…But It Beats Working.

School is hell, but it beats working.

Oh Matt Groening, truer words have never been spoken.

I find myself in this kind of weird half-state a lot of times. Like, sometimes I really give a sh!t, and am scared sh!tless and dreading that whatever is taught in the next class period is something that I won’t understand.

Then I alternate between that and not really giving a sh!t, thinking “Oh well, if I don’t get it, then I’ll pass it next semester.”

Also, I freak out and write good papers two hours before they’re due…but some other times, I can’t be bothered, even though I know I really should be busting my butt on something.

Seriously, I don’t know where this range of emotions is coming from. I clearly need to work on this. Here’s a list:

• Time management: Clearly, I have little to none in this arena of time management. I have come from a work environment that was working in a constant state of being reactionary. Which means I am still used to doing everything last minute, as I was given no real lead-time. Now that I have all this lead time, I really don’t know what to do with it.
• Discipline: I sometimes succumb to having no discipline in my life. It’s literally been nearly a decade since I was a student last, and I have no disciplinary infrastructure, where I come home, do my homework, and go play. I need to self-enforce the idea of get up in the am, grab coffee and breakfast, hit the gym, shower, do some reading+homework, go home, make dinner, sleep. It is so hard, because when it comes down to it, I really just want to sleep in–and I end up kicking myself when it ends up being 5pm and I have read 4 pages out of this humongous chapter.
• Quality(?): This is something I need to work with my classmates on, using them as a standard/reference, because oftentimes, I am finding that I have no idea what my profs expect from me. I’m feeling like, “Thanks for your übergeneric, seriously vague description in the syllabus of what you want from this paper, but what the heck is it that you really want?!”

The hilarious thing is, despite the fact that I feel like I’m internally struggling with all these huge “problems”, I have been asked several times during the trimester already, “Hey, what do we have due in this class today?” That just cracks me up, because I was the student in elementary school through to undergrad asking my classmates, “Do we have anything due in __?!”

I guess the fact that I am paranoid and overcompensating for my nervousness of being a student again makes me “appear” to be in charge. Ha!