We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain.
It’s the third week of April.
For those of us in grad school, the third week of April means a never-ending torrent of stressed-out Facebook status updates from our academia-inclined friends all over the world who are dealing with The End of the Semester. At this time of year, our lives run the gamut of crises of all kinds, everyone carrying their own stresses that seem like the most important thing in the world at the moment.
The emails we get from undergrad students at this time of year… I can’t even. Students who want to complain about the grade you’ve given them, even though they didn’t show up to half the tutorials this semester; students who are about to be kicked out of their program because their GPA is too low and who appeal to you, as the “nice” teacher, to help by raising their grade a teensy bit (you know, like just by a letter grade or so), even though they didn’t earn it; students who are very, very angry with you the day after grades are posted online; students who drop hints that they are on the Football Team, and this (generous) C is unacceptable; students who email to make appointments to come cry in your office.
Cruelly, the end of the undergrads’ semester is also the end of our semester as grad students. This means that the very worst part of TAing and/or teaching coincides with our own busy season. Because, although it might never cross the minds of our undergrads, we have stuff due too. Papers and shit. For scary professors who are preeminent in their fields. Classes are ending and comps and quals fields might be winding to a close. We are preparing to strike out on research trips in the coming summer. Conference presentations are coming up for which we have no clue what we’re going to write (and probably won’t until we’re locked away in our hotel room the night before our panel, clutching a half-empty bottle of wine and hyperventilating in the general direction of our laptop). And did I mention, papers are due?
Grad school has taught me that there are degrees of desperation. There’s the desperation you feel when you haven’t done the readings for the seminar that’s coming up in two hours and you’re totally gonna be the dumbest person in class if you don’t finish them, and then there’s the desperation you feel when you get the email from your Grad Program Secretary that it’s time to enroll for the next semester—again—and weren’t you supposed to be finished by now?!
And yet even that kind of desperation sees you glance back and forth between your Word window, NEWCHAPTER3.doc, and the NEW episode of Mad Men. Or, you know… Real Housewives of Vancouver. For a moment, you’re torn, a deer stuck in the headlights, knowing you should shut everything else down and write. You’ve downloaded a Chrome extension for that sole purpose. But you just… can’t. It’s like a disease. With your heart pounding in your chest, and the full knowledge that your paper or thesis should have been finished YESTERDAY—or last month, more like—you click over to find out whose wife Don Draper is going to bed this week. Or to peruse your favourite feminist news aggregator. Or to watch a 5-minute video of a cat who likes to be vacuumed.
Because grad students are masochists.
We have to be. There’s no other explanation. Never have I seen a group of people excel at self-flagellating procrastination to the extent that my fellow grad students and I do. Now, this isn’t true of everyone (damn you, early finishers), but I would wager to say that, in general, procrastination to the point of despondency is a condition of the grad life at least once every so often.
Image from miguelalmagro.tumblr.com
Procrastination is the grad student’s Imp of the Perverse. (In my undergrad, I had a totally hot and, more importantly, totally intellectually stimulating English professor who taught American literature, which is why I remember Edgar Allan Poe’s genuinely frisson-inducing short story so vividly.) Poe wrote of the Imp of the Perverse as that feeling we get when we stand at the edge of a tall building—or, as he phrases it, a chasm—and have the sudden desire to jump off. It is the human tendency to wish to do that which we know is wrong and contrary to all of our instincts, just because we know it is wrong. It is a fleeting, frenzied, thought. But it is always pushing us towards self-destruction.
In “The Imp of the Perverse”, Poe writes about the human tendency for procrastination so beautifully and comprehensively that it actually makes me feel a little bit better about my own totally sick-and-twisted proclivity for deferral:
We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. … It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. … The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies—disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!
I’m writing this blog post right now instead of writing my thesis. Why? Do I have a death wish? Do I want to see myself suffer? Because the outcome of the situation is totally, painfully, predictable. Another day, another total lack of progress on ol’ Chapter 3. And it doesn’t stop there. I’m also writing this blog post to procrastinate finishing up my Skyfall series with Part III for this very blog, which is itself an outlet of procrastination from the thesis. You see the severity of the problem.
Soon it will be too late… Again.
Procrastinators Anonymous needs to be a thing. Last year my fellow SFU grads and I bandied about the idea of a writers’ group that centered on “public shaming.” The idea was based on the concept that we all do better if we are beholden to others to produce work, and not just dependent on our own personal deadlines. We envisioned ourselves broadcasting due dates for certain pieces of writing—conference papers, chapter drafts, full drafts, what have you—to our peers like an academic’s scarlet letter, emblazoned on our proverbial chests for all to see. It never really took off.
But I made an important step today.
I emailed my supervisor and I set up a date on which I will officially owe her a complete draft (minus conclusion) of my thesis. It’s next Thursday, by the way. The 25th. I’m writing it down because now it’s out there, and I’ll feel beholden to stick to it. Please, if you see me on the 23rd, 24th, or 25th, ask me how my draft is going. I know that’s the question you never ask in academia, but goddamnit I need the prospect of public shaming to get me going.
Wish me luck.
Andrea Walisser 