Next stop, Procrastination Station!

The other day, I received the fabric I ordered for two quilts I’m going to make. Now I have the first quilt's batch washed, pressed and ready to go. My pattern is chosen, my blocks are plotted out in a little colored-pencil sketch and I’m eager to get my sew on.

However, over the next week, I have four exams and a packed work and school schedule. And all I want to do is work on my projects.

I don’t know about anyone else, but my most prolific periods in the domestic arts have run concurrent with my busiest times in school.

Cases in point: 

• In my senior year of college, while working three jobs: I threw myself into pastry.

• Preparing to present at two conferences: I painted my apartment and landscaped the patio.

• Applying to graduate school: I made a blazer and two sundresses. 

• Revising my Master’s thesis: I took up knitting, producing a cavalcade of hats, scarves and arm warmers. 

• And once, once, the eve before two papers' deadlines: I made a cheesecake. With my own homemade cheese. 

In the course of my academic endeavors, I have thirsted for tangible tasks and practical outlets. In the midst of critical theory and literary analysis, I just wanted something I could put my hands on, manipulate, mold and finish. And a garment coming into view from a piece of string and two sticks blew my mind as much as anything Foucault could say. 

Though my coursework now is more practically related to everyday life than anything I’ve ever studied, the same holds true. I crave producing something "real" while reading and thinking about speech, hearing and language science, vast and often abstract topics.

In this sense, I think these projects are a perfectly healthy counterbalance to the scholarly task at hand.

On the other hand, they are largely procrastination. I am not a lazy person. But I do procrastinate, in the form of projects that would make Martha Stewart beam (or at least stiffly nod her head in prim approval). Because my procrastination feels productive, avoiding school work seems less wrong, even if the things I choose to do are the last things on earth I should be doing at that point in time.

So yeah, I’m the first to recognize the absurdity of this. I mean, it’s my morning off, when I ought to be studying for my impending exam, and I’m writing about (!) the procrastination I could be (!) doing today. 

Okay, I've sufficiently shamed myself. Off to study communicative processes in aging... and fight the urge to sew quilt squares.