There comes a point in every semester when you reach the stage Kalie likes to call "burnout." Your brain is saturated with information and you can't process it all, and in order to write your papers you have to wring it out like a sponge and look helplessly at the mess you have to sift through. (I probably could not have picked a more gross analogy. Sorry, guys.) Alas, I have hit that point. I have two papers left, one of which is due tomorrow, and I just lay back on my bed in my empty house and wailed, "NOOOOOOOOO, I DON'T WANT TO DO IT!"
I have had a gloriously fun time procrastinating today, though. Kalie and I decided that the kitchen needed a thorough scouring, and we cleaned while singing--at the top of our lungs--Disney songs playing on her computer. (We did this for an hour at least. The neighbors probably hate us.) And after that was done, we sat with Stephen talking to Sean's two visiting friends, Jeremy and Andrew, who--as Kalie and I were discussing earlier--are a hilarious Laurel-and-Hardy duo, more entertaining than anything on TV. Now, however, everyone has gone to the Covered Market to retrieve birds for tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast, and if I plan on making a pie at all, I need to get working.
But, as I've said, I've hit that point.
I used to think that there wasn't a point. I've been told by multiple sources (okay, almost everyone I know) that I'm way too hard on myself. So I kind of expected myself to just be perfectly fine with churning out essay after essay. I'm an English major, right? I find writing essays so much fun! (Please, please pick up on the sarcasm there.) Therefore, when I find myself falling a little flat, I put it down to a character flaw. This is a really, really dumb thing to do, and I only ever attribute it to myself: I never think that other people getting burned out aren't justified for it.
Somehow I never really let it sink in how much work we've had to do at Oxford. Last night I went to a C.S. Lewis Society meeting at The Eagle and Child and had a nice talk with some of the other students. There was a very nice girl, Nicole, who is working toward her second BA in theology here at Oxford, and she was talking about how rigorous the course load is. Somehow I assumed that she was taking a more rigorous path of study, but during the conversation I realized: she's doing as much as I am. Two tutorials, one every week and one every other week, a paper due for each of them. Which means that, in the past month and a half (since the Oxford term didn't start until early October), I've written ten essays. Ten individual essays, each incorporating several complete texts of reading, all of which had to be read in a week so that I could write the paper over a few days. And that's a lot of work.
But I can't say that I haven't enjoyed it. I've turned out some good work that I'm actually proud of and might submit to conferences and journals after I clean it up some when I get back, and I've been able to read a lot of great stuff. Even this week, for this essay I don't want to write, I loved my reading material, and I'm really looking forward to my topic for next week. Academically, Oxford has been really good for that aspect of my growth.
All the same, we're all hitting that burnout point, if we haven't hit it already. But we have creative ways of combating it. One can always leave the house during the fleeting hours of daylight to take a walk around the meadow or up Cornmarket Street to clear your mind. Sarah, one of the girls in the program who came from another school, has introduced to me the wonderful activity of "procrastibaking," which is as delicious as it is fun. (Stephen does this too, to wonderful effect, but Sarah came up with the name.) When Kalie and I are writing papers at the same time, which happens fairly frequently since our tutorials are on the same day, we closet ourselves in her room and work with a reward system: we get to watch things every time we finish a paragraph or a page. In this way we worked through the last three seasons of How I Met Your Mother, and when we ran out of episodes we started watching movies online. (The most recent conquest: The Emperor's New Groove. You know you're jealous.) And sometimes I blog to put off my papers.
But I think I've procrastinated long enough by writing this post about procrastination. Now I have to go back to work, or else these pies won't get cooked, and that, my friends, would be a tragedy. I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!
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