brain with that I found more important that accomplishing my tasks on time. I watched films, read books for leisure, watched television, and masturbated; anything that was an easy alternative to reading bullshit religion books or doing pre-calculus. I got away with it then because I was smart, and I could talk my way out of the potential problems that could occur. I began to believe my own hype. I believed that my contribution to the academic world was such that the world would be lesser for not having me in it.
That’s the trickiest part about procrastination; it’s not just limited to the unknowledgeable, the lazy, or the unmotivated. It can be the smartest kid in the class, because he doesn’t think he has to work that hard, or an extremely driven young lady who assumes that under the time crunch she can churn out the first chapter of her novel in four hours.
It’s never a clear cut-and-dry reason for why people do this either. In some cases, people just start too late. They assume they have a smaller task in front of them that ends up being a climb up Kilimanjaro. In my case, and I would assume in the case of many others, this pressure could be a fear of failure or even worse, a fear of success. I want reassurance that my work is adequate or even good, and I don’t want to feel the sting of a B+ when I know in my heart that the paper was a C-. Maybe we’re afraid to grow up? College is a time when we’re told to enjoy it, and savor each moment, because it all goes downhill from here. So why not try to prolong the experience. What’s another year of school when you could be out in the lousy world of mortgages, student loan bills, and no job?
So what do I do? I retreat; I avoid; I accept defeat. Many other procrastinators are able to break through their coulda, woulda, shouldas and get their work done. They can see the benefit of barreling through and accomplishing the goal no matter how haphazard the results may look or sound. But I can’t seem to. So I walk around the academic buildings like a feral cat; jumpy, disorientated, and anxiety-ridden. I take different hallways to avoid the potential confrontations with professors, who only want to help, but that I assume are out to reprimand me. Such is the life of a procrastinator.
Curing this disease is an on-going process. It’s hopefully something that won’t last me the rest of my life, but maybe that’s too unrealistic. I want to eventually be able to graduate from college, get out, and live my life. I want to work as a professional writer, and have children, but none of those things can happen until I finish the paper. And that will only happen when I finally stop trying to ignore that blinking cursor, put aside my insecurities, and get to work.