I think I must be losing my touch.

I have gotten myself all worked up—to the point where I have avoided any major social outings (with the exception of Friday night, but all things considered, it was a pretty tame Friday night) and shunned shopping trips, excursions and sleep with the excuse of needing to work—for three essays not due until Friday.

Back in the day, I would not have been concerned in the slightest (ok, maybe slightly, but slightly, not in a proactive sort of way) until maybe Thursday night.

Recall, if you will, The Night of the Junior Year Science Project: My first real all-nighter (in the name of school work) and what a night it was. Not only did I manage to scrape together enough data (read: mostly, I made it up. I mean, I took some real data, and then I exaggerated the hell out of it, based on what seemed scientifically probable) to fill the backlogs for several weeks worth of my "Science Project Log", but I also managed to pull together enough research to write several pages of a report, enough visuals to create some rather unexciting but still reasonable posters, and enough bullshit to fill a five-to-seven minute presentation (I think that's how long they were? Something like that?).

Oh, and I got myself to the library, checked out half a dozen books and wrote a six page history paper on "The Rise of the American City" (which defended the oh-so-controversial thesis that during the ninteenth century, American cities grew rapidly and developed a whole lot. I'm surpirsed nobody suggested I submit this ground-breaking work to some scholarly history journal.)

Or, recall the Weekend Before December Finals, freshman year. One seven page English paper, two Sociology papers—one a 12 page, supposedly "in-depth research paper" on internet newsgroups, the other a five page paper on some subject I have long since forgotten. Except I didn't really start doing any of the work until some point in the early hours of Sunday morning.

When I passed in the Sociology papers at 5 pm that Monday, I experienced the greatest rush of relief I think I can ever recall.

There were other great nights, spent in painful moments of agony as the bullshit spewed forth from my fingers onto the keyboard. Too many to name, really. And though I can't recall every mark I've ever recieved on these papers (in many cases, I don't think I ever bothered to find out, since final papers are the type of thing you have to hunt down to see what they really gave you, and I'm not the sort of person to do that) they all did fairly well (from what I can remember, both the Sociology and English classes of freshman year garnered A-'s).

And so, with this great precedent in mind, I can tell myself I really shouldn't worry.

The funny thing is, I seem to have come some sort of academic full circle. An excerpt from my journal during the late fall of my freshman year of high school will show the great amount of anxiety and consternation I spent worrying about my science project. (Which was, by the way, conducted in a most scientific of manners, in part due to the fact that Herr Dad decided to "help" me and had commandered control of my project. And no, it wasn't one of those things where he did the project for me, it was one of those things where he orchestrated the project in a way where I had to do far, far more work than any person would have normally done for a high school freshman science project)

I'm back in that panic mode, and rusty without practice since I haven't had to write a real school paper in months. (The three page essay on Death of a Salesman I wrote as a semi-extension of my internship does not count; they were paying me, it wasn't graded, and it'll be published in the textbook I used back in my high school English class.) I'm not sure I remember exactly how to do all this rapid-fire bullshit.

Caroline's Law: Work expands to fill the amount of time allotted to it. If I allow myself to spend the entire week trying to finish these papers, it will take me the entire week to finish them. But no matter how much time I let myself have to write them, I will finish them—they must be finished. Therefore, I should not worry, therefore, I am going to bed.