What I Talk About When I Talk About Procrastination

Occasionally, I get inspired to write.

Inspiration is problematic because what it really consists of is my brain deciding that it doesn't want to study, or grade another stack of papers, or make a paper-clip chain and string it around my office. It consists of my brain seeing some mediocre rehashing of a story that's been done to death (Snow White, anyone?) and rebelling against the fact that my less obviously unoriginal stories are still not quite ready to be thrown out into the world (they also lack sparkly vampires, so perhaps the world is not quite ready for my stories, either). Mostly, it consists of me scribbling madly on scraps of paper, only to realize that's I've turned my story upside down and inside out, and I don't have time to put it back together before class.

Yep. You've got it: inspiration acts a lot like procrastination.

But, maybe procrastination is all in the eye of the beholder. Am I procrastinating by working on my novel, or am I procrastinating working on my novel by studying and going to work?  (I promise I'm not being [completely] facetious. I know what my priorities are: I have to have money to feed my cat or she might kill me in my sleep). I'm not sure what it's called when your cat kills you--maybe convenient-human-who-feeds-me-icide. Whatever it's called, it sounds unpleasant.

And you thought I was going to talk about Facebook, didn't you?