A peek at the life, times and thoughts of John during his two-year stint in Knoxville.

I realized when I woke up this morning that my final term paper shouldn't take as long as I'd been convincing myself for two weeks that it would.

I headed for the library at approximately noon and had an ambitious goal of being finished by 6:30. I worked at a leisurely pace, took a lunch break, and finished the paper at 6:45. By the time I got it to a printer and the appropriate header slapped on it (OpenOffice really doesn't like to do headers the right way) and another paper I had finished it was about 8. Not a bad day of work.

Cranking out three papers in two weeks has reminded me of something I already knew: my procrastination has got to stop. I hated it this quarter because I thought it would have me working too hard to compensate. That hasn't really been the case, the papers have not been hard to write. What I dislike about the procrastination is I can tell the papers aren't the best I could do. Are they good? Sure. Would other people be happy with the quality of papers I have written? Probably. But I can do even better if I can get better at budgeting my research time. It's a goal I have for next quarter.

Writing the papers was even (dare I say it) fun. Journalism gives me a distinct advantage in this regard. I know to look for things to make the case for me, and in doing that I end up with a variety of sources. In a way, a research paper is a really long newspaper story. You find people who said something, attribute it to them, and try to keep it coherent. I enjoyed putting it together, I hope I remember how fun it was for the future. If for some bizarre reason I actually enjoy research it makes since that maybe I should think about doing more of it, a lot more of it, in the future whether it's for a grade or not.

Since the papers are done much sooner than expected I can really lay into getting take-home tests and studying done. Finals week is here and unlike last quarter I won't be scrambling throughout the test week to get lingering assignments complete before it's too late. That in and of itself feels good.

-John