procratination

A particularly vocal bird has taken up a position very near my dorm these last few evenings.

It’s wonderful. I think he’s having a conversation with another bird nearby. The birds have a habit of becoming more vocal after dark rather than in the early hours of the morning. It’s a strange phenomenon and I like it.

It’s also gotten dark later and later everyday here. When I first got here the sun went down around 4.30. It was depressing, but New England is almost as bad. I had a little conditioning. Today it didn’t get dark until around 5.30. A whole hour’s change in the sunset in just 4 or 5 weeks. That’s AWESOME. Before you know it there’ll be light until 10 at night.

Not too many eventful things happening in my life at the moment. For the last two or three days I’ve been working on a paper about political theory, and that’s been taking up all my time.

When I write papers, I also don’t allow myself to read anything for fun. In fact, I try not to read anything at all unless I absolutely have to. I attempt to get all my reading for class done before or after I write a paper. I’ve found that my writing changes based partially on what I’m reading at the time. I would hate for my writing to change mid-paper. That sounds terrible.

Once I read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity just before writing a paper. I ended up using many real-world examples in the same manner Lewis uses them. With every claim about society or the characters in the book I was analyzing, there was an example to follow. I couldn’t help myself. It was as if I caught a disease that made me pick up parts of Lewis’s style.

Since I’ve been reading The Mill on the Floss recently, I didn’t want to write political and social theory the way George Eliot tells stories. I’d be here for months. And the essay is capped at 2000 words. If I wrote like Eliot, do you think I could cap anything at 2000 words? I think not.

Anyway, the reason for the ranting is that I’m so close to being finished with the essay, but I can’t seem to wrap it up. It makes me distraught. I just want the thing done. It's pretty much done, though.


By writing this, I have procrastinated another reasonable amount of time. Hooray!