Reminiscing...

"I'm so OVER this paper.  Seriously, I just don't CARE anymore.  I just can't wait to be DONE and I don't even care about my grade in this class anymore."  How many of us have uttered those exact complaints about a particularly pointless and frustrating research paper?  Now the better question: how many of us have repeated those exact complaints approximately 10 times per semester every semester of college?

Hi, my name is Barson, and I'm a complainer.

As a history major, term papers were never few and far between.  Try frequent, lengthy, and soul crushing.  Invariably, with each paper which came across my path, somewhere between receiving the rubric and officially turning the paper in, those whiny words would escape from my mouth.  Just as invariably, I was lying.  I did care.  I always did.  I said I didn't-I'm not even sure why now.  It wasn't because of peer pressure to whine about how much you hate school.  It wasn't because I thought the subject was uninteresting (with the exception of several truly abysmal papers that occur in every college student's life).  Attention perhaps?  Definitely because I just didn't feel like doing my homework.  Regardless, constantly, I found myself groaning at the prospect of writing another paper.

Yet, I am a blogger.  Again, irony, not my strong suit.  Maybe because I enjoy writing about myself.  That's probably it.

Back to the point.  Through five years of college and graduate school, I have honed my skills of whining to an art form.  There are few things in life at which I excel.  Whining is among them.  Whining about school work was my forte.  While my undergraduate work did consist of many papers, including a 40 page undergraduate thesis on fascism (yeesh), my graduate work was even more lengthy and even more whining-inducing.  A 150 page cumulative project for one of my classes was just the beginning.  Having three 10 page research papers in a six-week summer program was nothing last summer. 

All of this is to say, I have one paper in between right now and graduation.  ONE.  I have worked on it for seven and a half weeks and have completed 90% of it.  The final 10% must be done by Wednesday.  The last five years of whining without really meaning it has finally come back to haunt me.  I finally, honestly, do not care.  If I could turn in the paper as is, I absolutely would.  This is the last paper I must complete EVER.  Until the end of the world (if we listen to the Mayans, a paltry six months away), I, Barson, am DONE WITH RESEARCH PAPERS.  Almost.

I'm so OVER this paper.  Seriously, I just don't CARE anymore.  I just can't wait to be DONE and I don't even care about my grade in this class anymore.  Urghhhhh.