Or, rather, because my sarcasm meter has been turned up to eleven for about a week and a half now.
See, the only time that I've ever wanted a Twitter is in telling people how many words I have written in a given document. This is true for both NaNo and for papers I write here at New College. I just like the satisfaction of taking little breaks to post that I'm such and such percent done, or I only have X number of words woe is me, or this paper is this ratio to that one in terms of length... you get the idea. I really like the way the numbers generally keep going up, too.
I really wish that I could do this all on Facebook, but I am loath to spam everyone's home page with my rambling banalities of X number of words on a paper due tomorrow morning at 10 AM. So, what I've done is posted my little status that says 'first paper of Hilary 2010 woo' and I'm going to comment underneath it with my progress throughout the day. Still kind of makes me look like a tool, but at least all the fail will be contained to one place when I do it that way.
As an alternative to the alternative, however, I could just blog about my progress. So, what I'm going to do is leave this tab open, and whenever I want to say something awesome about my progress or that I'm stuck, I'll write it here with a time addendum. This way, I can feel like I'm making progress. (And hey, I'm such a nerd that I might even go back and make graphs of it later.)
For people who might, I don't know, actually want to know what's going on in my academic life right now, I'm writing a 1500-word paper over behaviorism (or, as my tutor spelled it on everything, 'behaviourism') for my Philosophy of Mind tutorial. The prompt is two questions, one of which has two parts, so the 1500-word requirement can be subdivided into two 750-word requirements. (Sounds nearly manageable when I put it like that, doesn't it? Sort of vague and nonthreatening under-4-digits number.) The tutorial is at 5 PM tomorrow; the paper needs to be turned in beforehand, sometime before noon, but seeing as I have lectures scheduled every Thursday from 10 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, I figured I'd get it to him either tonight or around 9 tomorrow morning.
So, we all got the rules and constraints here? 1500-word paper by 9 tomorrow morning. All right, here goes nothing.
2:15 - Open Word document. Mess around with fonts. Type questions. Create header. Got 34 words out of it. That's still good, at least.
2:34 -325 words. That means I'm 20% done. And I haven't even gotten to most of the content yet. I have a very, very good feeling about this tutorial and how these papers are going to go. Also, by my current work ethic, I should be able to write roughly 900 words in an hour, meaning I should be able to finish the paper in, holy crap, two hours, personal best evar.
2:47 - Still at 325 words. Distracted by Facebook and writing up this blog entry. Need to go back to paper and concentrate. Also, the soundtrack to Firefly is charming.
3:00 - 453 words. I also learned that my keyboard is made of awesome, though I wish I could set some of the custom colors as regular colors.
3:09 - Finally have all of the presets on my keyboard filled. Haven't written any more words.
3:17 - 529 words, which means I'm over 33% done. I could be going so much faster, but it's easy to get distracted. Whoa, hey there, Polkas y Huapangos!
3:26 - Just hit page two. You can't grep dead trees and you also, apparently, can't grep PDFs being displayed in Internet Explorer (or at least I can't).
3:43 - Halfway to wordcount. I have some rather overinflated footnotes, but I'll compensate for that later; I just want to finish this paper by dinner. Also, listening to video game soundtracks (I'm looking at you, Halo 3 ODST) while writing papers makes me feel like, with each word, I'm beating the final boss. :3
3:49 - I'm such a nerd, I love using ibid. and op. cit. in my footnotes. :3
4:35 - 916 words, which means I'm 60% done! And I've almost rounded out the first question's answer.
5:25 - Friends distracting me and Heidi Montag later, I'm at 1034 words, which is 2/3 of the way done, and am almost done with the last paragraph of my first question.
5:34 - 1156 words, done with the first section, and hell yes I get to use a block quote.
5:50 - 1280 words, only need about 350 more to round out the section I'm writing, giving up in the meantime so I can go to dinner.
6:45 - 350 WORDS. PLEASE.
7:02 - 100 more words. That's all I'm asking. Come on.
7:11 - 1622 words, and I think I'm done. Just minor proofreading and typesetting changes to make now.
7:25 - Another once-over before I send it tomorrow morning should be good, but other than that, I'm finished!
Whew, that took a while. Now I gotta reqard myself with something. And since it appears as if I don't have any chocolate, I might instead watch a few episodes of TV/a DVD and do my nails. Also, write a few response e-mails, read one final thing for my paper due tomorrow night, and actually start outlining for said paper, as it appears I won't have much time to write it tomorrow.
To end on a happy note: I have my flights scheduled, and it looks like I might be home to go to Justin's fraternity's formal! Glee!
- Jen -
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yet another post? Gah!
ReplyDeleteSo, if anyone comments on or 'likes' said status, they get a notification every time you comment on it...
Haha, my first thought from that paragraph was to write a program that would graph it on the fly. That would be a valuable experience to do in Python, the language we're learning for Programming Paradigms (the class during which I get on Skype...).
Wow, that keyboard is distracting you too much.
You mean Internet Exploder? Or, perhaps, Internet Exploiter?
The video game music strategy is what I do during finals week. It's usually Smash Brothers Melee and/or Chrono Trigger.
Oh, was that when I (and Rachel) distracted you during my class?
Yes, it was, because you were excited by the block quote. And the apparent ability to edit previous posts in Skype.
Yes, go reqard yourself like a champion today.