This morning we have a special guest blogger...my daughter Katie. Let's give it up for Katie, shall we?
I suppose I should start with my alarm clock. It is a tiny little travel clock that I got for $4 at Walmart to take with me on trips to Tucson. It runs on one AA battery and is about the size (and weight) of an index card. It's very handy for on-the-go time telling, but rather shitty as a permanent fixture to one's bedroom. I sleep with it on the corner of my bed, because I have no bedside table and my room is too damn cold to walk across in my underwear as soon as I wake up.
So this morning my alarm went off. I had knocked it off of my bed in the night, as I sometimes do, and it landed about 6 feet away from my bed. It beeps about 5 times before it goes into SUPER BEEP MODE and is capable of waking all the dead animals in the fridge. Unfortunately, it usually takes me about 4 regular beeps to finally shake me out of my sleep, so by the time I realized it was on the floor it was already in SUPER BEEP MODE. I got up, walked across the way too cold room, turned it off, and climbed back into the covers. "Oh fuck!" I thought, "I never did that English paper!" Lying there, I went through my list.
1) I could stay home?
-No. I'm not even remotely sick. It's mom's day off. Mr. Horn will know that I skipped. Can't get away with that.
2) Make up an excuse?
-Oh please. The guy's not stupid. Anything too creative will be an obvious lie, and anything not creative enough is an excuse that I'm sure he's heard before. As tempting as "Oh no! Why isn't it showing up on my flash drive?!" is, it would never work.
3) Just accept the consequences of my irresponsibility?
-Am I crazy? I have a 91% in that class! We're on an 8 point grading scale, so that's a B+. My only B, that I could easily get to an A should I turn in a good paper, or easily never recover from, should I not turn anything in. This thing will be worth 200 points, easily.
So I rolled out of bed and shuffled over to my computer to start researching. The paper must be at least 3 pages, in MLA format, with a works cited page and no more than 10 passive verbs. It's about the religious symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was 6:05. My bus comes at 7:30. Oh yeah, and I didn't have my text book, which held my actual copy of the story.
As I typed furiously, the hopelessness of the situation was dawning on me. There was no way I could research it, formulate my ideas, type everything up, rephrase all sentences with active verbs, and then write a correctly-formatted bibliography in an hour (I still had to get ready for school). This paper needs 4 hours, at least. I could just stay home, tell my mom what happened, have her lecture me and ride my ass about it all day, then never hear the end of it for the rest of my life. The story would be told at the table this Thanksgiving, so as to shame me further, in front of guests. Nope. Not happening.As I started beating myself over the head for not having done it yesterday, like anyone with a brain would have done, I wondered where the day had gone.
No really, where had the day gone?
No.
Noooooo.
It's Sunday.
The alarm must have gotten switched on when the clock fell off of my bed.
I took it as a lesson: I really need to stop procrastinating. Waking up late the morning before something is due is pretty common for me. Usually, I set my alarm for 3am, and put in my 4 hours of work in the silence of the wee hours of morning. It's not a flawless strategy, but time is an excellent motivator for me.
So I continued researching, and began the paper. I'm done with one page, and now I'll have breakfast, and if I keep up this pace, I may be done by lunch time, and then the rest of the day I won't have to fret and put it off more.
I'll still be up at 3 doing my trig homework the morning it's due though.
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4 comments:
Only one of Ev's children can beat themselves up over a B+.
I used to try and figure out how to change that D to a B on my report card without my parents realizing the ink didn't match. It never occurred to me to actually try to earn the B.
Kids these days.
hey, think of it as having an extra day.
get the paper done early, and you'll be able to do the trig homework with ease!
Thanks for the hilarious story and very good lesson learned. I hope that Katie will be contributing to the blog again in the future.
Maybe the lesson is you need to get a new alarm clock - one that doesn't signal the end of the world when it falls of the bed. Have you seen the ones that walk away from you when you get up to turn them off? Maybe that kind! Robin
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