Scrambling that Writer's Block

Thanksgiving break was much too short. Flying home for those four days off felt just like pausing live TV on my TV tuner without pushing the record button first; once I click on the "Play" button, everything suddenly jumps forward and I am scrambling to catch up on the crucial elements of the plot I missed while attempting to juggle comprehension of what is going on at the moment.

That's exactly how I am feeling right now and I am not happy about it. Scrambling, unless it is scrambling eggs for my breakfast (preferably with a side of French toast and two or three veggie sausage patties, please) has no place in my presumably more laid-back life here in La Jolla.

Since I did not get a lick of work done in San Francisco, lugging my untouched books back to campus with me, knowing full and well of all the end-of-quarter deadlines hanging over my head, left me with an extremely guilty conscience.

My biggest deadline was the outline of my worth-45%-of-my-grade, eight to nine page (trimmed down from ten) Muir 40 paper due at my 2:15 pm conference with the instructor. The thing about writing is that it is a fickle facet of academia; no matter how much you may want to focus, once that writer's block hits, there really is not much you can do besides sit at your desk, stare at the little blinking bar on your open word processing document mocking your inability to express coherent ideas in written words, and scream silently while attempting to rip chunks of hair from your scalp out of sheer frustration.

Despite shelling out some big bucks to take a cab back to campus from the airport so I could start hitting those books earlier with the hopes of catching a few winks of sleep before my 9 am class the next morning, I did not get any work done whatsoever. That stupid blinking bar was really getting on my nerves, so I ended up browsing internet deals and mentally adding items to my wish list for THREE hours.

I desperately needed those extra few hours of sleep, but I was convinced that I would be able to come up with something brilliant to write about if I just stared at my notes or the word processing document a little longer.

Unfortunately, that much-needed bout of inspiration did not come and I ended up crashing into bed, feeling completely dejected, at 3 am.

When my alarm went off at 8:30 am, I turned it off and seriously contemplated rolling over and sleeping through my Political Science class. After weighing the pros and cons of cutting class, I figured that the benefits of sleeping in did not outweigh the costs (how's that for theory of rational thought for you, Hobbes?), jumped out of bed groggily, brushed my teeth, and ran out of my room with my notebook, an Odwalla bar, a half-filled Nalgene, and my iPod.

I was glad I did not miss class today because we watched a really moving documentary about Jewish rescuers during the Holocaust. The rescuers' accounts of what happened were so intense that I started tearing up at one point. I am really excited about the "Becoming Evil" seminar I will be taking with my current Political Science professor next quarter that will delve even further into this dark period of history.

At the end of class, our TAs returned our in-class midterm exams. When I opened my bluebook, I was very surprised to see a big "A" circled at the end of my essay with the word "Excellent!" underneath it.

That was just the inspiration I needed.

Once I got back to my room and pulled up the blank word processing document I had opened up the night before, the right words and ideas began to flow out of my head like water out of a kitchen faucet. Two hours later, I was pretty satisfied with my paper layout, so I printed the sucker out and headed to history class.

After class, I grabbed some food before walking over to my instructor's office for my conference. One-on-one conferences with my instructor always make me nervous because he can be pretty intimidating, but things always work out well in the end and I come out of his office with great advice to guide me as I sit in front of my computer writing my papers late into the night.

Today, I sat at his desk and watched him in silence for about ten minutes as he read the outline of my paper before either one of us spoke. When he was finished going over what I had written, he told me that he had no real criticisms of how I intended to write my paper and that he was looking forward to reading it when I was done. After giving me a few reminders to keep in mind as I wrote the paper, I was good to go.

I hope this is a good sign that I might be able to score that "A" in the class after all!