I'll go to college and I'll learn some big words and I'll talk real loud, goddamn right I'll be heard

I have to laugh at myself today because that's all there is.  I have no strength for frustration or anxiety so I laugh.  It's 7:30 in the morning on the day that I have a paper draft due.  It's a chapter from my dissertation and something I am supposed to send out for possible publication.  The person overseeing this is my advisor, but does this inspire me to get this fucking thing written?  Nope.  It is yet unfinished.

I've been awake since six and didn't ever really go to sleep.  I've had so many chances to get this paper done but alas, here it is the due date and I'm ignoring this fact entirely.  The nice thing about graduate school (and it's a short list, really) is that due dates are negotiable because there are not many of us to manage and we are, after all, graduates.  You have to attain a certain level of scholarship to be in this club and it seems to me that I should have some professional leeway.  

What is most amusing, however, is that I preach to my students in an almost endless diatribe to not wait to the end of the term to write; I design my courses to make them plan ahead, to make it impossible to procrastinate.  The reason I am so perfectly adept at designing courses in this manner is because I am the ~QUEEN~ of procrastination.  Why do today what you can put off doing until tomorrow?  But still.  This has gotten out of hand.  One paper due today, another tomorrow, and I'm no further along with the latter mentioned one either.  The bottom line is, I don't want to write them.  I'm sick of MLA and research methods and thesis statements and supporting evidence.  I teach it practically every day, can do it in my sleep (and often do), and I want to be on strike.  Isn't it enough that I made it through the quarter at DU and - to my knowledge - all are yet living?

I often wonder what would happen if I just never turned something in.  Undergraduate students never think about such things because most of them couldn't care less about the difference between an A and a B or even a C, but I'm a shameless grade grubber.  In all three years of DU, the only smirch on my record is from The Professica, who gave me an A-fucking-minus, not because I performed in a substandard way, but because she flat-out doesn't like me.  As a teacher myself, I happen to know for fact that it's impossible to be impartial when it comes to grading people in subjective matters like English.  I try to be fair, but some people I just don't like, and I am aware that at least subconsciously, I grade them harder.  So every time I look at my transcript and see that 3.95 and not my standard 4.0, I seethe.  Also in my program, anything less than a B is considered a failure, the consequences of which are dismissal.  Thus, what would happen to me if I just didn't turn in these papers?  Would these profs give me an incomplete?  I almost feel like daring them to fail me because some part of me knows full well that neither of them would.

So where's my motivation?  It's summer, my superiority complex is fully fleshed, and I want to write fiction but have no time to.  I can't wait to get out of this program, and I plan to toss a lit match onto this bridge behind me as I leave, and which I will douse in gasoline on my way across.  

Happy Monday to me!