I procrastinate too much. In fact, I’m doing it right now. See, I’m beginning to write this at 4:00 am and I have a 2,000 word essay due today at 8:00 am. All I have done is 200 words and a very messy and disorganized rough draft that at this point seems to be only slightly related to what my final draft will be about. This is only the latest all-nighter I’ve pulled to finish, or even start, a paper they day it is due. I literally can not remember the last paper I wrote ahead of time, if I ever have. I’m so addicted to procrastination that I’m procrastinating on writing a paper to start a blog! Even though it still isn’t a good idea to be writing this right now, it is a roundabout way of trying to fix the root cause.
My problem isn’t that I’m a bad writer. I doubt anyone will ever say I’m a good one, but I’m certain that most other student writings I’m subjected to are even worse than mine. My problem is that I can only seem to write well if I’m under so much pressure or know the subject so well that I can think almost as fast as I type. Thankfully I know myself well enough that I can puke this garbage out onto the internet fast enough that I’m really not wasting too much of my time, but that isn’t what this post is about. What I’m getting at in the most verbose way possible is that I’m starting this blog to practice not really writing, but the ability to stop thinking about how I’m going to say something but just say it.
I always over think my language. It takes everything in me not to go back and rework every sentence in this post three times trying to find the best way to make a sentence flow. I argue in my head about the right words to use. If I could blame anything (and believe me I like blaming things) it would be reading too many books and being forced to learn too much vocabulary. It’s given me an obsession with using the most flowery and superfluous language possible in any situation. I derive so much pleasure from having big words come to mind and using them in perfectly constructed sentences. I’m not forcing myself to go and look up new words and I know what the words I’m using mean, it is just that I usually forget that I’m trying to get to a point.
Speaking of the point, it is about time I got to it. The point is that this blog is my way of getting over my language obsession and procrastination problems. First, even though I’m still using over-the-top language in nearly every sentence, I refuse to go back and change a sentence’s structure or replace words with fancier ones unless it absolutely necessary to make the sentence make sense. Hopefully this will train me to do the same with at the very least the rough drafts of papers I’m writing for a grade. Second, by making writing a normal part of my life, I might not require the crushing pressure of an impending due date to force myself to write on a topic. If nothing else, this will give me a place to rant about things I don’t feel I need to subject any of my friends to and create a log of projects I’m working on that I do want to subject the internet to. Is anyone going to ever actually read this? Probably not, but if someone is reading this than it should be obvious that having a readership wasn’t ever really the point.
