I'll Think of a Title Later | Teen Ink

I'll Think of a Title Later

March 26, 2015
By Ali Whitman BRONZE, Norton, Massachusetts
Ali Whitman BRONZE, Norton, Massachusetts
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

 It’s only 3:00 pm; I have plenty of time to do my homework. Just one more episode and I’ll start. Similar to most students, one more episode often turns into three more episodes of shows such as Gossip Girl or Breaking Bad. Suddenly, I look at the clock and its 5:00 pm. At this point, I might as well wait until I eat dinner. I work better on a full stomach anyways. One hour later and I still haven’t commenced to my work. I have no problem finding time to check Twitter to see if Sue broke up with her boyfriend or what to see who’s at some stupid party or text all my friends about their ex-boyfriends that just started dating a new girl but when it comes to homework, I always put it off to the side until the last minute. Studying and homework are not nearly as important as One Tree Hill or Snapchat. That is, until it’s 9:00 at night and I come to the realization that I still haven’t started the pile of homework on my desk.

   Math, Spanish, English, and biology. Sounds easy enough. I started with my biology homework, which happened to only be a couple pages of fill in the blank answers. However, what I prayed would take me 15 minutes ended up taking me 45 minutes. Not too bad. I deserve a break. After 20 minutes of catching up on everyone else’s lives, I decide to get back to mine.

   As soon as I take out my Spanish homework, my friend blows up my phone asking for questions to the math homework. I decide to do that first. Our lesson in class was easy to understand but when I looked at the work in front of me, it looked like Gibberish. Let me just take a 5 minute break to get my head back in place. 20 minutes later, the same friend that was struggling was now the one helping me understand the confusing words and numbers known as math. After completing the nearly impossible work, I reward myself with 10 minutes of communication with my friends.

  30 minutes and a snack break later, I open up To Kill a Mockingbird and begin reading. Did people actually speak like this? What does any of this mean? So, once again I turn on my phone and read the two chapters on Sparknotes. This takes longer than you would expect, however, because after every couple sentences I get multiple messages from a group message which is way more important than this useless story. Although I’ll regret it the next day when I fail the quiz, at the moment we were having a great conversation about food and shopping.

  One more class and I’m done. This should be easy. Wrong. I open my book and find that I have to copy over 50 words in Spanish. Please tell me when I’m going to need to say words like "dust" in Spanish! After 2 words, I look at my phone. Another one of my friends asks me what we need to know for our quiz next class. Quiz!? There is no way she mentioned a quiz! I look at my agenda and surely enough "Quiz next class" is written in bold letters. Whatever, it can’t be that hard. Wrong again. After succeeding to vaguely copy down 50 words in a language I’m never going to need to use, I finally lie in bed and go through every social media and message left on my phone that I didn’t use as an excuse to not do my homework. 4 hours of sleep is enough, right?

   Once again I was very, very wrong. After oversleeping my alarm, I rush to get ready for school. Oh no, I forgot to study for Spanish! Whatever, I’ll have time in school before class. When I walk into school, I immediately join my friends in conversation about more drama that occurred during the few hours of sleep I actually got. All together, I studied for a total of 10 minutes, 5 of which were spent with people standing over my shoulder trying to have conversations with me. I spend my day exhausted, and I promise myself that I will start my homework earlier the next day. This cycle repeats nightly despite my pledge.

  Every student, at some point in their learning career, has become very familiar with the word procrastination. For me, it’s more like a habit than a one-time mistake. Something always seems more important than what I should be focusing on. Maybe one day, I’ll fix my procrastination problem. Then again, Friends just came on Netflix.


The author's comments:

I wrote this self-deprecation piece to poke fun at my habit of procrastination.


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