I love writing (I mean, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t). I have this problem though, that when I’m not inspired or can’t think of what to say and how to say it, I’m very easily distracted. Very easily. If literally any thought pops into my head, I’ll decide it’s clearly more important than whatever assignment I’m working on and deserves my undivided attention. For instance, if I’m working on an essay while wearing a necklace, there’s always a moment when I become deeply, wholly fascinated with every intricacy of the necklace. Inevitably, this leads to a lot of, shall we say, “detours” on the path to completing my work.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when I sat at my desk to come up with an idea for this article, I got distracted. I thought about my article from last week, about how I should really start my articles not the day before the deadline, about how cute my desktop picture is (it’s a cat in a reindeer suit), about when I’m going to get lunch and what I should have, about the comparative merits of two sweatshirts that happened to be in my general vicinity, and at least a dozen other things that were decidedly not my article.
Then, something amazing happened: one of my distractions actually helped! I was just sitting there thinking “wow, I sure get distracted when I brainstorm,” and that brought to mind the time those distractions were at their worst: college essays. And then I knew what to write.
When I wrote my college essays, I was a bad student and procrastinated heavily, to the point that I had to go into hard-core, write-essays-all-day mode for a good while (it is not a strategy I recommend). During those hard-core days, I got distracted a lot, and those distractions led me to do many things that wouldn’t strictly be considered “essay writing.” It wasn’t until I made a tourniquet for a stuffed animal that I realized how weird some of my activities were. Fully acknowledging that I further fed into a weird distraction by doing so, I decided to compose a list of everything I’d done while writing my essays. In the spirit of revealing my eccentricities for the amusement of others, I’m going to share a modified version of that list with you today.
Here we go.
Things I Did While Writing College Essays
(With additional commentary specifically for you, the reader)
- Made several attempts to create a plan for finishing all the essays
- Chastised myself for not getting more essays done sooner (do your essays early, kids)
- Verified my knowledge of college acceptance rates (yes Sophie, the essays do matter)
- Checked the exact, to-the-minute deadlines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4eIL6G8cdE
- Fantasized about being done with college apps
- Fantasized about being done with just the essays
- Fantasized about being done with just one essay
- Fantasized about it being late enough that stopping to go to sleep is justified
- Fantasized about taking a break to eat
- Perused lists of books the internet thinks I should read (and regretting that I have to be writing essays instead of reading them)
- Checked each of my email accounts multiple times
- Read old emails
https://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/MjAxMi1lMThkY2Y0ZjM3NDFmMzg5/
- Looked up Cheeto jewelry, because apparently that’s a thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGCJ7JiDVL0
- Watched the amazing video “Iguana vs Snakes”
- (watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv9hn4IGofM )
- Read about the mantis shrimp
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
- Visited the website of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade
- Braided my hair
- Unbraided my hair
- Made new subfolders in my Application Essay folder
- Read random paragraphs of random things I’ve written and saved on my computer
- Reread the essays I’d managed to finish (maybe I’ll be inspired . . .)
- Opened my Amazon Kindle app
- Discovered my Amazon Kindle app has been disconnected from my Amazon accounthttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.kindle
- Checked my holds at the library
- Read a summary of the horror film Proxy
- Listened to songs from Moana
- Researched the Moana soundtrack
- Made a tourniquet for a stuffed cat
- I feel like I need to explain this one. I discovered it had a hole in its paw, and I reasoned that I didn’t have time just then to fix it, since I was working so diligently on my college essays, so I tied some tissue around the paw to stop the stuffing from coming out. See, it’s not weird.
https://www.pinterest.com/caregifting/best-teddy-bears/?lp=true
- Almost fell asleep
- Actually fell asleep
- Learned that chapstick has an expiration date (who knew?)
- Peeled a sticker from my computer
- Picked lint off a blanket
- Stretched
- Played catch with my phone
- Played catch with chapstick (because maybe my phone isn’t the best object to throw in the air . . .)
- Read the YouTube comments for the background music I was listening to
- Google-translated a Latin phrase from my Celtic background music (still deeply confused about that)
- Googled myself (because why not?)
https://digifesto.com/2010/05/26/sneaky-google-search-ui-design/
- Watched Gilmore Girls (at this particular point I wasn’t even pretending to work)
- Deleted old text messages from my phone
- Discovered that there are bars specifically for “the darker souls” (and subsequently wanted to know what constitutes a “darker soul”)
- Turned hitting keys in frustration into a study of probability (how many times will “jdks” come up if I press all the keys in the center row at the same time? Hmmm . . . I guess I’ll have to do an experiment and find out)
- Made this list (while fully aware of the irony)
- Continued updating and editing this list (still fully aware of the irony)
- Changed the entire list from present to past tense (it just didn’t make sense, and it’s important to use correct grammar in the lists you create to put off doing actual work)
So now you know how my brain works. Not that you asked . . . oh well.
And in case anyone was wondering,