Diary of a Chronic Procrastinator

Yes, that would be me. I am possibly the worst procrastinator that I know. At least in regards to writing research essays. You see, I was loco enough to take 20 credits for Spring Quarter in college, and TWO of my classes are requiring 6-10 page research papers.
For one of the classes I already finished and turned in the draft (got a C because I didn't cite correctly in a lot of places. :/ ) and another one is due this coming Friday. Which is so close that I get anxiety every time I think about it.
However, because studying is tedious, I haven't started it yet. I've read a few articles on the subject, but I haven't done an annotated bibliography yet, or a sentence outline, I've only barely begun formulating a thesis, and the paper is DUE in THREE DAYS.
I'm crazy.
In fact, writing all that down just made me realize how much I need to cease procrastinating and go write the gosh darn paper.

15 minutes later: I just spent that time reading a blog and playing dragcave. Excuse me while I go hyperventilate into a paper bag about the only 3 days left of paper-writing time that I have. While popping vitamins. Because I don't want to get sick with whatever my boyfriend has. Poor guy had a fever of 104.5 yesterday morning. I had a fever of 100F yesterday evening, but with a few tylenol and lots of water, that went away - hopefully for good!

Stoned With Semen: Extremists War On Women

Note: This is copied from a friend of mine. His view is against all extremists, but in this he was specifically ranting against conservative Republicans and their horrific bills and proposed anti-woman laws.

"The writer Warren Ellis relayed a story about Hypatia of Alexandria. She was a philosopher, an intellectual powerhouse. She also refused suitors with reckless vehemence. Upon one man professing his love for her, Hypatia waved her bloody menstrual rag in his face and shouted "This! This is what you love, young man."

Hypatia was dragged through the streets and stoned to death by a Christian mob in about AD 415.

Her primary work at that point was the beginnings of calculus, something she's often not given any due credit for. Mankind didn't get back to calculus for another thousand years. Take a second and imagine that, right there, the patriarchy and its holy mandate had buggered off and left her to complete her work. That's scientific achievement one thousand years ahead of the curve. Moon landings by about 1200. Flying cars and jetpacks by...when? 1300?

Ellis uses this story to talk about a world without Christianity. I sympathize, but that's not quite what I'm about. After all we have to play the hand we're dealt. What I want to do is prevent the next stoning.

That there's a war on women in America is undeniable. That it's fueled by right-wing Christians is also undeniable. I don't see legislation about male contraception, about condoms or about Viagra. Because God knows if you're old enough to need the little blue pill that it's only for procreation. Rick Santorum, one of the GOP frontrunners, espouses these views daily. Mainstream media echoes him constantly. Rush Limbaugh waves his hateful microphone like a Righteous Phallic Bludgeon and I don't think we need to argue over who exactly his supporters are.

This is all coming to a point: Hypatia was a blueprint for today's Christian Right. Women are at best empty vessels there to be filled according to this worldview. They're not allowed to be or fill themselves. And the only thing they can fill the world with isn't knowledge but progeny, more arrows in the quiver of God.

Woe unto a society that can no longer murder a woman for refusing to populate god's quiver, right? Need to get back to those Basic Christian Values. No longer acceptable to preach to them through blunt force trauma. So these Taliban for Jesus choose a different stroke instead: pregnancy by legislation. By trying to force their morals into law the options to prevent or terminate pregnancy are ruthlessly narrowed. We are now stoning our Hypatias with semen. Not quite as easy for a woman to do groundbreaking scientific work when she's pregnant, constantly shamed and has the choice to allow state-sponsored foreign object rape by ultrasound or keep an unwanted fetus.

What mindblowing breakthroughs will be lost to us for the next hundred or thousand years because of this?

We can't kill her anymore so let's just kill her options. Praise be to god, and population sustainability and personal choice to be damned. Progress be damned. Calculus be damned.

But praise be to god."

