Saturday, September 16, 2006

The Strange Case of Dr Chao Mugger & Mr Slacker

I've come to the sad conclusion that i can really only get work done when i am in a proper school environment.

Take right now, for example - I'm now in my room alone listening to online Christian radio awaiting for my laundry to be done in the dryer. I could be sitting at my desk doing some of the numerous readings and subsequent reading responses that are due through next week. But instead i'm at my laptop lamenting away...

Now, if not for the laundry having to be done in the first place, i probably wouldn't even be in my room at this time - since it's pretty obvious to me where the resulting time spent waiting for the clothes to get washed and dried will go - which is down the drain, together with all the dirty laundry water.

And one thing (either good or bad depending on what kind of a student you are) about the UNC undergrad library is that it's open 24 hours a day Sunday through Thursday, something which when i first heard the news of, triggered an eerie glee within the chao mugger side of me which totally spooked my slacker half to no end. Yup - you'd think that the ultimate would be spending enough late nights in the NUS central library until i can memorise the annoying piped-in music that they play to signal closing time, but no, UNC has gone one up (have i mentioned that the studiousness of a lot of the students here really is freaky? I suppose that's why this school is so difficult to get in to). And for the former half of me, the news of this 7-11 quality to the library is one attractive prospect. Now, i'm positive that i would never be able to pull a full all-nighter, but at the least i could get a few hours of productive studying under my belt in the night and get back to the room and then regress into the slacker half - wasting much of the rest of my waking hours doing mindless things such as this...

Well, one other reason why i'm avoiding doing the work for the upcoming week is that the stuff to do is really cringe-inducing. There's actually not that much, but it's a chore to do nevertheless. A big part of it is the readings for that same headache-inducing course that i have on monday nights on welfare. But there also is the reading for another course which is really troublesome. Allow me to elaborate...

I've three chapters of a book on the 1986 Tax Reform Act in the US (scintillating stuff, isn't it?) to read and do a short write-up on. Now normally that would pose little problem to me, but in this case, things are somewhat different.

You see, i decided to order some of my books online via half.com. But owing to some card problems, i was delayed in confirming the order. The result is that my order of the book in question for this particular assignment will only come in after i'm supposed to hand in the write-up.

To make matters worse, all copies of the book have been snapped up in the library. So initially, i was tempted to be a total cheapskate and just hang out in the bookshop and somehow get away with reading 64 pages of the book without looking suspicious. But instead i settled on another less-obvious but far more troublesome way to read the stuff - through looking at the excerpts on Amazon.com - it's been a very troublesome process which is too long-drawn for me to attempt repeating here, but suffice to say it's very draining.

So i haven't been able to read all the pages yet because of the copyright limit, but thankfully i think that after four or five hours spent staring at the computer screen i've enough info to do the write-up with...

And now all that's really left is for me to actually do all the work that has to be done asap so that i'll have some semblance of a weekend left for me to enjoy. I do wonder how i'll be able to handle all the over-the-weekend work whenever i'm out of Chapel Hill for the weekend (which hopefully will be fairly often enough if i ever want to cover a fair number of places on my to-visit list) And that brings me back to why am i still sitting here doing nothing productive? Laundry's done and hung. No chance i'll be motivated enough to get started on anything here. So off to the library i go then...

ta!

No comments: