Essays

I was going to begin this post with some sort of statement about how I don't really like writing essays but I don't think that it would be entirely true. As you can see with your scroll buttons, I'm not exactly a stranger to the idea of rattling out a few lines. I've decided though, today, that I have developed some extremely bad study habits, mostly throughout high school that are lingering.

At school, I never wanted to write the essay. In Year 7, when I had a great english teacher who invested extra time in working things through with me, I used to love it. After that I just learned to hate the idea of sitting down and writing about whatever the children's book council had decided to emboss with their seal of approval the previous year. Suffice it to say, that this generally encouraged me to spend a great deal of time procrastinating. Not good procrastinating either. Ignoring the essay and doing something else is one thing... but I've never been able to detach myself from a pressing deadline that much.

I've found myself employing similar tactics today. Sitting at the computer with books open playing around on the internet, attracted by the prospect of watching lame Saturday television, and desparate to listen to CDs. With the addition of pressure from work, spending over half an hour on the phone to my boss troubleshooting a server problem, I've successfully achieved nothing today, yet still feel a sense of exhaustion.

As you can see from the previous post, however, there's absolutely no reason for me to be reluctant to get into it. I like this stuff. I guess I'd much rather sit around and have a discussion about it, or muck around with the material in a blog post, than I would write an essay that's going to be graded by someone who writes serious books on the Old Testament.

When I get to this stage, I just sit and think to myself:
"Well Paul, you're not going to have a chance to do something like this again for a while."

Motivation for me has always been a case of mind over matter.