Time Wasters

My main motivation for this entry is to simply avoid working on an assignment that I've successfully avoided working on for over a week. It'd be easy to finish if not for my chronic procrastination and the assignment's heart-stopping inanity. Like an ersatz Job, I find myself cursing the ink the assignment was written with, the paper it was written on, and the very day the tree that was to become the paper was conceived.

To say that my time at the library tech program has been well spent would be a gross abuse of the truth. To give it its due, there are certain computer programs that I never would have known about without it, and I did genuinely enjoy my placement at a school library. So much so, that the rest of the program is seeming more and more like a grimly tedious mess. I am not enthralled with this program, I am not in love with what I am being taught. If I was dating this program, this would be around the time that I would start suggesting that we see other people, as we clearly have irreconcilable differences. I enjoy reading and seeing my friends, it enjoys obscure journal databases that perhaps thirty people outside of this program use.

Of course, like any relationship, it's never one persons fault when things start to sour. It always takes two. For my part, I am willing to admit to a fearful level of procrastination, a monstrous incapacity to commit fully to what I am being taught, a satanically short attention span for what I consider dull or unimportant, and overweening vanity. Sometimes, a subject is just too ridiculous for me to take notes on. The program is not completely to blame. It's more that having started down a certain path I lack the imagination to do other than grit my teeth grimly and continue marching on. Cursing under my breath all the while. Stoicism's not my bag.

That's not my bag either

Of course, a very wise friend of mine has rightly pointed out that it would be sheer emptyheadedness of me to drop out at this point. If I'm not doing as well as I think I should be doing, either start paying more attention or just stop caring. At the end of it I will have contacts in the field, and a nice little piece of paper that explains that I now officially know how to do stuff I already knew how to do. She also points out that nobody, Nobody cares what my marks are once I finish the program. All they care about is the little piece of paper. She is of course completely right - as usual - and I should just man up and get this program finished. The problem is only in my head, as are most of my problems.

Ultimately, the only thing that's at stake here is my vanity. Despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, I've always thought of myself as being a good, if somewhat misunderstood student. I realize now that that was really never true at all. I am a so-so to okay student. I'm not sure why this bothers me so much, as I know and respect many people who were never good students and I recognize as being highly intelligent and talented people. It seems that there is never an issue so intangible that it cannot somehow intersect and wound my monstrous ego.