Tonight’s the night I actually write that goddamned final paper for Psych 1200.

In fact, honestly, I would rather be writing it than writing a blog entry. But I have to do my words now so they are out of the way and I can concentrate fully on the paper without worrying about the bloggening.

Today’s saga of personal dumfuckery began when it came time for me to call the university to get my password reset. I had the number on the screen when working up to getting over my social anxiety issues re: phones, when suddenly the most amazing thing happened.

I remembered my password. Of…. course I did. I remembered it at the exact moment it would make absolutely no difference. None. Zip.

Oh well, it saved me a phone call.

This afternoon, I did all the preliminary work. I found my study and three related sources (one of them the DSM). I started the document and set it to the right margins and put the header in and figured out how to do line numbering and stuff.

But the dumfuckery was not over, as I freaked out and got all frustrated at not being able to figure out how to set the document to double-spacing. I Googled the problem, pored over menus, and got no closer to an answer. And the thing is, I knew I had figured it out for other documents. But now it was gone!

Nerp. It was right where it has always been, right where all the answers I Googled said it would be, and I had been too panicked and frustrated to see it.

I really am prone to freaking out. It’s disturbing. I think of myself as this mellow laid-back cool guy, but the reality is that I am high strung and ready to go off like a rocket at the drop of a hat, leaving reason and sensibility far, far behind.

Gotta work on that.

Anyhow, I have the opening paragraph, which will be the most difficult one, half-done. After that, it’s pretty much just a rephrasing/summarizing job. Read the study, summarize method and results and all that, not that big a deal.

So I am not sweating it too much. Once I get the intro done (which is where I will in-text cite my sources), I should be able to knock of something approaching a decent paper before midnight.

Technically, I have until I have to leave for the exam at around 2:30 pm to do it (we pass it in at the exam) to do it, but there’s no way I am going to try to go to sleep with this thrice damn’d thing weighing on my mind. I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep, and sleep is kind of important before an exam.

I have already had the experience of writing an exam when I had not gotten enough sleep (during College The First Time), and it was a surreal, hellish experience that I do not wish to repeat.

So now it’s just a matter of getting the damned thing written. It still pisses me off how cavalier Kwantlen and its staff are about testing you on things they did not teach. The attitude seems to me to me that if you assign it, they will do it, and so why should the profs care if they ever taught you to do the thing? If students fail, that will be reflected in their grade, not the teacher’s grade.

It makes you wonder why they bother teaching us anything at all. Why not just give us all the tests and assignments during the first class and leave it to us to figure it out? It would save a lot of time and it’s wheat they are going to do eventually anyhow.

What bothers me is the lack of an attempt to smooth the gradient. Take this course, Psych 1200, that is making me write this fricking paper. We have had absolutely no lessons on how to do a major assignment like this one. None. And because it was the final assignment, we had no idea we were not going to be taught how to do it until it was far too late.

But it’s what is easiest for the profs, so why should they care? There’s no feedback mechanism to correct this. It is, as my dear friend and nexus of fabulosity Felicity says, sink or swim.

And some of us are sinkers.

Although, to be fair, most people do not end up having to do the whole thing at the last minute due to their own stupidity either. I’m just lucky that writing comes naturally to me now. All the mental muscle in my writing zone that I have been building up over the years in this space makes it a not horrendous task.

Otherwise, I would be fucked, to be honest.

Closing in on why doing research stresses me out so much. It’s a frustration thing, I think. Dead ends take a way higher toll on my emotionally than I would like. My frustration level builds rapidly when I don’t find what I am looking for, and I can only take so much of that before it becomes quite painful and makes me prone to giving up in a rage.

And I have had this issue with frustration all my life. That’s one of the reasons I was such a pain in the ass to teach as a kid. When something didn’t come to me naturally, I would get frustrated and refused to do it, especially when it came up against my lack of visual acuity and fine motor control.

So, to put it in Internet lingo terms, I ragequit things. And that meant I never got any better at them. Nobody could force me to keep at it, and so I got away with just plain not doing it.

It would have taken someone extraordinary to get me to keep trying at those things, like arts and crafts, once I had decided I wasn’t going to do them.

I was such a handful!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.