For Sale or Trade

Wanted: Approximately one person with the intestinal fortitude to kick the everliving fuck out of me every time I put off a project or paper until the last goddamn minute.

I am so mad at myself right now. I could be hitting hour six of a good, REM-filled sleep session but instead I'm up to my ass in Earnest Hemingway, multiplexers, and the need to fill my lungs with savory and cheap Pall Mall cigarettes. No, I don't mean smoking-- I mean littering stuffing an entire pack of twenty cotton-filtered sticks down my windpipe and hoping that my lungs figure out how to turn them into pure euphoria.

Instead of sleeping I'm reveling in awe at this awesomely bad paper about moral ambiguity in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and wondering how I could possibly attach my name to it. I mean, the physical body of Kyle Barnhart sat and typed every word but the damn thing reads like the dissertation of a 13-year-old who huffs oven cleaner to get his rocks off. If I ever have to type out the title of that story again I'm going to shit pineapple grenades all over the floor of my suite and that's really going to make my roommates mad. And fuck Hemingway for writing a story with dialog that goes thirty lines without referencing who's actually speaking. Imagine this:

"I ate a dog today," said the man.
"Yeah," responded another man.
"It was good."
"Yeah."
"Yeah.
"Good."
"Okay."
"Yeah."
"Huh?"
"Oh, nevermind."
"I'm going to Cabo."
"I'm too old to go to Cabo."
"Let's change subjects."
"Horse dick."
"Leprechaun."
...

And it keeps going like that for twenty more lines, only referencing the speakers at the top of the page. Little things like that piss me off because they add nothing to the style; I reckon it's just Hemingway's morbid way of making me read his shitty dry dialog twenty times and making little notes about the speaking order on my course packet. Fucking pious bastard.

But wait, my day can only go uphill from here. I have so much to look forward to besides turning my paper in, like getting my moderately dismal results back from an oral exam I took last Thursday in my Waves and Photonics class. Talk about exciting! Then, for the rest of the afternoon up until midnight I get to finish a computer engineering project that was due last Friday! Let's hear it for ten percent of my grade! Oh, and then I have to do a three-hour take home exam for the same class. I'm going to stop using exclamation points to hint at sarcasm because, honestly, it's not funny.

I would rather be opening little, pink exotic drink umbrellas in my urethra right now but instead I have roughly twenty more hours of awake time to pile onto my tired and broken brain. The great thing is that even if I make it to Tuesday with all my work done it's going to be another trudging week where I pull more all-nighters and then on Friday my mom comes into town. Maybe she'll let me spend the entire weekend catatonic on the fold-out couch of the Hilton she's staying it. Maybe.

I used to employ Google Calendar to remind me when things were due but, honestly, I'm starting to realize that I'm more of an "obscene amounts of neon Post-it notes all over the computer screen" kind of guy. All I know is that if I don't get some sort of system down soon my brain is going to turn into sleep-deprived goo-- it's going to transform into the kind of generic Gak that you get at an arcade for 500 tickets. Seriously, I need people to ask me what I have due soon. I also need those same people to follow up with a swift tire iron to my gonads if I tell them I have anything due soon that I haven't started.

Judging by how hard it was to write all that down, I can safely assume that the next twenty hours are going to be fruitless and that, per the usual, I will barely skate by with a passing grade on everything I've done today. Well fuck me.