Some Things Never Change

Every week I have a quiz in both of my Mississippi State University classes. Every third week, it’s a quiz and a test based on my homework.

The idea is, you do the homework every week as you watch the lecture and read the textbook. Yeah, right.

This precedent was set in the first grade back in 1956. I was cruising along in Miss Thompson’s class at P.S. 201. Even then I realized something catastrophic might happen. Maybe a meteor? Possibly the plague or dengue fever. Who can tell? Why do your work early? You might get off the hook – and it would all be in vain.

Last night I got home from work around midnight, washed up, had 2 cookies too many and went to my office. There was plenty of time to do the work, so I fired up the laptop and played a little poker while I answered emails and poked around on the desktop machine.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but normally there are three PC’s in my office. Two are really dogs – old machines with limited resources that used to live elsewhere and were discarded by others for hotter models. The laptop and my homebuilt machine run Windows XP, the second desktop machine runs Mandrake Linux. Sometimes I’m on all three at once.

I played an $11 ‘sit and go’ no limit Hold’em tournament at Pokerstars. The cards were awful. I held on as long as I could, but only came in 4th – meaning I lost the $11.

It was around 1:30 AM when I started my school work. This semester I am taking Synoptic Meteorology and Satellite Meteorology.

The first quiz went very quickly. The first test slower. By the time I finished, everything, it was 6:20 AM – a terrible miscalculation.

Because these get graded at noon each Wednesday, I already know how I did – which was fine. That’s not the point.

Why do I continue to procrastinate? What is it within me (and it’s been inherited by my daughter) that wants to put everything off until the last minute? It’s not like it wasn’t going to be done. Doing it – doing it well – was a given.

I’ll probably never learn my lesson. I just want to learn my reasoning.

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