Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Mary Poppins Ain't Got Nothin' On Me!!

I don't really remember watching the movie Mary Poppins all the way through. I just remember snippets and parts here and there. But these small snippets have taught me many important life lessons. Things like:
  • You can fly with an umbrella.
  • If you sing about doing something (let's say, for example.... flying a kite), it will be the coolest thing since sliced bread and you will get old men to follow suit (is that the phrase?).
  • It's okay to pull your pants down on a date as long as there are cute penguins in the vicinity.
  • If you are laughing, you are most likely high.
  • Your reflection moving separately from you in the mirror doesn't have to be creepy.
  • And the most obvious, of course, is that if you make cleaning fun, cleaning will get done.... or something like that.
Great life lessons. But I have found the last one to be not quite true. Cleaning can be fun, but it's still cleaning. And even though I can make it MORE fun, it's still not fun. And thus, I am not motivated to do it. That is, unless I am in school.

I've never been officially diagnosed with A.D.D., but I think I may have a slight case of it. I am constantly procrastinating, have troubles prioritizing, and am constantly distracted (I could make some joke here and get side tracked on another story... But that is too obvious. This thought did, however, get me sucked into the blackhole of youtube for quite awhile because I thought of a Simpsons clip where Homer is supposed to be paying attention in church or something like that and gets distracted by a butterfly outside. Anyone know which one I'm talking about?)

Anyway.... I realize that I am a fairly lazy person. I text and call people on the phone even though they are just upstairs. I drove down to my friends' (Skybo and Adam) houses, and they each only lived two houses away. I've seen plenty of them girly designer television shows and other shows I would probably never watch just because the remote was not in my immediate reaching range. I usually end up driving for about an hour in a parking lot to find that perfect parking place. My family tried to train the dog to close the door (we had already taught him to just walk in) so that we didn't have to get up to close the door after he came in (this didn't work so we built a pulley system so the door would shut on its own). And that's just the starting of my laziness.

I can't think of anything really significant that I got done during the summer. Except beating Batman and Portal 2. I had a few projects that I could have worked on, but I didn't. I mean, come on, I was busy with..... going on that.... one date I went on .... maybe...... and I probably occasionally mowed the lawn...... and other busy stuff.

This month I just started going back to school for my Masters. Homework, as we know, always comes along with school. The Masters program seems a lot worse. There is a ton of homework. It's non-stop. One of my professors said that for an undergraduate class, they expect you to spend an hour out of class for every hour in class or something like that. For the graduate level, they expect you to spend 3 or 4 hours out of class for every hour in class..... are they serious? That's an entire long boring movie! Or two good movies! An entire weeks worth of exercise that I don't do! An entire nap! An entire weeks worth of church! An entire football game!..... And that's just for one hour of one class! I have three classes.... That's like ..... a lot of hours (I didn't feel like doing the math). And the reading..... oh the reading. That's all they give us for homework, is reading. And they actually expect you to read and learn. What's with that?

So, as I was saying earlier (before I got sidetracked), I get sidetracked really easy. And this seems to happen most often when I have homework to do. I make all sorts of plan the day before (*cough*procrastination*cough*) to get my homework done the next day. The game plan is generally something like this:


  1. Wake up early.
  2. Get some breakfast.
  3. Get some exercise in.
  4. Do some homework.
  5. Go to work.
  6. Work super hard and don't slack off at work (just in case any one from work is reading).
  7. Get some homework done on my lunch and then continue to work hard until that clock hits 5 pm.
  8. Come home speedily and start on my homework and don't stop until caught up on all the homework.... In fact, get ahead and do all the homework for the rest of the semester.
  9. And then go to bed super early, because being healthy is important.
But then, that day comes and goes and it usually ends up going something like this.
  1. Hit my snooze alarm.
  2. Hit my snooze alarm.
  3. Realize I hit my reset alarm instead and have to be to work in 5 minutes.
  4. Rush to get ready and get to work late (a little stressed because nobody likes to be late to work).
  5. Work extremely hard (again.... people from work may be reading this).
  6. Lunch time! I was going to do homework, but I worked hard so I deserve a nap... Take said nap in car.
  7. Wake up late from work nap and get back to work late after lunch.
  8. Having a semi-nap in car just makes me sleepy but some how make it to 5:00 without passing out.
  9. Get home determined to do homework.
  10. Realize that I can't do homework on an empty stomach, so I make myself some food.
  11. Realize that I can't make food without something on TV.
  12. Realize that I can't really watch TV when the family room and kitchen are dirty.
  13. Proceed to clean family room and kitchen.
  14. Now that family room and kitchen are clean, try and find a show to watch while cooking and eating.
  15. Start cooking, then eat, all while watching a show.
  16. First episode of whatever I'm watching ends while I'm still eating. I might as well start another episode to watch while I finish eating.
  17. Finished eating but episode isn't over yet. Might as well finish episode.
  18. Walk upstairs to do homework.
  19. Realize that I can't do homework without a drink, make a quick Maverick run.
  20. Come back and realize that room is dirty and one cannot do homework in a dirty room.
  21. Clean room.
  22. Sit down on luv sac or bed because all the cleaning and eating has worn you out.
  23. Wake up an hour later.
  24. Start on homework but realize it's dinner time.
  25. Repeat steps 10 - 19 (yes, the house gets dirty somehow. And even if it didn't, I could still find something to clean).
  26. Finally sit down to start on homework and maybe get an hour in before I convince myself I should go to bed and just wake up early to do my homework.
  27. Better play one more level on that Playstation before going to bed....
  28. And finally, go to sleep close to 1 am.
And that is a normal day. 

Anytime I think about homework, I think about that little project I've been putting off. I mounted a TV on my wall awhile ago. And then I got a sound bar earlier this past summer. The sound bar needed a digital audio cable plugged into it. I put it off during the summer because it was going to be quite the project. But the second I have to do homework, I think to myself that I really can't let that sit anymore. So I spend the next few hours trying to get that wire plugged into my TV. Then I've been perfectly fine not having blinds in my room for years. But, as soon as school starts, I decided that my room must have blinds and I proceeded to go and buy them, mount the brackets, and  put those suckers up. I may have vacuumed my room once during the summer, I think I've already vacuumed it four times in the four weeks since school has started. I've washed my sheets more often. And I have dusted a ton (I don't think I dusted once during the summer).

Little did my parent's know all those years growing up that all they had to do was ask me to do my homework. All my chores would have been done at that very second. Mary Poppins' spoon full of sugar? Pfft.


(P.S. Did you notice the dates of my last blog posts? Last one was pretty much when school just ended. And now I'm doing this post right after school has started. Just sayin....)