Writing essays is physically painful. Honestly, it is. It hurts your brain. I suppose it’s like exercise: it hurts, but it’s good for you. Perhaps each time I write an essay my brain is expanding, buffing up like a muscle, and that’s why it’s so excruciating. Either way, I don’t enjoy it. Well… sometimes I do, when I’m on a roll and the ideas are popping up in the right order and in the right words. I used to do that a lot more as an undergraduate. I suppose now I focus so much more on every word and phrase, determined to get it right. There’s a balance that has to be met between the best constructed phrases – those that sound good and roll off the tongue, that select the most appropriate words and encompass the whole of the idea you’re explaining – and the plain sense of the content. Sometimes I find myself reading back over a paragraph and thinking it sounds really intelligent and impressive, and then I go back, read it over carefully, and realise I don’t actually explain how a particular idea works or what it is I’m trying to get at. I’m having that problem more recently, perhaps because I’m so much more concerned with making it good now that I’m at this level.

I find the most amazing ways to procrastinate. Sometimes it makes me so frustrated with myself to realize that I’ve done nothing with the last 30 minutes except avoid the issue. During one of my procrastination sessions today I read a quote from a book listed in the Common Reader catalog that basically said: Why do we put things off like we do? It seems like we value the present far more than the future. For if we valued the future, we’d be more than ever concerned to do all the things we don’t want to do now so that we can make time for the future.

It’s a lovely thought, but to be honest it’s not one that makes much sense, primarily because if we did free up time in the future by doing the hateful things in the present, we’d most likely be bombarded with more things to do in that future time.

But it’s a good motto for reducing procrastination. Although, to a certain extent I need a few moments of procrastination when I actually get down to the physical typing up of ideas, otherwise I feel as though my head might just burst. The writing part is a bit like swimming underwater. When you get back into it it goes great, you swim along perfectly and start to see things as you get deeper into the water that become clearer as you swim closer. But then you start to feel the need for oxygen. You get a little lightheaded. You can’t hold it much longer, and then it’s over, you’re back at the surface again and you need a few moments to get your breath back before you dive once more. The problem with this paradigm is that you never manage to get further than a few meters down – just to the point where ideas start to swim clearer in front of your goggles. And then you have to come up for air.

I need essay-writing scuba gear.

Well, my analogy was my breather. Now it’s time to go diving again….