Finals week -- or as we like to call it, Procrastination Week -- is upon us. (Actually, it's more or less supposed to be done for me today, though I won't present one project til Friday and I am STILL having a beeyotch of a time finding people under 18 who can play Grand Theft Auto for my other final paper-- if you KNOW any, have them CALL me!!!!1)

Tonight, having procrastinated every possible way I know how, but still having finished a presentable draft of a paper due Monday well before I thought I would, and even turned it in to both TA and instructor of the class, I was smote heavily with a blinding flash at 2 a.m. with the sudden realization of why I procrastinate.

Basically, it's the only safety valve I have. I can't finish anything until the end, until the very last minute. If I didn't push everything back until the very last minutes possible (ok, I'm not as bad as some -- I've never written a paper cold starting at 4 a.m. or anything), I would be inclined to revise it and revise it, and over-research sections of piddling importance, and fail to give myself any un-agonized free time until the paper was out of my hands. The burnout I'd suffer would be a hundred times worse.

For some reason in the past I've conceived of procrastination only as "stealing time from myself" -- acknowledging that I'm horribly obsessive about these things, but yet still framing procrastination as something which was bound to hurt me. I hadn't thought of it as a safety mechanism. Hmm.