church was fantastic, reflected upon the necessity of inward heart change that leads to external life change rather than the converse. lunch was mediocre, i need to remember never to order anything else with a cheesy double beef burrito because it either induces vomiting or you don't finish one or the other. movie was good, watched alice in wonderland in 3d with my lovely wife and i thought it was surprisingly less tim burton-y than a lot of his other films. home is good, put up a few framed photos of hong kong in the room and caught up on my youtube subscriptions.
i got to help my buddy nic [i keep linking his blog in hopes that he will notice and update it, but now that i think about it, he probably doesn't read my blog] out with one of his papers for seminary. it was neat: he did all of the serious scholarship [25+ footnotes] and i cover the grammar/syntax end of the heavy lifting. in the end, hopefully he gets a good grade and i get to share in knowing that he is a step closer to getting into the doctorate program he deserves, if he chooses to go that route.
speaking of school, i am glorying in my procrastination. tomorrow i have a project due, but i know it won't take me a whole lot of time to do. that should make me want to do it quickly and get it over with, but no. i can't do that. that's too simple. i insist on waiting until the last minute. does it produce a better result? well, i wouldn't know really, because i can't remember the last time i've written a paper or done a project that wasn't completed at the last minute. but i can tell you one thing about a procrastinator's work:
it's honest.
sure, it may be honestly rubbish from time to time, and it may not always be the most well done or fine-tuned piece of work. it's honest work, and i guarantee that i pull out significantly less b.s. to get the work finished than i would if i had a lot of time and energy put into the project. that may sound counter-intuitive, but my reasoning has a lot to do with my personality. i tend to take a lot of time obsessing over minutia, looking up just about everything and going just a smidge shy of looney trying to make something perfect. the more i do that, the more of my insanity goes into the project and the less human it is.
it sounds strange, but i really do firmly believe that crazy people should always procrastinate as much as possible in order to preserve enough of the human element to make the finished project something worthwhile. the longer i spend hacking it to bits and over-analyzing, the more my work ends up looking like someone else's. don't get me wrong, i'm not saying that there's another person inside of me that takes over a project if i spend too much time on it, but my life seems to be a constant struggle between the side of myself that is spontaneous and the side of myself that is calculated.
if you've ever read some of the tussles i get into on facebook, you've experienced 'calculated bud' before. if you haven't, i'll spare you the trouble: he's kind of an asshole. the more time i spend on specifics, information, research and content, the less time i spend thinking about presentation. if i just type type type type type and hit send... it's gone. it's done. the problem in the internet venue is that i can always delete and re-type. sometimes i do, sometimes i don't.
for some reason, i have a hard time being objective about my own material. i guess to a certain extent, everyone has that difficulty, but i think it's worse for someone as split down the center in regards to thought processes, manner of execution and general je ne sais quoi as myself. this post probably isn't making any sense at this point, and i should probably stop typing and hit 'send' before i delete it all and no one gets to see what i'm like when i go all stream-of-consciousness on y'alls. ;-P that's all for now.
I'm definately like that too, Sometimes when thinking of starting a project I know that I have to jump in head first or I will wait until the details and prep are absolutely perfect, which will be never. And I think part if being a procrastinator in the "good sense" is that often you are really not totally procrastinating, you have ideas that are streaming in your mind, those ideas are edited, and you might go a totally different direction onece pen hits the paper, but you have actually done quite a bit of prep work ahead of time. I think your recomendation for crazy people to procrastinate is both very interesting as well as extremely comical, seriosly that comment is still tickling me. I can recall an AP English assignment where we had to write a 10 page paper on an author's life and work. It was a year long project which I neglected till the end, I did previosly read the authors work but I had procrastinated on writing the actual paper. Now this assignment was unique because we had to write it in the voice of the author we chose and hit on a number of specific points. So I slammed this paper out and rather enjoyed it. In the end my teacher commented that I had done an excellent job at finding the authors voice and sounding authentic. Now I wonder if maybe that had to do with the procrastination itself as you pointed out that it ensures a more human quality to your work. Very interesting, and although I know you're not joking about procrastination being I guess more productive for you, I have to say that that's the best argument for slacking that I've ever heard :) You definately have to be unique (of wich you obviously are) for that theory to be liable because I think for most procrastination is not a helpful quality even if you are able to produce good quality material from it. Anyway, I'm glad you posted instead of deleting.
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