The ball is rolling...

Finally I reached procrastination saturation. At 3 o'clock in the morning last night. I really had read, seen and done everything on the internet and was no longer able to find any joy in looking at solipsistic rants on blogs, vaguely relevant news articles and 'comedy' office attachments or in playing arcade classics like pacman lovingly resurrected in flash.

I could have gone to bed, except I wasn't tired, and I knew that would just lead to another lie-in which is the first stage in a day of doing nothing. So I finally started to work. Library books were due back today anyway, and I started what seems to be the only way I have of working nowadays - the all-nighter.

I blame A-level art. Once the boundary was broken and I discovered I could work through the night I was never the same. Architecture in first year blew my bodyclock wide open, and the increasingly ridiculous work pattern (56 hours continuously awake working on drawings at one point) contributed heavily to the mountain of reasons to change course. But even doing history I have pulled all-nighters on the night before the vast majority of my essay hand-ins. Every time I said afterwards that I wouldn't make the same mistake again. I've given up trying to change.

It's a combination of two things really:

1. A perfectionist desire to do the absolute best I can. This means using every waking minute before I finally have to hand something in to get it up to standard, rather than knocking off a weak piece of work in a few hours.
2. The fear of how much effort my lazy ass will have to put in to reach this standard, which makes me delay until the critical point where it becomes about producing the best in the restricted time available, rather than the best I could ever do.

Well I reached that point last night, so I worked through till 1pm today. However, interestingly with all-nighters, once you pass the midday falling asleep sitting up stage (which I had to overcome to return a reserve book to the library), you strangely feel like staying up till normal bedtime. I eventually persuaded myself that I needed sleep at 6pm, and slept till 10pm when my alarm went off and I found I had messages. Cue long conversation on phone with parents (best I've had in ages, especially with dad, chatting about history which was really interesting, though got frustrated about physical impossiblity of interruption in the face of my dad rambling) and now I've ended up heading off to a birthday party!

It's all good.