Procrastination: Why do I do this, again?
I am the queen of procrastination. Don’t try to deny it. I wrote an entire thesis in two weeks after my adviser remarked (in a strained and worried tone) that she had no idea what my point was.
No, I don’t mean rewrote. Wrote. Yeah, ok, the research was done, but you write a complete, polished, revised 70-page paper in two weeks. From scratch. Using an entirely different thesis than the one your adviser didn’t get.
Unless you can beat that, I don’t want to hear about your Procrastination Skillz.
Anyway. I don’t understand why I procrastinate. Or I do: It’s because I dread the work. I hate the thought of sitting down and slogging through… everything. Seriously.
And yet, once I get going, I love it. Case in point: I kept putting off this database application that I had to build, until I couldn’t possibly put it off any longer and still get paid. Since my need for money is greater than my dread of work, I sat down and did it and… remembered how much fun I have coding things. Even when it’s frustrating… like when the code not only doesn’t do what I think it should do, it does the exact opposite and crashes a server or two, I enjoy it.
Intellectually, I know I’ll enjoy it even while I’m procrastinating and not doing it… so why do I procrastinate in the first place?
Or, to put it another way, why am I writing this post when I’m supposed to be getting ready for X and heading out to Y so I can be at Z on time, and not late, which is what I’m fixin’ to be?
My Higher-Deity-of-Choice! What is wrong with me tonight?!
Why am I still typingggggggggggg—
Bottoms Up!
I love Dressage. There’s nothing like a sport that allows you to focus on minute details and perfecting the relationship between horse and rider. Or, as one of my friends likes to say, “So you finally found something that rewards you for being anal, eh?”
But while I enjoy Dressage the most, I started out as a Hunter/Equitation rider. Actually—no. I eventually learned Hunter/Equitation. I started out as a little snot.
After eighteen months of lessons, I started trotting crossrails. I thought I was hot stuff, waving my fanny in the air over an 18” jump. And, sometimes, waving my fanny in the air over nothing at all, when Pony graciously let me test the landing first.
So when a friend announced that her birthday party would be at her house, where she had several horses, I immediately took on the role of Second Horse Expert (deferring to my friend as First Horse Expert since she was, after all, the Birthday Girl). Everyone invited began to speculate about whether we’d be able to ride the horses. And would we jump?
As Second Horse Expert, I had all the answers. “She might let us ride, because riding really isn’t as hard as you think it is,” says the girl whose first experience riding was riding double on a Western saddle. “But she won’t let us jump, because it takes years to learn to jump.” In my mind, this was technically true. After all, I’d been riding for eighteen months, which is more than a year, so the plural form would apply. At twelve years old or so, I was far too young for the irony of that statement to even blip on my radar screen. Hindsight, at they say, is a twenty-pound hammer blow to the ego.
On the day of the party, our friend tacked up her horse and jumped her around a bit, showing us all what they could do. Much to my surprise, the jumps were about six billion feet high. (Through the all-too-clear lenses of hindsight, they were about three feet.) I didn’t even know horses could jump that high. Then she dismounted, dropped the fences a foot or so, and asked if anyone else would like to jump.
I watched everyone else go, expecting total disaster any moment. Much to my surprise, it didn’t happen. And then it was my turn.
Justice, Every Story Ever Told, and the Conventions of Plot demand a fall at this point in the story. A humiliating refusal that would leave me sitting in the dust, nursing a wounded pride and sore bum. If you’d like to imagine that scene, I certainly won’t stop you; I’ll even help you sketch in some rainbows and tweeting bluebirds over my head and smirks on the faces of my classmates.
Unfortunately, the truth is rarely so predictable as fiction. I jumped just fine, and my friend even put the fences up a few holes for me. This led, the next time I took a lesson at my regular barn, to asking my instructor when she was going to put the fences up and let me jump higher, since I knew I could do it now.
And then, since some endings are inevitable even if they are delayed, my instructor just sighed, pulled me up from the ground, and said, “When you can get Pony here to go over a little jump in a straight line, we’ll talk about putting the fence heights up. Now get back on and do the jump again, and try not to fall off this time.”
A Sense of Space
I’ve never considered myself a spacial person, unless I looked at my rear end in the mirror, which definitely suffered during the years I was riding less and grading papers more.
