So Many Minutes

As you all know, I'm once again a college student. Naturally, this makes me brilliant. Remember when you first went to college how smart you instantly became? My first time in college it took me only one week to learn that I couldn't keep reusing the same plastic cup for milk everyday without rinsing it.

I've told some of you this, but one thing I didn't factor into the whole "going back to school" thing is the time that homework would take. I knew I'd be spending two nights a week driving to Cedar Rapids (roughly an hour drive one way) for a three and a half hour class, but I didn't even think that the other nights of the week would be filled with homework and reading and papers, oh my. Last night my little lady told me I'm already acting stressed. She told me I was starting to freak out when anything unplanned popped into my schedule (ie giant colossal snowstorms and/or dishes).

I believed her. I tend to do this. I'll start to worry so much about stuff I have to get done, that I in turn get nothing done. I give myself some sort of busy schedule attention deficit disorder, BSADD. Take last night: I had a paper due today. It was an easy paper. I had to write an analysis on an article. It should have taken me at most two and a half to three hours.

Instead I managed to spread it out over two nights because when I sat in front of the computer, I thought about work, which prompted me to check my work email, which reminded me of all the stuff I didn't do at work that day because of the paper I needed to write. Then the dryer beeped at me and reminded me the laundry was done. I unloaded the dryer and put all the clean clothes on the stacks of other clean clothes in the laundry room that I hadn't put away because I was too busy to put anything away. I noticed the washer had five minutes left. I stood there and waited for it because I surely couldn't start anything new in those five minutes (even though I knew our washer's last minute actually takes about fifteen minutes and my computer is portable and I could have easily started something new in those twenty minutes I had). Then TV was about to start, and I really wanted to watch TV, but I needed to check ESPN.com and other websites for a bit in case anything had changed in the last half hour or so. Finally I realized my paper wasn't done, and Kelsey asked me if I wanted to cook supper, and HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT? Then I checked my Twitter feed. There were funny videos posted from people, including this one:



Haha. That was a great video that didn't help me get my paper done at all. The minutes kept ticking by when it occurred to me: I waste a lot of time doing nothing...then I stress out about it. I think a lot of people in our generation do this. We should stop doing this.

This actually came up at class tonight. We were having a discussion about how marketing has changed over the last ten years. Someone brought up that people are so much busier now. The professor asked if everyone agreed. Everyone agreed except for me. I find this happens a lot. The professor asked why I didn't agree with that. I told him it was simple. The amount of time in a day has not changed. It's impossible to have less time than someone who grew up ten, twenty, or eighty years ago. It's what we choose to do with our time that has changed. He agreed with me. Take that everyone else in the class!

I know I've wasted plenty of time playing Xbox for six straight hours when I could have used that time working on my novel about the end of the world. I've spent entire Saturdays watching seasons of TV shows instead of installing shelves in the linen closet in my basement bathroom. I think the problem lies with the world convincing us we are so busy. You don't have time to cook! Buy fast food! Etc.

We aren't so busy. We just like to immediately satisfy our compulsions is all. Calm down everyone and for the love of God quit checking all of your friends' blogs and go do something productive.