Dreaming Isn't Free

I do enjoy dreaming, since I rarely dream and even more rarely remember them. The dreams I recall are generally full of excitement, danger, adventure and rebellions. I rarely repeat a dream, often have dream continuations where I continue a dream from one night to the next, and I can count the number of bad dreams that I have had on one hand.
This may or may not be because I forget my bad dreams fairly quickly, so it is only the really bad dreams that I remember.

Last night I dreamed. It was not pleasant. I came half awake in the middle of a mild panic/anxiety attack, and soothed myself back to sleep and different dreams repeating the words to a hymn in my head. I cannot for the life of me remember what hymn it was.
What kind of dream would cause this reaction in myself? I have no phobias, there is almost nothing that frightens me, and as an extremely resourceful and capable person, there are few situations I could find myself in that I would feel incapable of handling.


Of course I dreamt explicitly about a situation I never had control of. Or rather, a series of situations. I dreamed myself into an odd place. I was both myself in my memories, able to feel all the rage, helplessness and emotions that the memories were evoking, and I was also an onlooker, feeling my own rage, helplessness and impotence to change what was happening. It was horrible.

I was in my childhood home and my mother was raging made at me. She was lunging for me to beat me, pull me around by my hair, and scream expletives at me. I was fleeing for the house; trying desperately to get inside and lock the door. I did not make it. I felt her steps closer behind mine, a rough hand grab my long hair, and my head jerking back. Then the dream would immediately flick back to the beginning the sequence. Sometimes I made it inside and locked the door, only to have her come in another door and grab my clothes, shoulder or hair. Repeat sequence. I flee out the other side of the house and she come around the corner. I am caught. Repeat sequence.

It felt real. It felt awful. I had all the pain and anguish I ever had in those situations and it was humiliating and terrifying. Stress is not good for me.

I wish I could remember what hymn I sang myself back to sleep with.

Six Days, Seven Nights

Nope, this isn't about the movie Six Days, Seven Nights (starring Harrison Ford...great movie!) this is just the first title to pop into my head.

Six days ago, I was hanging out with one of my younger brothers, my mom, and her current man. I generally avoid being around Mom & her man, but this evening, in order to hang out with littlest brother, JonJon, it was the only feasible way.
Jony and I made enchiladas, mango sticky rice, and watched a few episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender; a favorite show of ours. By the time we were done with everything we had been working on, it was nearly ten o'clock and I was extremely tired. So I headed home. I'm on my bike no matter what, and it was great weather outside, although totally dark (this IS March!! Early sunset.)

I was riding home, up a little hill, texting my boyfriend Colin while riding and not really paying attention to the road. Went over the crest of the hill, was heading down and kind of just staring at the road right in front of my front bike tire, when suddenly the thought popped into my head "There is something in front of me." At this point I was going at least 15 mph, and I snapped my head up to look and as I looked I saw a dark green, enormous truck parked on the darkest spot on this entire road and I slammed into the back of it, taking all the impact on my lower face/jaw area, and a bit on my right hand. I bounced off the truck, landed back on my bike, only slightly noticing my extremely sore lower abdomen where it had impacted the frame of my bike, got off my bike (which was still upright due to the 29 inch front tire - most bikes have 26 inch tires or less.. - being completely wedged under the bumper) and tried to determine if my jaw was broken or not. I decided that it was not, and forced my bike out from under the truck, checked the wheel rim and discovered that it was NOT bent, to my relief, and set off riding for home again. I was barely able to move my jaw at all without excruciating pain, and since I was only two blocks from Colin's house, and about eight from mine, I decided to stop there and ask his parents, Rick & Estée, to look at my poor abused face.

I got to their house, no problem, locked my bike on their carport, and went inside without knocking, as is my habit. Rick looked up from his computer and immediately noticed that something had to be wrong with me. He says I was shaking and my eyes were as big as saucers.
"What is wrong?" he asked.
"Will you look at my face?" I asked. "I hit a truck."
He did not laugh, for which I was grateful, but he checked my jaw, Estée came out of her bedroom and also checked it, and sent Colin (who I had not yet even said anything to) to the kitchen to get me an icepack. She settled down on the couch to do homework, and after sitting in a recliner for a few minutes talking to Samire (Colin's foreign exchange student sister) and the French Club from the highschool which was over at the house, I moved to Estée's couch and fell asleep on her lap.

