It's not procrastinating! It's called waiting for artisitc inspiration. Which is triggered by the abject terror or last minute deadline, of course....

It's final exam week and everyone is stretched to the limits, torn between studying for exams and completing final assignments. Lots of it has to do with writing a lot of papers. Writing papers is also one of the things I hear people complaining about most. I myself has a 12-pages final paper and of course, the final project for our class. Since such tasks are often very time-consuming, most people start early. I have always been the exception. My first semester of freshman year I had a 20-pages final paper. I put it off until the last weekend and submitted it Monday morning. The semester after that I spent the night before the due date to write up a 10-pages book review. Again, this semester, I pulled an all-nighter writing the 12-pages research paper and submitted it the next morning. People invented a word for that: procrastinating. In terms of works ethics, it's bad. Yet nothing is more popular in college experience than procrastination, at least for me. It's like McDonald food which everyone knows is bad but they keep eating it.

Personally it has always been my way when it comes to writing. I simply can't write something way ahead of time. Nor can I sit down, write 5 pages today and finish 5 more pages the next day. I just don't feel the desire, or more importantly, the inspiration to. I have to sit down for a whole day and whole night if need be, just a day or two before the deadlines depending on the assignment. I feel that the sheer terror of facing the deadline makes my thoughts much clearer and my writing much better. So far it has yielded me great results, and thus I have decided not to change it. When my friends learn about that, they just don't have anything to say. Another friend at whose house I spent the night writing the 10 pages book review last semester was even angry about it-about the fact that I put off work until the last minute. Most of the time I don't have anything to say back either. Procrastination is still a bad thing and there's simply no excuse for it. Deep inside I am always afraid that if I keep up this work habit it will brew complacency and ruin my success in the future. For the moment though, I simply can't resist it. That terrorized feeling and the work drive I feel at the last minutes, it's... addictive. I love that feeling and I seek it whenever I could.

I simply hope that by the time I learn the lesson it will not be too late.