But if you put me in a room filled with objects (say, a typical classroom and its many desks) and ask me to walk from one end to the other, I can practically guaruntee I’ll trip over a chair, run into a desk, and bang a shoulder on the door frame on my way out. Despite the fact that I’m totally sober at the time. I just seem to have a knack for running into the very things I am trying to avoid.
Most people have a “this is the path you should travel” wire that connects “this is how big the object is” and “this is how big you are” with a suitable margin for error that ensures your elbow will not hit the chalkboard when you turn around to ask your students if there are any questions. In my brain, that wire has been replaced by the sort of connection normally only seen between magnets and bits of iron.
On a related note, I’ve never been very good at pool, either. I remember in Geometry class they tried to teach us about angles by showing us diagrams of pool tables and where the balls would move if you hit them off the edge of the table and so on. When my brother went over that chapter in the book, he turned into a pool shark. When I went over that chapter, I went from being a mediocre player to barely able to hit the cue ball. I think I’m just not very good at physical science.
Now, if someone could explain movement to me in terms of nouns and verbs, we might be getting somewhere. Or science in general. You know: an atom is made up of several parts, like a compound verb, and splitting an atom is like splitting an infinitive: if you do it, the world will explode. See? I understand that. Just don’t talk to me about angles and vectors and velocity and quantum.
Anyway. The point is that I count myself lucky on the days I manage to raise a spoonful of food to my mouth and not end up with rice up my nose, so I’d appreciate it if someone would explain why, when I turn my bedroom light off and head for bed, I know exactly where the bed is located in the room, exactly where each pile of… whatever… is located on the floor, and I can get from the doorway to the bed without stepping in any piles and when I reach the bed I can scratch Pookie’s head as easily as most people can tough their nose with their eyes closed? Despite the fact that if the lights were on I would certainly trip over the pile of books, over the box of towels, and fall face down onto the bed where, instead of me scratching the cat’s ears, she would rake her claws across my stomach?
Where it all begins
When I was seven or eight, a neighbor asked my parents if I’d like to go riding with their daughter because “it’ll be cheaper if our daughters ride together.” My parents agreed that I might like that, although in hindsight my father, at least, probably wished he’d just bought me a new My Little Pony instead.
And so it was that my friend and I arrived at the barn for our lesson together, where we discovered that “together” didn’t mean “group lesson” as you’d expect. I spent the hour riding double behind my friend, while the instructor coached her through the lesson. It didn’t matter: I’d been on a horse.
My dad took one look at my face when I got off, saw the future reflected in the dollar signs stars in my eyes and announced, “We’re moving.”
To England, as it turned out, where I wheedled my way into lessons in the age-old technique perfected by scheming daughters everywhere. You know: you start by saying, “Can I have a horse?” and negotiate down to “Well what about lessons, then? I called these six barns and you don’t have to buy equipment or anything to ride at these three and this one’s only fifteen minutes away, look, I got the atlas out.” (This was before everyone had a GPS on their phone, back in the dark ages when people could still read maps.)
Once my father was resigned to lessons, I raised the question of owning a horse again. Naturally. Unfortunately, “Can I have a Ford Mustang?” didn’t negotiate down to “Well, what about a Shetland pony?” as I’d been hoping it would. He did promise, in a rash moment, that I could have a horse the day I could buy it. After all, I was nine. Where was I going to get the money to buy a horse?
It took me two years, but I finally found a contest in a magazine that was giving away a horse: “The horse is free and everything, so can I enter? You promised I could have one if you didn’t have to buy it.” Dad pointed out that’s not what he’d meant at all and then, just in case I’d had any funny ideas about sending in an entry blank anyway, announced we were moving again—all the way to Alaska.
With contests out, I settled into regular lessons at a new barn. But it wasn’t long before my trainer introduced a new concept to my mother and I: leasing. I pointed out I could work at the barn to help pay for it. I was old enough to get a part-time job elsewhere as well. And my grades were good. And it wouldn’t cost much more than we were paying anyway, once you took off what I’d contribute. Poor Dad. He never had a chance. And a year or so later, it was “There’s this horse at the barn for sale, and he’s really affordable; I even have enough in savings to pay for him. It won’t cost much more than leasing, plus I can work more hours at my other job now.” What else could he do? We bought the horse.
And then he pulled out the Christmas card list and crossed out the names of the neighbors who once, so innocently, asked if I’d like to go riding.