The Procrastinator, Part I

Do any of you ever feel like you've been buried under a mountain of work and other responsibilities, and somewhere -- perhaps deep inside -- you want to just say "fuck it" and go back to bed?

Of course you do -- occasionally, anyway.

That's what I'm desperately trying to fight right now. And I'm losing.

I have close to twenty books stacked on my coffee table. I have a twenty-item-long, studying/recapping to-do list along with them. And I'm trying so, so hard to force myself to actually go out to the living room and actually work on those things.

Someplace in the back of my head, somewhere, there's this little voice telling me why bother? You'll take your exam in five days and you'll be fine; why waste your time studying more? You don't want to do it, and it's not going to help your anxiety, truly give you anything more than you already know and can expand upon at will, or ease any other apprehensions about taking that exam -- so why waste your time?

That voice is battling internally with another voice, a voice that says you're a fucking idiot if you're not spending every free second cramming your head full of knowledge from those books and notes; this is IMPORTANT, Brandon. Do you want to fail your comps? Do you want to have basically wasted three years of graduate school?

They're trading punches and battling each other to a standstill because I -- the real me, the one writing this post -- doesn't know which one is correct.

Five days out, there are books I have not yet read; I have the Crane book (of which maybe 40 pages is his poetry -- he wrote relatively little before he died) and I have the five theory/critical texts that I've not yet touched, mainly because my director told me that he more than likely wouldn't use anything from them except for possibly to base a question around one of their large overall themes (translation: nothing really important that wouldn't be common sense anyhow). The vast majority of my studying now is, simply, review. I took good notes on most of the poets I read, and refreshing myself by reading through them for hours yesterday, as well as opening the books to the poems I marked that I needed to come back to for further study (in some cases) made me feel a little more confident, but how much of that knowledge and review I'll actually be able to retain for the exam is questionable. I desperately want that zen-like calm of knowing that I've done all I could be reasonably asked to do in preparation, and I'm not there yet. I will be eventually, by later this week more than likely, but right now, I'm not. That's why today and tomorrow, for most of my waking hours, all I'm doing is trying to work on what my mind will allow me to do. Little by little, I'll claw my way out of uncertainty and towards enlightenment.

Or something like that.

Today is Easter Sunday, something that I didn't know was coming up until, oh, Friday or so. As an atheist, it means nothing to me, really. It means that when I go out in the middle of the night to Walmart to get cigarettes (which I'll need to do tonight), I'll be able to look through whatever discounted candy they have left and get some. That's about it. My parents sent me a really sweet Easter card which arrived on Friday as well. With Easter upon us, it usually means that spring is truly here, and it is usually around Easter that I switch out my wardrobes -- I replace all of the heavy long-sleeves, pants, and thermals with my shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops.

However, according to the weather, this is probably not going to be the case until well after I've taken comps.

Again, today is Sunday, and the last day of March. The weather is predicting another snowstorm to hit tomorrow night/Tuesday morning.

No, I'm not kidding. Mind you, yesterday it was 73, and today it's 66 right now. And there's another winter storm coming, apparently. It cannot be predicted with accuracy yet, but the weather guy I trust in Wichita says that a couple of inches are possible by Tuesday morning.

This is a bad thing. I have to teach on Tuesday morning. In fact, it's my students' workshop week before they turn in their papers next week. I have a "floating day" in there on next Tuesday where we'll finish everything up in regards to workshops (because there are so many of them in this group) but that's it -- the rest of the semester must be tightly regimented between then and finals week, and lessons/due dates for things cannot be changed any more. I have a library day, conferences, and evaluation days coming up, and those things can't be moved or canceled; the snow days earlier in the semester we had destroyed any "free," flexible time we had, and (silly me), I figured that by fucking April we wouldn't have to deal with snow anymore. Tornadoes and/or severe storms, those I can deal with. Snow makes me cancel classes if I can't get out of my driveway, or can't reasonably drive the distance to campus without killing myself or totalling my Millennium Falcon of a car. I really don't want to have to cancel classes anymore -- I want to go to campus, do my job, and come home. That's all. I've got less than two months of this daily grind left, and I want it to be finished as soon as, and as painlessly as, humanly possible. Not to mention that drastic changes in weather between over seventy degrees one day to below freezing and snowing like hell two days later completely destroys my allergies.

Welcome to Kansas, I suppose.

If I have to cancel classes, I'll have to -- there's no getting around it if this storm is bad enough. I can almost guarantee you that the university won't close again, as they've already had three snow days this semester (which must be some sort of record). Having next Tuesday as the last flexible day possible does mean that we should have a little more cushion in my classes if necessary to take care of everything if I do have to cancel classes this week, but believe me, I would so rather not do that if I can avoid it. On the plus side, that would be one extra day I could cram for my studies.

