Look: Being prepared and being OCD

Columns October 21, 2015

I’m not always the most prepared person. I’m a procrastinator. I wait and I wait until basically the moment makes all the minutes disappear and time ticks down like a clock on high-speed internet.

Assignments are due and the workload is huge. I remember, somewhere in the far reaches of my memory, someone telling me to be prepared. What is that, exactly?

Look, a column looking at life as a student, appears in every issue of Nexus.
Look, a column looking at life as a student, appears in every issue of Nexus.

I still don’t know. Nobody does. Being prepared is something that is as mythical as a flying unicorn with big teeth.

My bag is still 35 pounds. I’m behind on my reading. But more than procrastination pulls at me to get all the reading done.

It is this: I have OCD.

I’m so OCD my last child has those initials. I’m not even kidding.

And here we are, heading into week seven… or is it week eight? I can never remember. Because there’s so much work to do I have to sing the alphabet just to remember the first letter of my name.

So I have come up with just a little golden rule to being prepared. It is simple: I write things down.

That’s it.

I am still behind in my readings and I am still struggling to keep up the workload. The truth of the matter is that as the weather changes and it gets cold, all I want to do is put on cozy PJs and snuggle down under my quilt and surf the net. The second best thing is being able to sleep for as long as I want.

Sigh. The life of a student is bittersweet: like doughnuts to beer, like milk duds.