Lucky so-and-so.

I procrastinate at an seriously unhealthy level. My number of, "projects," continually grows. These include (1) a truck-load of homework, (2) various flash projects, (3) a political satire, (4) a slig report, and (5) global domination.

I think I may have created a monster.

Feh. I don't even do things outside of school and I feel overwhelmed. I really hate the way I'm turning out . . .

I do it all the time. Basically most of the time on the weekend I think to myself 'I'm gonna do it on Sunday.' Do I?

Heck na. Then the teacher asks do I have it done.

"Yeah but no but yeah."

I was a really bad procrastinator pretty much all my life untill about halfway through this past semester. I'm studying Illustration at the University of Massachusetts, and at some point I realized I actually care about my work. Good grades is no insentive for anybody to work, you should do your work because you want to learn. If you have no interest in learning, you're not going to be interested in working. I still half-ass my way through my academic classes, but I'm training myself to really put in the effort in illustration and other art classes I'm taking. After all, this is what I've wanted to do longer than I can remember.

Throughout school I had an incredible love of knowledge. Classmates asked me why I knew so much (I didn't know all that much, but the amount of knowledge the average elementary school kid has is pretty small, and I was learning about nuclear physics in this gifted program, Excel). I told them, "Because I want to." It was as simple as that. Even when I first started my trend of slacking off midway through sixth grade, I still loved to learn. And since school, with all its faults, is the best way to gain knowledge, I put up with it. But this year it's like somebody dropped a bomb in my brain. I can't stand school now. I don't care about learning, I don't care about my work, I don't really care about anything. And I don't know why. I don't know what the hell happened, and I don't know what I can do to change it. Maybe this is just getting older. If so, maybe death isn't such a bad thing after several decades of this progressively worsening crap. This blows.

It's called puberty. The desire to learn eventually comes back. Slacking off is a natural phase.

Really? I figured the anger and suddenly intense interest in girls was puberty. I didn't know it made you slack off and hate school, too. How uncool.

I'm the King of procrastinating, I've got some physics coursework due in tomorrow (it was actually due in last Wednesday but I found something better and less boring to do) and I wrote half a page around an hour ago and I got distracted. Now I can't be bothered to write any more.

Lol, Puberty being when you turn from a child to an adult and find out who you really are. Your mind becomes open to lots of ideas. Some brainwashed Religious people decide that God isn't real, some people discover music, some crave creativity.

Work becomes a chore in the exicting world of possiblity. If I can slack off, I will. I slack off, therefore I am.

I went through a bunch of weird phases that I'm still going through. I went through this athiest phase being stuck in a catholic school. The general feeling of not wanting to do my work has been pretty persistent all my life. I've been getting really philisophical lately; I'm not sure if that's related to my mind developing naturally as I grow into the adult stages of my life, or if it has more to do with my recent experimentation with marijuana.

Heh heh I'd say both. But you probably don't need the marijuana to be philosophical. There's a certain breed of people, myself included, I'd like to think, where once we hit a certain phase, it's like blick-a-blaow! we're Socrates (if he had been a teenager living in suburban America gettin' pissed at how meaningless life seems).

The River Why is a must-read for any philosopher, religious or spiritual soul, confused and epidermically challenged pre-adult, or anyone who luuuhhvs fishin'. Seriously mon. I reread it again, having read it the first time at a younger age, and now it's like it means so much more. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul? Bullcrap! (not that I've read it, but just the idea of it . . . ugh) Read a literary classic for chrissake! If you think there's a nifty little manual for life called Chicken Soup you need to get your head outta your ass. There is one good way to learn life's lessons: live. But barring that, pick up something by somebody that has lived and learned the tricks to it, and glean what you can from that.

Caffeine is grand. I feel better at 10:48 at night than I did at noon. That's another thing: sleeping habits. Since the beginning of the year mine have been blown to smithereens. Another factor in my slow deterioration towards either A) a crashing dark valley of lowness from which I will slowly climb my way back up, or B) an epiphany or insight POWERFUL enough to give me the strength to pursue my dreams, get past this bloody speed-bump of an age they affectionately dub "growing up", and get on with my f*cking life.

Rich, did you discover who you really are during puberty? Lucky bastard. I've just discovered I'm nuffin and nobody. It's not that school gets in the way of me wanting to live my life. It's that I don't have a life to live or a love to live for, and without that to get me by, I have the yin but not the yang. I have school and tedious, scary social interaction without the compensating goodness of a passion or hobby or goal (besides the written word and literary classics, but that's not something you get into when you're fifteen, now is it? You have to write what you know and before you know you have to live and to live you have to live FOR something and what do I got? Nothin'!). So in short, uhm, it sucks and I feel like I'm a rocketship with a full fuel payload and no directional vector. What do I want to do? Anything. What can I do? Nothing. So what do I do? Nothing.

And now I believe I'll take a shower and go to bed.

I meant it as a sort of generalising statement. Then again I suppose I have/ still am finding out stuff. For me, music is the big thing, I live for my Guitar/ Bass!

Rather negative chappy today, aren't we?
Take everything one day at a time, there must be something you can try out.

I'm doing so right now.

I was spazzing on sleep deprivation and caffeine when I wrote that. But though I may have hyperbolized some things, as well as displaying horrible diction, I think the general sentiment is still the same.

Big Bro, what are you doing?

Procrastinating! What else?

Oh yeah. Sorry. I would say it was a non sequitur, but technically everything I've posted in the last couple days was a non sequitur, so BB was actually getting back on topic. Good for him.

Although . . . now I can't whine about procrastinating. I feel like whining about things of greater importance. Damn.

On a related note, I just read The Perks of Being a Wallflower finally for the first time last night and it's one of the greatest things I've ever read. I highly recommend it to anyone who's growing up or has finished growing up and would very much like to be reminded of it. It's a great novel. Very touching. And so on. I do believe I really got it. It made more sense to me than a lot of novels. I place it right up there with The River Why. And . . . yeah. That's all I got. Peace.

I quite often will procrastinate, but the funny thing is that when I do actually force myself to do something, I actually don't have any trouble with it. The only trouble I have is starting something, once I start I can keep going (unless it's something that I hate doing!:))
I've found another fellow New Zealander!:D

Sounds like a good philosophy.
I hate all forms of un-necessary work. Therefore I procrastinate all the time, all homework is bollocks.

Bah. If you don't do things you don't want to do you'll never be able to fit into society.

I know that it's damaging my future to be this way. Unfortunately, in addition to so many other things, I've also lost my abillity to care about the future beyond tomorrow. I can only hope I'll get out of this slump pretty soon and refrain from doing any permanent harm to my chances for success. Myeh.

I have found since my last post that music cures my procrastination. But for most of you, it most likely provokes it. I find that I can do my work alot easier, listening to Muse and Placebo. I mean, I was singing 'Without you I'm nothing' to my pen yestarday. Aint I weird?

(P.S, I still havent done my holiday project for school, so my theory works ONLY sometimes. Damn.)

Well, there's one good thing in being home-schooled, it teaches self-discipline somewhat. I think. It still doesn't stop me from procrastinating in some other things, though, but the strange thing is that it's my ideas, or projects as Nepharski put it, that usually get put off. You'd think I'd put off the real work to do stuff with my ideas, but it's the other way around. Odd.