February 03, 2008

Things to do when an anthropology paper is due tomorrow.

  • All of your laundry.
  • Eat multiple lunches.
  • Watch the weather for extended periods and debate with yourself about the best time to go to the grocery store.
  • Re-acquire your dormant coffee habit.
  • Painstakingly handwash all of the clothes that you never wash because they need to be painstakingly handwashed.
  • Travel plans.
  • Invent delicious coffee-cocoa hybrids. Refine, remake, drink more.
  • Re-read interesting, but not paper-relevant sections of your anthropology textbooks. This one gets bonus points for being almost impossible to identify as procrastination.
  • Read the Chronic(what?)les of Narnia, then immediately read them again in order of internal chronology.
  • Eat something else.
  • Take four lines of notes, then get up and stretch and find something else to do.
  • Blog, with a blank OpenOffice document open in another window so that you could at any moment start writing a paper in it.
Posted by dianna at February 3, 2008 03:50 PM
Comments

How big is this paper you're avoiding through skilled kabuki (the re-reading of non-relevant course material is a masterful touch, by the way)?

I also applaud you for getting through a list of a dozen work-avoidance activities without even a hint of a nod at watching the Super Bowl. Clearly, not even avoiding a paper is worth watching football for.

Oo! You could convince yourself to do the paper by telling yourself that you really SHOULD watch the Super Bowl, but damned if that anthropology paper isn't in the way... Might as well get a few pages done...

Posted by: MoltenBoron at February 3, 2008 05:04 PM

It's outrageously short: five pages maximum. If I'd approached it in any kind of disciplined way I could have knocked it out in maybe four hours, but since I of course did no such thing it hung over my head all weekend. In fact, it's still hanging, because I allowed the fact of its being due at 4 pm across the street from my office to lull me into going to bed with a full page still unwritten and key examples unidentified. I predict that my lunch break will be over before I get the stupid thing really finished.

Posted by: Dianna at February 4, 2008 09:25 AM

I bet your paper turned out great. I have no doubt about that at all. I was catching up on internet things and thought that I should say hello. I hope things are great.

Posted by: David at February 6, 2008 06:53 AM
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