"I Can Got This"

It's two o'clock in the p.m, and I've been sitting at this computer for a good 3 hours.  I have an 8-10 page paper due for my World Lit class tomorrow and I'm proud to announce that I've been quite on track.  I have 3 1/2 pages done! You may be thinking, "Anne, that's like a page an hour."  To that all I have to say is, "Yeah! Well, when you're writing a paper on the complications of the idea of Nigerian nationalism in the post-colonial text of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, racking your brain for things to say on this topic whilst incorporating 15 scholarly sources, you can come talk to me about a page an hour!" And now most of you are probably thinking, "Zzzzzzzzzzz" because you have fallen asleep at the very thought of post-colonial literature.  Anyways, I figure if I keep on keepin' on, at this rate, I'll have my minimum 8 pages finished by the time the library closes at midnight, so I'm good to go. 


As you've read before, research paper writing is not one of my fortes.  That is, it takes me an exceedingly long time and requires the utmost dedication in order for me to keep focused.  Here are the top four struggles:

1) For every paragraph I type, I erase two.  That is, I'll be sticking to my outline, keeping my paper organized and coherent, and then suddenly I bust out a bunch of tangential thoughts and find myself having to backspace for about 2 paragraphs.  That or I'll be thinking so much about how I hate writing research papers that I'll start typing sentences like, "The scholar Frantz Fanon understood that nationalism is... a bunch of crap and nobody really cares about this anyway, and the only person who will ever read this paper is my teacher so why do I have to write 10 stupid pages about useless junk anyway????"  after which much backspacing ensues once again. 

2) For every hour I work, I spend a half hour playing.  By playing I mean watching YouTube videos, listening to music, surfing Facebook, or blogging.  That last one still kinda boggles me.  Why is it that I take a break from writing to do more writing?  I can whip out 8 pages of blog like that, but research paper=no. 

3) Lost words and ability to think. There comes a point in my writing when I just can't think clearly any more, and so that prolongs the writing process tenfold.  It takes me a good five minutes just to type one solid sentence because it starts coming out like this, "I thirk natoionlism found book cause the guy wrot it and so yeah."  Yet, while I can't come up with words for my research paper, after working on my paper for a long time, I never seem at a lack of words for anything else.   That is, my blogging and speaking begin to take on my research-paper voice and it's quite irritating.  Like that, I could have just typed "it's stupid!" but instead I had to fight off the urge to type, "incomprehensibly irksome and platitudinous."  Geeeez.

4) Giving myself pep talks.  For every page that I write I have to stop and give myself a little pep talk to keep myself going.  I have to literally tell myself, "I can do this, I can do this, I can do this" and "Another page down, don't give up now" to make it through.  Most recently I told myself "I can got this", which you noticed is the title of this blog.  I once said that to my friend Glen when trying to encourage him.  I had tried to say, "You can do this" and "You got this" at the same time and it came out, "You can got this", which made us both really laugh, and ever since then it's been kind of an inside joke and something that I say all the time.

Anyways, you've probably realized by now that I'm just delaying getting back to my paper, and you probably are more than persuaded that I have a problem. I can no longer put this off...I need to finish this paper, so, I'll just leave it at, "I can got this!"