The End of a Week

For those of you who know anything about procrastination, Friday afternoons can be a real pain. The great potential of a Monday can come crashing down on a Friday. For those adept at putting things off until the last minute, Fridays often mean getting a week's worth of work done. Years ago I remember telling myself, and others, if they would just listen to me rather than judging my procrastinating ways, that I did my best work under pressure. I think I was just making that up.

It's true that I write productively under pressure, but I think I only write well because I'm writing. As in, I might have also written a decent paper or essay over the course of a week or month if I had just sat down to work on it. That specialness of the last minute? It turns out, that's actually just called working.

You might think that leaving graduate school might mean the end of such procrastination, but you'd be wrong. I know I was. My Friday afternoons are still filled with things I wish I'd done earlier in the week, like learn math for my Praxis exam this coming Monday and send that birthday package to Simon and Morgan. But here we are, late Friday afternoon and those things are not done. But I won't be too hard on myself. Even if I haven't re-learned all the math from high school, I've done a lot of studying this week. I also learned how to do word trees in my linguistics class (jealous?) and I've been reading lots about siblings.

There's something else. What am I forgetting? Oh, right. My baby quit sleeping this week. That can often stand in the way of progress. She's been waking up every two hours to nurse for the last two months (she's almost eight months old), but this week she's reached new heights of non-sleeping and I'm beginning to get the crazies. It happens to the best of us sometimes.

But now it's the weekend! Friday afternoon, with all its expectations, is almost behind us. I have much studying to do over the weekend, but that's not all. Alyce and I have some celebratory ice cream to eat (I'll let you in on the details next week) and I'm going to suggest to my husband that we have our own celebratory champagne with dinner tonight. You know, to celebrate that we made it to Friday.

Have a great weekend everyone!