Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The past passed, que no?

I wonder why after all these years, I can't shake my bad habits. Let me list a few: laziness, procrastination, lack of discipline, irresponsibility, tardiness. Sometimes I feel I make progress and then one of those assholes comes along to whack me in the head and steer me off course. The blame truly belongs to me, sadly.
This has been an odd spring. I'm in my last semester (or supposedly my last semester) of grad school and I finally e-mailed my thesis director a draft of my proposed thesis. To the naked eye, this is a good development, but to my trained eye, it appears more as a failure. I should have finished the draft weeks if not months ago. Now I have six weeks to make it as perfect as possible. I feel like once again, I have short-changed myself out of being great. I will have to settle for just getting it done. I feel like I should have taken this process — grad school — so much more seriously and I fear I will have major regrets when it's all over. It's a familiar for me, that anxiety caused by inevitable mediocrity. I can think of so many experiences of my life — school, relationships, work — that I sabotaged with my own hands.
It's sad, really.
Spring is supposed to have that "rebirth" element to it, but for me it never does. My father died in the middle of spring. I spend forty days of Lent spiritually preparing for Christ's death (and resurrection, but the death is the operative action here). I wish my bad habits would die. Can those be my spring sacrifice?

1 comment:

blythe said...

Hey, lady. You're accomplishing something pretty tremendous here, and I hope you're pleased when it's all over. Grad school wasn't meant to cure you of anything. Don't you do your best work on deadline?

My guess is it'll be much better than you expect and you'll come out richer for it. Or maybe it'll remind you to avoid procrastinating on the next big thing. We can always learn ...