Sometimes I Wonder About My Own Sanity...

Do you remember that completely old school computer game of Minesweeper? Yeah, you just made me feel old. For those of you youngins, minesweeper was what kept us old folk entertained before Facebook and Twitter. That, along with solitaire and Oregon Trail, occupied a significant amount of my time growing up. 

 It's a game of logic. Basically, you have a grid on which a certain number of 'mines' are placed. Your job is to find them and flag them. If you don't, and you make the mistake of clicking on them  it 'destroys' the board and YOU DIE. It's very bad and death like. It can be quite a tedious game at times, but throughly addicting. 

Not completely connected but exceedingly relevant to this post is the fact that I have struggled for a good deal of my life with anxiety. As an adult I have better control over it than I did as a teenager, but it often gets the better of me. It stems from the fact that I am a quintessential perfectionist. (Seriously, I'm a freak.)  I become irrationally upset about small things. I stay up all night worrying about situations and relationships that I can't change. I stop eating when I'm overwhelmed. I burst into tears with the slightest provocation. Basically, 

I become a completely unreasonable mess.

(I pity the poor man who marries me. Talk about mood swings.)

As of late, my life has turned into one huge game of minesweeper. I feel as though I'm picking through a mess; wondering where I'm to find my next mine which will lead things to be bad and death like. It's the worst at work. I'm blindly clicking along, trying to flag the mines before they explode in my face, but more often then not I miss one. And that's the difficult part:

I never did like it when the whole board blew up.

And more often then not, the whole board blows up faster than I can handle. Whether or not the explosion is actually the result of a bad click or missed flag on my part, I still feel responsible. The tedious nature of the 'game' brings me to the brink of insanity. 

And I don't particularly look good at the brink of insanity. 

See?

"I despise academics." Lorelai Gilmore

So I really don't despise academics. I'm going to be a college professor for heaven's sake. Academics are my life. But right now, I'm in the process of The Week of Five Papers (well that's the Native American name for it. I just call it the week from hell). Yes friends, you read that right. I had 5 papers due this week. Here's the page break down:

Senior Capstone Paper of Death: 25 pages
Korean movie review of depressingness: 2 pages (If I had to sit down and type it, then it's a paper.)
Iranian Revolution of confusingness: 8 pages
Biography of Livia Drusilla, who rocks my socks off: 10 pages
Korean History book review on a book that I have yet to read: 5 pages

I'm done with the paper of death, the movie review and the biography. I only have 13 pages standing between yours truly and cram sessions for finals. And every single ounce of my motivation is gone. I've tried bribing myself with frozen yogurt (as in I write 4 pages of my Iranian Revolution confusion and I get the treat. I've written half a page and it's been an hour) but even that hasn't done anything for my fading desire. So basically, I'm sitting on my bed, typing a sentence here and there and pretending that I really want to write this paper. In reality, it could be worse. This is my last semester where I'll have any history classes, actually come to think of it, this is my last semester where I'll take more than one class. So I guess the Avalanche de Papers could be more awful: I could have to do it again next semester. That realization aside, if any of you want to send me suggestions via any mode of communication possible (we're talking even carrier pigeons, people) I'd love to hear your suggestions of how to convince myself to finish these nasty little papers. 

Help...

I'm slowly being crushed by the weight of huge papers and massive study guides. It's dark and I can hear laughing...