This is Bad

I have an incomprehensibly large case study (The Dump Files) due on Friday for my education class. I've had the assignment for a month. Have I started it? I guess you could say that. One page down, fourteen to go. I was planning to write at least half of it tonight. Instead, I read a book about feminism, watched and made fun of the low-budget local news, and have just finished making and devouring macaroni and cheese. Tomorrow I should not be doing any activity at all that is not writing this bastard paper. If I post even once in this godforsaken addicting time-sucking hole of a blog, I give anyone in Internet Land permission to slap me the next time I expose myself as a real person.

Why am I so exceptional at procrastinating? I'll tell you why. I do a ton less work with a ton more time than I ever did in high school. I never had room to procrastinate when I was younger because I had four hours of homework a day, wrote at least two papers a week and was occupied with driving to and playing hockey from 7-11 every night. I also had teachers and parents who were constantly on my case and went to an uber-competitive prep school with bell-curved classes up the butt. At college, everything I could possibly conceive of to waste time with is within my reach or three steps away, as I live in a box. The work is far less plentiful, my parents wonder if I'm still alive, and most of my professors could really care less if I went to class. And then, of course, there's Facebook.

In addition to matriculating me as a five-paragraph-essay-writing energy-drink-expert I-can't-dress-myself-because-I-wore-a-uniform machine, Marian High School also instilled in me one of the most highly prized gifts in the college community: the ability to bullshit. I'm a firm believer that if you can pull out your race, gender, religion and socioeconomic status cards and formulate one of these elements into a grammatically correct and syntactically sound sentence, you can blow off your way through anything. Because it was physically impossible to actually do all the work you were supposed to at Marian and not fail, my classmates and I became scarily good at pretending. We learned that if you half-listen in class, use Wikipedia and Sparknotes liberally, scan readings and write about oppressed people then you're set to jet.

Tomorrow I shall lock myself in the library, where I will have no Internet or roommate to distract me, drink some Monsters and write an entire memoir about a very familiar black kid's educational experiences. I shall do an entire semester's worth of work in a single day, and I will probably come out all right. At least a 3.3. I will be okay with that. I know that I'm spending the rest of my waning youth wasting time, money, and sense on friends and doing what I want to do. I'm hoping that 30 years from now I'll remember dancing the Soulja Boy for hours and spending my last dollars on once-in-a-lifetime experiences better than stressing out over homework. Maybe if I'm good.