in Life's name and for Life's sake

While in the process of procrastinating because I really don't want to write my history paper, I stumbled again across my senior thesis. Seeing as how I was procrastinating, I read it.

Honestly, I was very gratified.  It read like something professional -- like an essay of literary criticism fit to reside in any of the compilations of literary criticism that I've been reading through lately. Of course this is just my biased opinion, and obviously it's probably exaggerated, but the uniqueness of the approach still has me giggling with excitement nearly a year after its initial conception.

The craft of it impressed me as well.  Usually when I re-read things I've written in the past I tend to discredit my former style of writing as childish or immature, but that hasn't happened yet with the senior thesis!  I still feel like it's well-written and deserving of respect.  More than that, it's well-argued, referencing just enough passages that the reader would probably believe what I have to say.  I looked back at it and thought, "Gee, why can't I just whip out a history paper that looks like that?"

And then I remembered exactly how long it took me to write that marvelous masterpiece of an essay, and how engaged in the subject I was, and how many revisions it went through, and I said to myself, "That's why I can't just whip out a history paper that looks like that."

The idea is a little depressing, especially since I'm meeting with my history GSI to talk about the paper tomorrow and I don't really have much to show her, but at the same time the gratification of knowing that I'm still in love with my senior thesis is helping me to balance these things out.  Whaddaya know -- IB was good for something after all.  I know that in the future I'm certainly planning to make further inquiries into the literary criticism of dystopian literature in a historical context, because that's what moves me.  

Just like I'm reading through a couple books of Jane Austen criticism in order to write a simple paper on Pride and Prejudice.  It's so refreshing to have such a love for a subject that even the research and the work is something worth it.  The only problem I have is that at some point I'll have to pick an area of English to specialize in, and I'll be torn between the Romantics and the Dystopians!  Maybe it's Professor Goldsmith's fault, but at the moment I'm leaning to the Romantics, especially if it means I get to read more of Austen and learn about the critical tradition in her works.  Besides, I can always wrangle the Dystopians into the focus of my history major, which looks like twentieth century western history at the moment, from the Great War to the Cold War.

And then there's always the chance that four years from now I'll have graduated with a degree in Women's Studies and be starting med school -- at least, my father would remind me of this if I mentioned how set I feel I am in the paths I want to take.  After all, he went into Berkeley as a lawyer and came out as a teacher.  But somehow I don't see myself undergoing the same kind of transformation.  I know very well what I want to do with my life, and though the specifics might change, they also might not.  And that's not exactly a problem.

This has turned into an oddly retrospective entry for something that was initially intended as further procrastination, but I think I like it that way.  I've got an odd mixture of Pride and Prejudice and Fahrenheit 451 running around in my head right now...maybe I should follow it.

I'm really not in the mood to do things.

Part of me things this is okay. I did things earlier today -- I basically finished my senior thesis; I got started on the IB Chem lab. I even did terms for MUN because we apparently have a test on Wednesday. I have a math quiz tomorrow which shouldn't be too bad, even though I haven't studied. I haven't done the English homework for Krucli yet.

Information permitting, I'm going to do my internal assessment for Spanish on Cuban science fiction. It's really crazy, actually; I just found some information on it that's very wow. And it's something I'd actually be interested in working with, almost.

However, I did manage to forget what hydrogen peroxide decomposed into. For some reason I thought it was oxygen and hydrogen, instead of oxygen and water. Heh. Wow. Not having the best of days!

My problem is that I go through periods of intense motivation followed by periods of intense malaise. I'm in one of those right now -- all I want to do is go to sleep. I can't, because there are still so many things for me to do. Well, not really "so many," but enough to keep me up.

I hate it that I have less work than I used to but I feel just as busy and even more annoyed, because when I actually had work it was enough to provide me with the motivation to do it. Now I have to find my own motivation for unexciting things, like the history paper and a chem presentation on school safety (I'm still working out how to do that one).

My life never moves at the speed I want it too. It's either too fast, so that I lose my breath trying to keep caught up, or too slow, so that I get bored and apathetic. I don't know which is worse.

I've got a piece of paper on my whiteboard that's been there since some time junior year. It's got a quote one it: "Better to burn out than to fade away." I say this...but some days I don't know. I'd like to go out with a bang...but sometimes it seems like the best anyone can do is a whimper.