I reviewed the comps schedule again this afternoon to refresh myself on where I have to be and when on Friday. It goes as follows:

Show up at 8:45 a.m. and bring your student ID.

The exam is three parts, each 90 minutes long, with breaks between of 15 minutes between parts 1 and 2, and a lunch break before part 3.

 

Here’s the schedule:

9 a.m.-10:30 Part 1

10:45-12:15  Part 2

1:30-3 p.m.  Part 3

The English Department will cover the cost of taking the exam there.

I'll take the exam in the campus testing center, which is across campus from my office. I'm one of four people taking it on Friday -- for poetry, there's me and Jay, and then two fiction MFAs, neither of whom are GTAs this semester. I've emailed the MFA director for clarification on whether we're using our own computers or the testing center's computers (if they even have computers over there; I'm not sure, as I've never been in there before). It doesn't really matter either way to me, but if I'm expected to bring my own laptop to write my exam on, that is sort of important information to know now.

Daisy and I haven't been in incredibly close contact for the weekend, and I miss her. She's working her night shifts and has now become busy and exhausted during them, though she did Skype with me on her phone during a break on Friday night. Aside from a few scattered Facebook messages, we've not been able to get any time together -- and I'd hardly call that "time together." This does give me time to focus more on my studies, which I did last night for a great while, but once comps are over and I have more free time to relax and spend with her, well, her schedule's still going to be the same, and we'll still not exactly be able to spend that time together. She's exhausted; she's trying to acclimate herself to the overnight work schedule she's on, and it's rough on her. I've been where she is -- no, it is not pleasant at all. But, as I've told her, she will eventually get used to it. As you folks know if you've been reading this blog since I started it in 2007, I worked night shifts for three years running, and then again for a short time after moving to Kansas. Doing so, even now, has altered my brain chemistry -- years later, mind you -- to where I'm still my most productive and/or creative in the overnight hours.

Here's my "stuff to re-cover" to-do list that I made last night, in order to help guide and finish my studies before comps:

1. Review notes multiple times
2. Review the four poems I gave to my director for use on the exam
3. Leaf through the large, unwieldy C.K. Williams book again
4. Re-cover Anne Sexton/get criticism and/or interviews
5. Review Whitman's "Salut au Monde" and "Song of the Open Road"
6. Review more Frank O'Hara
7. Review W.H. Auden, especially on criticism/explication of his mythical works
8. Get criticism/explication of Keats' "Endymion," "Hyperion," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for further analysis
9. Cover the notes I have on W.B. Yeats, review his poetry a bit more
10. Look up more Robert Lowell works, including criticism/interviews
11. Read/take notes on the Crane book
12. Peruse the five critical/theory texts I have
13. Review some of Robert Frost's poems, find criticism/deeper bio on him
14. Review Eliot more, including criticism and/or letters/interviews
15. Re-read all of the printed notes I have on Wordsworth
16. Return to Anne Carson and get criticism/interviews with her
17. Re-read Levine's A Walk With Tom Jefferson and re-flip through News of the World
18. Look through the highlighted sections in my anthologies for the poets on my list

It doesn't look like a lot left to do, really, but it is. Some of these are rather light bullet points, I know, but some of the others will take hours. Hours. I'd like to knock out a good chunk of them tonight (apparently the "you're an idiot if you don't study as much as possible" voice in my head is slowly winning the battle), as deep inside I know that I won't reach that zen-like peace or confidence in my knowledge until I do. This doesn't mean, obviously, that I'll be studying psychotically, but I'll be working on these things until I feel satisfied with myself, especially since I have nothing else to keep me from doing so -- my students' workshop copies have been edited, most of my household chores are taken care of, the new bills that came in this week are paid, and Daisy is working during the time where we'd usually talk or Skype. It's just me, my books and notes, and time. Really, that's comforting on many levels.

I'm already starting to plot out my time for after comps are over -- I've received my RAM upgrade for my old Dell in the mail, and I ordered the new season of Red Dwarf to watch as a celebration when I'm finished with everything next weekend. Whether I end up having to "re-do" a question or otherwise, all of this stress I've been under basically ends at 3PM on Friday when I finish my comps and drive home to pass out for most of the night and/or weekend. I look at my studying and reviewing as little baby steps closer and closer to that hour, that minute, at which I'll be done. And it can't come soon enough. If you read my post yesterday, you know how stressed and angered I've been by being forced to devote all of my free time to preparing for comps when I'd much rather be enjoying the final weeks of the semester, enjoying the weather (ahem, when it's not snowing), looking for post-graduation work, doing my taxes, etc. Oh, there are so many fun things I'm looking forward to doing in my free time once comps are over. So many.