Day one. New blog. Its an idea I got from my friend Beckie, who I haven't really seen or spoken to much in a long time. Too long. But I was reading her blog and decided that this may be a good time in my life to start one of my own.
See, I'm having sort of a rough time right now. I'm readjusting to life as a college student after taking two years off to work full time. I'm in my second semester, and it's been difficult to say the least. I've also just moved in with one of my best friends, Sarah. Another adjustment. I've never lived anywhere but at home, really. I mean, "home" wasn't always what one would traditionally think of, but isn't that the case more often than not these days?
Its been weird, to say the least. I'll get to that a little later, I suppose, as the purpose for this first post is to kick off 30 Days of Honesty. This just seems like a good time in my life to do a little self reflection and look at my life and where it's going.
Day 1: Something you hate about yourself.
Ha. Today, it's difficult to narrow that down to one thing. I've been having a really rough time lately, so I'm feeling particularly down on myself. I'm going to go with my strange cycle of perfectionist tendencies combined with procrastination.
This is particularly an issue now, as I'm back in school. Just last semester, in fact, I had a 15-page term paper that was assigned in my Supply Chain Management class. It was in the syllabus, assigned the first day. The given deadline was the last day of class, with two earlier deadlines for extra credit. For me, at least, SCM was kind of an ambiguous subject, something I had trouble pinning down. It isn't like leadership and motivation or PR, where you can kind of wrap your mind around the concept and gain an understanding of it, shape it, take the knowledge and apply it to things in your life. Not to me, anyway. It's all about logistics and inventory management and other boring concepts. Maybe part of it was the professor, I don't know. He definitely didn't help. I think at least half of us nodded off on a regular basis during that hellish hour and fifteen minutes.
At any rate, we had to do a 15-page paper on a SCM topic of our choosing, a business that uses that particular idea and our feelings on it. I figured I'd wait and find something that struck my fancy during class and then use that.
Nothing in class ever struck my fancy. When I went, of course. That was one of those classes I never (or very, very rarely) felt guilty for skipping. After all, the professor was unbearably boring and on top of that, after the first test, he'd posted some nasty comments about people in my class being stupid on Facebook. Really, dude? Of course, one of my classmates stumbled upon that and it became an issue. Apology during class, whatever other punishment got handed out by the university, and we're done.
Back to the paper. December 2nd was the due date. Like absolutely must be turned in by 4:30pm electronically that day. Who waits until a week before the paper is due to even think about a topic? Yep, this girl. So I picked a topic out of the air, more or less. Six Sigma business practices. Woo hoo. Sounds amazing, doesn't it? I knew what it was, but not much more than that.
So after emailing another professor to get a better feel for it and some ideas as to where to go with the paper, I still waited. 3 days before the deadline, I started this stupid paper. I did come up with a pretty genius method for writing papers requiring a lot of information from outside sources, at least it works wonderfully for me. It involves an outline color-coded by source and a corresponding works cited page. To make a long story short, I basically spent 9 hours writing this paper the day before it was due. The paper turned out fantastic, the professor I had emailed to ask about it actually uses it as an example in one of his classes. I got a 100% on it. But I was completely burned out by the time I turned it in. Like, I thought my brain was going to turn to liquid and leak out my ears. I was up until the wee hours of the morning writing, slept for 3 hours and got up armed with a pot of really strong coffee to finish it and edit.
And the whole time, I kept asking myself "WHY??". There was no reason for me to procrastinate like that. I knew about the paper for almost 15 weeks and yet I waited. I could have chosen my topic way earlier, could have researched, etc. I actually wound up using GE and Jack Welch's ingenious business practices ( the Work-Out method and Six Sigma) for my topic. It was something I wound up finding interesting, something that really did teach me management and logistics principles.
Given more time, I would have loved to read the Work-Out Method book before writing the paper. I may still read it just for kicks, because the topic interests me.
The point being, even though I busted my ass because that paper was going to be the best paper I'd ever written even if I had to practically pull an all-nighter, I could have done an even better job if I had just started earlier.
I hate that I do that. With everything. I will sit on my ass and watch TV until half an hour before I have to be somewhere and then go "Oh shit, I need to shower and get ready" and I wind up being late because I couldn't find an outfit or my hair wouldn't go right or whatever. I feel the need to look/act/be perfect in everything, and I don't leave myself enough time to do so. Which results in my being late, or not getting the grade I wanted or looking as good as I wanted or just generally not living up to my impossibly high standards for myself and getting pissed off.
Of course you know I don't hold anyone else to such ridiculous standards. Just myself. It turns into this vicious cycle of procrastination and idiocy and I wind up beating up on myself and feeling like a failure. And yet, I can't seem to stop.
Pure. Fucking. Idiocy.
So maybe this post will cause me to look at things and decide to be different. I know that its going to take a Herculean effort for me to change this part of myself. I've never been good with willpower and forcing myself to stick to goals or rules that I set. For example, dieting. I'm terrible at it. Exercising, same thing. Which could totally take me into another thing I hate about myself, my body. But we won't go there today. I really haven't got the time.
Off to shovel the driveway (Dear Beckie, please pack me in your suitcase and take me with you when you go to Hawaii!!!) and get ready to take my dad out to dinner for his birthday.
I'm really excited about that, I miss my family since I've moved out. And I'm going to use tonight as an opportunity to have my dad act as a sounding board and possibly give me some advice on my current issues. That's big for me, as I've never been very close to my dad that way. We're not a family that is big on being emotionally open or whatever, so this is weird. But I can already tell a difference in my relationship with him from moving out. A closeness. A more adult relationship. Friendship, almost.
I don't know. But I've got things to do, places to go, people to see (that's another issue we can come to in a later post, ha) and a tasty dinner to have with my family.
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