Life & Procrastination

Life of a Procrastinator.
Life as a Procrastinator.
Lifelong Procrastinator.
Lifetime of Procrastination.
Procrastinating Life.

I'm trying to remember if I've always been a procrastinator. Thinking back to my childhood, the earliest memory of my partaking in procrastination goes back to elementary school. Growing up in Japan, we had homework over our 6 week summer vacation. Stuff like keeping a diary everyday, learning kanji characters by writing them over and over and over millions of times (must submit this notebook as proof!), math problems, art projects...

I think I was pretty good about getting the mechanical projects out of the way. Mechanical meaning I would just chuck away at writing same characters over and over and doing similar math problems over and over. I think I even put together a half-assed art project. The problems I had were with projects that I had to think about... Like thinking about what to write about in today's diary entry. I mean we had to even write down the weather for that day and each entry had to be accompanied by a colored drawing. Ummm. Yeah. So I procrastinated. Resulting in my mother going through old newspapers to look up weather information from weeks ago (days before the intertubes!) and me writing entries like "tomorrow is my friend's birthday", "today was my friend's birthday", and finally "yesterday was my friend's birthday". And later years in my elementary school, I remember I had issues with research projects. It could be about anything. I procrastinated because I couldn't decide what I wanted to research.

Middle school and high school pretty much went the same way... I excelled at math or physics or something like that, but sucked at subjects like history or English where I had to think more and interpret, blah blah blah. I liked having right/wrong answers.

So naturally (?) I pursued engineering in college. It went pretty smooth I must say... I'm a procrastinator, but I'm also a hard worker, I guess. I was good at performing mindless tasks. Endless math problems where as long as you had the patience to work through the 1000 iteration you eventually came to a correct answer was something I had no problems doing.

I kind of went to grad school and got a master's degree because I couldn't decide what kind of work I wanted to do and at the time pursuing a master's degree kind of was like an extension of my undergrad.

Then I decided to move to Michigan because there was a job lined up for me and I had a happy life with someone who was moving to Michigan.

But the job was not fulfilling. It was not a good fit. It didn't match my skill sets at all... I was ineffective, and bored. I think this is when I started procrastinating the most. Except it was about important things. Like what do I want to do to earn my living?

Procrastination kind of paid off in that respect... I went with the flow of things and ended up switching jobs, making more money, entered into a brand new field of work (not necessarily a good "career" move but when you don't know where you want your career to go, more money is always a good reason to switch jobs).

Years went by. Got married. Got divorced.

Then, mother of all procrastination. WHAT THE FUCK TO DO WITH MY LIFE??????

So yeah. Currently procrastinating.... life, I guess???