1:23 A.M.

I just checked the weather for Hawthorne and surrounding cities, the little chart shows lots of sunny days for the rest of the week. Maybe I will go back and check to see if Seattle has any electric storms, I heard they get them often. I am a college freshman, an HMSA alumni, an aviator-you would think that my 14-page English research paper, due later on today would be finished by now, it is not. I am procrastinating. Drinking from the forbidden waters, dark waters that poison the creative process. I have reorganized my bookshelf 14 times, Tried every pen in my pencil holder, checked every paper in my printer to make sure they are all white, I have counted the tiles in my room-144 if you count the ones that are cut in half, someone sucks at estimating. Earlier today I fed my dog 6 times, his belly will soon reach the floor, I wonder if male dogs can have puppies that one dude is pregnant- let me Google that- wait no, I must finish my paper. Why is it that we students love to wait until the last second to complete those big assignments?

Every Semester on every class, Project due dates are dark circle days; we walk into class half asleep gripping that mocha latte for dear life. We hand in the packet, Project, or Disc and hope for the best counting the seconds until were back sound asleep on our beds. What is the purpose behind? Perhaps the unspoken student code to keep tradition alive by preventing the sand man from making his rounds, that evil little bastard he won’t get me, I am wearing my sunglasses-they make me invisible. Must reach for Red bull- sugar wearing out. If I can focus long enough to finish perhaps I will decipher what makes the last minute rush so satisfying. Sure I had the format months ago, and the sources were sitting in my desk for weeks collecting dust, I just love the thrill of beating the deadline. At what cost-I mean, if I didn’t finish it would be another thing, but as long as the assignment is complete by 8 am and I am in class at 8:02 things will be ok, right? Wrong! Perhaps my unhealthy relationship with procrastination will explain why last semester’s History paper came back with the word sleep circled in red 13 times in my paper, or why the background music in my PowerPoint for art history featured Flobots instead of Mozart’s 3rd symphony, that was actually a lucky mistake that A came in handy. The consequences will be there, and hopefully minus a few sleep depravation mistakes my work and that of other procrastinators will stay intact and continue to fuel that need for last minute creativity. I am not a morning person, therefore I will work during the night when no one is watching, there would be no problem, but the only problem is that when I Sit down in front of the screen everything else in front of me is way more interesting. I must now block facebook, TMZ, and that funny website with the videos of the hamster eating the lettuce, take off my cell phone battery, log out of AIM, turn off my email so that I won’t check if spam arrived every 2 minutes (I hate spam I read every sentence of it.) And finally after trying to procrastinate free my work environment, (yes Snickers you are sleeping outside, sorry buddy I don’t want to pet you to death) I will finally attempt to write my essay-wait, let me check the margins they look bigger than 1 inch, maybe change the header space it looks-what does this button do…