My Brain.

My mind operates in a rather amusing way when it comes to deadlines, especially those of the academic sort. What happens is that the moment I find out precisely what day and what time I must hand in a particular essay or project, my brain engages itself in a frenzy of calculations and considerations. Following this, it completely shuts down and forces me to play video games, read books, or write for fun. The Horror.

Obviously you’re wondering what sort of calculations are being considered before this outage, but I’ll be very honest here and tell you that I’m only half-conscious of what these computations are. In reality, what my brain is internally calculating is the precise amount of time that is necessary to finish said essay or assignment. It would be rather nice if my cognitive buddy could also inform me of this estimation, but it does no such thing. Instead, I’m only vaguely aware that something deep within the recesses of my mind has created the essay, in it’s entirety. The ‘cool’ thing is that the fucker has locked the goddamned thing and won’t let me see it until I have reached that exact moment in time where, if I actually ‘begin’ writing, I’ll always be done 2-5 minutes before, or after, it’s due.

This is my life.

I used to get rather stressed out about this, especially in my first semester of University. I was absolutely determined to begin planning and executing all of my projects weeks ahead of time, but my good ol’ brain would allow, at best, a sentence or two, before I’d suddenly become distracted by a butterfly, my carpet, or my imaginary flying teddy bear best friend, Teddy the Bear. For three hours.

Thus in my first semester, I spent a large portion of it trying to trick my brain. I’d wake up early and try to force it to work on my essay, in the hopes that it would be too tired to distract me. What ended up happening was that I played a lot of Team Fortress Classic from 6 AM onward, and then I was tired and grumpy for the rest of the day. I even tried nonchalantly approaching the essay topic, by pretending I was writing about something else, and then suddenly trying to engage with my given assignment. I usually ended up with charming tales of puppies that float and meet quizzical cats of arbitrary colors. In the end, ultimately, I could not outsmart my brain, and so I surrendered to it’s quirky antics.

Flash forward two and a half years later. I’ve come to accept the nature of my brain, and because of this, I have grown to become a master of the procrastinessay. I didn’t realize how good I had become at this until this morning, when I realized I had an 8 page essay, with research, due at 11:30 AM. In reality, I knew that it was due, and I had been pretending to work on it the night before (this is considered relatively early for me to begin work), but then I got into a two hour discussion with a friend who’s doing his Christian seminary in Calgary about the nature of Church, and then I played Sins of a Solar Empire with my cousin and fell asleep after that. In fact, I even set my alarm clock for 7 AM, so that I could wake up and work on the essay with some slight leeway, but I quite literally slept through the alarm clock and woke up at 8 AM instead.

The curious thing was that I just managed to finish it, sprinted to the classroom, and hand it in. 3 minutes early.

Don’t ask me how this ability of mine works, because I really can’t explain it myself. I suppose, in a way, it also contributes to my sheer inability to worry or fret. Potentially I’m approaching some kind of determinism or nihilism, where it’ll get done if God wills it done, but I think I’m just lazy, handsome and carefree.

In reality, I was going to do a tiny bit of writing on Christianity, but I think I’ll save that for next time. For now, you get this piece of writing that has you all wishing you had your 5 minutes back.

Suckers.