Being extraordinarily nice people, Rick & Estée decided to keep me for the night so that they could keep an eye on me, and called my best friend's dad, Ken (I live with said family) to tell him what the situation was. After Rick made me a bed on the couch, I woke up, moved over to there, and fell asleep again pretty much immediately. I did have to get back up in about a half hour to use the bathroom, but then conked out again as soon as my head touched the pillow.

It's been nearly a week and I still have an impressive bruise on my jaw, that when I turn at the right angle, looks like a goatee. Two lessons have I learned from this:

1.) Always keep my bike light in fresh batteries.

2.) I don't like the way I look with a goatee.

Life Goes On

Well now that I've caught up ravelry and pinterest about as far as I can, according to my interests and et cetera, I am no longer addicted. That was a short one! Only about three days long each. I suppose once I get interested in a new subject I will once again start pinning things on pinterest, and I need to get some pictures of my past crocheting projects to put on ravelry...but not obsessed with either of them.
And for pete's sake, why did it take me four tries to spell 'obsessed?'
Of course, as soon as I thought about pinterest, my English class next quarter, and my hunger, this led to a half hour hiatus between writing the last paragraph and this one, in which I pored over tasty looking food and pinned it to my board entitled "Succulent Sustenance." I get hungry just thinking about the name of it. And now that I can chew again (crashed on my bike into a parked truck...I'll write an entirely different post about how THAT happened.) I can make myself food that requires food! No longer am I restricted to half a cup of yoghurt!

Currently I am procrastinating homework. Really. I am very much procrastinating it. It is almost the end of the quarter, and I have three papers to re-write for my English portfolio, and a term paper to write for my Humanities class. It really isn't an enormous amount of work, but work it is, and hence I am avoiding it. I am also avoiding emailing the director of the play I am - The Hobbit - to tell them that I cannot make it to any rehearsals (on time) on Wednesdays. Neither can Colin(he is Fili the dwarf), but emailing them is his responsibility.
I, you see, am seizing hold of my ability to not be an interventionist. It's a chronic habit of mine to try to intervene for people in order to make their lives easier. I often do it at peoples' request. But no more! I may have a social worker's or activist's mind set, but I don't have to let it change my life to the stressful side.

Whew!

Man, life has been busy lately! And now I'm up at 1:21am because I've been alternately cleaning, messing around and packing (ish) to go to Portland for the weekend. The boyfriend's family and I are driving down, going hiking at Juniper Canyons on the way, and then we teens get to enjoy ourselves downtown while the parents are at an administrative meeting for OAMC(Oregon Adventist Mens Chorus). I would surely rather be messing around downtown. Especially since I know where a vintage clothing store is, and I have a bit of spare cash!
So far in the last few days I have created accounts on ravelry.com and pinterest.com, and gotten pretty well addicted to them both.

Ravelry is a social networking site for knitters and crocheters, and while I haven't had a lot of time lately to work on crocheting, it is still fun to upload all my old project, put future projects in the queue, and add my knitter/crocheter friends to my friends list.

Pinterest is a site where you 'pin' things of interest to a virtual board. I have a board of gadgets I want, tech-y things I want, houses I like, jewelry I want...et cetera. It is really quite easy to get in the habit of seeing a neat picture online and going "ooooh, I want to Pin that!" and doing so. It also keeps neat things organized so that you can go back later and find that neat skirt you want to find a pattern for, or really anything else.

No, I was not asked to push these sites, they were just what was on my mind this evening. Well, besides cleaning and sleeping.

Honestly, I haven't a clue why I'm online blogging when I ought to be packing and then passing out for four hours.