Procrastination

It is Saturday morning and I just finished a toasted bagel with peanut butter and am nearly done with my first cup of coffee, and I am trying to face the reality that I have to go to work today. I have a brief due next week and I missed my window to get it done. I had 2-3 free days before Thanksgiving and planned to do it, but blew it off. This week was too hectic so I knew it wasn't going to happen. And now I am under the gun and starting to panic that I counted days wrong and it's going to be late...I hate hate hate being a procrastinator!

I am fundamentally lazy - I always have been. There is no perfection in my life, just enough to "get by". I graduated 13th out of 87 kids in my high school class. But I had an A- average and never brought any homework home ever. I rarely "studied" in college and skated through with honors and a 3.48 gpa. I didn't go on to the graduate school program I intended to, when I didn't get in to the only program I applied to, and instead married my boyfriend for no good reason other than I adored his parents. Three years later when that ended, I moved away and spent the next five years "finding myself" (the Seattle years, which will follow soon I'm sure) before starting law school. And holy hannah was law school a rude awakening for the person who had cruised through all previous schooling before. I bombed my first year before kind of getting the hang of it and while I did much better the second two years, my gpa was screwed. But even so, while others worked hard to get that A- to an A+, or to do whatever needed to get on the c.v. to make it to grad school, or stayed up an extra couple hours to polish that legal argument up another 5%, I just went to bed instead - perfectly satisfied with "good enough". I can't recall a time where I actually pushed myself, at least not without a coach or some other authority figure individually compelling me. And yet anyone looking at me on paper would say I'm very successful and clearly driven to excel.

Procrastination is certainly a team player with "good enough". I have all kinds of things I can imagine for myself that I would love to see in my future. But each begins with some effort now that I don't seem to do. I can imagine how to begin my quest for any of those goals, and I believe I have the time, resources, and ability to reach those goals, and yet the years go by and here I am - no closer and perhaps further away since I'm another day/month/year older...examples? I would love to run a 5k before I die. While I realize I am likely a long long way from dying, so I should have plenty of time, it would surely be easier to do this in my 40s than my 70s. Part of running a 5k, or at least a contributing factor, would be for me to also lose weight - which is also a goal of its own. I am so tired of trying to find tall clothes in women's sizes (the rant will come about why the clothing manufacturers can fully accept a short woman in women's sizes and accommodate her with petites, but won't accept that a women with a 34" or more inseam also wears a women's size is out of the question). I would like to organize my house, I would like to cook healthier meals for my kids, I would like to send birthday cards to my friends and family on time...you get the general gist.

On a side note, is that I can already feel my thoughts organizing themselves - as I hoped they would - with these posts. It might not read like that to you, but with this outlet, I am finding that the sort of random thoughts are falling this way, and my other writing project topics are filtering themselves out accordingly. What a relief from the jumble!