HOW TO: Get your butt in gear

As I sit here in the school's library, surrounding by my four humongous textbooks, numerous notebooks, my ever-cherished calculator, highlighter and pencil, and oh, of course, how could I forget? My lunch bag that never has anything healthy in it except maybe a granola bar.

Oh yes, as I sit here surrounded by my scattered schoolwork belongings, I think about how much I want to procrastinate my Thermodynamics homework and write a post that has been a long time coming.

Oh, and I do this while eating T's strawberry fig newtons that he doesn't know I stole from him -- but I digress.

I'm not one to make excuses but there comes a time where you must look behind you to move ahead. And that has been what I have forced myself to do.

At the end of August, school started, and with it came amounts of stress that basically I didn't know what to do with. I had spent my summer lounging on the couch with T, completely obliviously that I was about to begin the notably hardest semester in the engineering program.

And so it began. And it came hard and rough. I made it through the first few weeks, not really picking up on the material completely but enough to make it through the various quizzes and homeworks that are due. Great. Peachy. Give me the gold star.

Then the tests came around week 3 or 4. Oh. My. Heavenly. Lord. What did I get myself into?? I honestly thought, even after this being my fourth year of engineering, why am I here? Why in heavens name would I put this much stress and panic and anger towards myself -- WILLINGLY? I walked out of three different tests thinking "I have no idea what I just did." No answers on some questions. Knowing how to do these problems completely drifted from my mind at the pivotal moment.

The worst of it came when I got the results back on one of the tests, and I got a 36. I felt numb. Stupid. How could I do that? Why didn't I know it? I must be the dumbest person in the class. Am I stupid? Why am I here? And much crying and screaming and lastly, depression ensued. I've never felt depressed before, but now I think I have an inkling as to what it feels like. When it finally came to the climax of emtional depression, this was the picture: T and I sitting on the couch at 11:30 at night (note: my bedtime is 9:30 so I was already very happy) and we got to talking about what was going on with my academics and my utter failing-ness, and what we were going to do about it. It kind of went like this:

R: "I am a failure. I can't take tests. I can't do homework. I'm a terrible RA. I can't even run." (note: I'm near the failure line for my physical fitness test for ROTC, but that's another story)

T: "Well, what's the difference? When were you doing these things well?"

R: "(hesitantly so as to not hurt T's feelings) Before we got married."

T: "Okay. So what were you doing differently before we got married?"

R: "I was staying at the library until 8:00 because I didn't have anyone to come home to."

T: "Well, then that's the issue."

R: "....what's the issue?"

T: "I want you to pretend you're not married. Stay at the library until later at night. Don't come home until your homework is done, and I'll make sure that I'm taking care of the house so you won't get stressed out about it when you come home."

R: " (sob, sob, sob) But I don't want to! I want to see you!"

T: "Red, stop it. You are our livelihood. If you don't get good grades, you don't graduate, which means you don't commission, and we lose our future. We will deal with our marriage later. We did it before and we can do it again."

And after more sobbing and crying and choking, that was the plan. Final. No back-up plan. One direction. (Did I mention that T is an INCREDIBLE talker? In fact, I broke up with him four times in high school, and yet we still got married...how that's for smooth and direct? Or maybe I'm just gullible and impressionable. I'm not sure...)

And so the plan began. Last Sunday, I got a locker at the library, and started leaving my books at school. No more homework at home. Don't come home until 7:00 at night. Pack lunches to start eating healthier and not have hunger tempt me to come home. Pretend I'm not married.

Oh goodness. Pretend I'm not married. That has been the most difficult one. My heart hurts every day because I know that T and I could be spending precious moments together, and yet, I'm stuck in a library. Immovable. Stagnant. Stuck.

And I feel absolutely amazing.

I'm not stressing about homework anymore. It's all done already. I'm not scrambling to throw together the homework problems that are due the two minutes before class starts. More importantly, I feel like I'm actually understanding the material better because I'm sitting in a quiet room without T or the house or the laundry or the neighbors to distract me. T was right: this IS my job right now, and if I don't do it right, we lose everything.

There's only one thing I'm still having a tough time with: when I get home, I still feel like I should be doing something. Go. Go. Go. That has been my life for the past four years, and now I'm forcefully giving myself free time after the work is done. And I feel guilty about it. If you have any ideas on how to get over that, let me know.

So that's been the past few weeks. In the future, if I go long breaks without posting, it's probably because my poor brain is about to explode with all the studying I'm doing. Which, actually, is how the next few weeks are going to be: I have three huge tests right in a row. Suck. I'll try to post short things, but give me a bit. I'm still trying to figure this new plan out.

And I'm about out of strawberry fig newtons too. Bummer. But I've got to finish my homework before I go home. That's the rule.