So I said that I would write tonight and then I looked at the time. It might be early for some people but the way my days go, 11pm is getting close to the time when I stop to function and start to hear voices telling me to go to bed - that might just be me talking to myself again though. I might have taken a little bit of artistic license there though because it's not yet 11 as a start to write this post, so if I get a move on I'll be in bed before I fall asleep on my laptop.
Tonight's post is a bit of a repeat. You know when you look at the TV guide to see what's on, think there's a new series of your favourite programme, only to see the damn little 'R' at the top, ripping your dreams into shreds? Well that's pretty much the gist of this post which is about my constant flips between productivity and stagnation. If you think you have read this post before then I'm sure there's a repeat of Top Gear or Mock the Week on Dave that you've seen 3 times already that you might prefer to see for a 4th rather than read my dross - please stay, I don't have adverts (yet).
To set the scene here I might as well report that I'm currently in a state of productivity. I was sitting in work yesterday, scanning away ('any cashback there?...'hmm (10 seconds later) no'...'just your pin please') when I realised that I've not been working hard enough recently at university. I always find it oddly amusing that I come to this conclusion at a time when I can't do anything about it. I couldn't have whipped out a case report and started to read whilst I was serving people, nor could I have cracked out the Kindle and started to mull over a journal article. So I was left wondering what might be as I tidied up a burst bag of sugar that had been left by a valued customer at the end of my till belt, spewing its crunchy crystals all over the shop - excuse the pun.
After work was never going to be a realistic time to instigate my productivity revolution because I was lucky to be walking after a hard shift so I deferred until today. This was the crucial period, between last night and this morning (something I have written about before), that was either going to see the turning out of the light that I had seen at work or its magnification. Thankfully I pulled myself through and now I feel like I'm ready to tackle another challenging week at university with more oomph* than I've been able to give since returning after the Christmas break.
*According to Google, this means "The quality of being exciting, energetic, or sexually attractive." - I am all of those things...
To contrast this new found 'get-up-and-go-ness', this time last week I was struggling to see how I was going to get anything out of my two seminars on the Tuesday as a consequence of being hellishly under prepared for them. Somehow I pulled it out of the bag (maybe because my seminar on Monday was cancelled) but it was a rubbish feeling sitting in a seminar with only the basic work and a little bit of analysis in front of me. That might have been the starting pistol that I needed to get the race to my summer exams started. It shouldn't have even been an issue (that is motivating myself) but it was and I had let it get to that stage. I'm just glad that I've hopefully turned the corner and that I can now say that my post-essay hangover is behind me.
So I don't know if you consider this to be a cruel, uncontrollable (and possibly natural) cycle in my life or if you think it's a nasty habit that I've got that could be changed with a some effort on my part. Either way it gives me something to write about every few months, it gives my readers something to make them feel better about themselves every few months and it means that I'm not writing about things that I don't understand - like women, and...no just women.
Now even I feel like I've read all of this before - worrying since I'm the one who decides what to write here. I hope it's not like a post-banana belch (the taste of banana is great when you're eating the thing, but there's something dissatisfying about tasting it twice) and that you get something out of the stuff that I write. I would be generous (to myself) in guessing that you consider 90% of my writing to be superfluous, with the other 10% making a modicum of sense to you - possibly even inspiring you to some degree.
It's 11.30 for goodness sake! Bed for me I think.
Thanks for reading,
Martin
P.S. I intended to write about Lance Armstrong tonight - that didn't happen if you just skipped to the end of this post to see how it ended - but I think I'll put that out later on in the week so keep your eyes peeled!
