Procrastination.

By: Tyler Cuddeback '14

Procrastination. We all do it. Sounds like the beginning of an Oprah special, sure, but it’s true. And is it just me, or do we do it at the worst possible times? As it is, writing this blog is a form of procrastination for me. Sure, I get paid to do this, but I’m also looking at 3 half finished essays for Freshman Writing, studying for a week’s worth of Chinese that I’ve missed from being sick, and I have to seriously start considering what I want to do for my 10 page research paper for this semester. On top of that, I’m looking at a pile of dishes, a load of laundry, and I should probably change my sheets soon.

These all seem like easy enough tasks to accomplish, right? Throw the laundry in to the wash, do the dishes, swap over the laundry to the dryer, throw my sheets into the washer, sit down and finish up my essays, finish up the laundry and go to bed. I could have all this stuff done in a matter of 3 or 4 hours, tops.

I blame winter! Before the snow started to fall and it got so cold outside that your snot turns into icicles, my friends and I entertained ourselves by going out around campus or hanging out outside or walking around town. We found ways to blow off steam so that when it came time to do work, we weren’t so pent up that the last thing we wanted to think about was work. Right now, if we went outside to do the things we used to, after about a minute, someone would scream some random expletive and complain about how cold it was until the rest of us went back inside.

When I first moved here, people told me that the winters were cold. I live about an hour south of Elmira, so I didn’t think it would be that much of a difference. Boy was I wrong! Unless you have lived here for years, or grew up somewhere were your closest neighbor was a herd of moose or caribou, you need to throw on a big winter jacket or layer up just to leave your dorm and go to the Campus Center for Dinner.
So most of us just stay inside and try to find a way to entertain ourselves. I can’t wait for the sun to stay up later than 6PM and the snow to melt enough so that I can finally get some work done!