"Wasting" time

I'm having one of those days, or indeed weeks, where one questions the point of everything one's doing. Or not doing, as is the case with my 18,000 word dissertation, whose word count stands at a defiant zero.

I apologise to those of you who have tried to contact me recently and have been met with silence. It's nothing personal.

I must write a good dissertation, and submit it on April 28th. Then I must "revise" (read: learn from scratch) five or six modules worth of course material so I stand a chance in the exams three weeks later.

And all so I can get a good graduate job, right? Right. Thing is, all I really want to do right now is play piano and write games.

Aww. No sympathy from the audience. It's the classic case of the lazy student facing up to the real world, isn't it?

But whatever happened to chasing your dreams?! Maybe I could make a living writing music? Or writing and self-publishing indie (I term them "nu-shareware") video games? (A significant voice in my mind reckons that I should go full-time on Millennium 3 until it's done, and then market it as a niche product for hardcore space-sim fans.)

But I'm supposed to be here to get a decent "proper" job, and if I screw up my degree then I'm doomed, or so they tell me. And all this thinking about the future is just making me get up later each day.

You see, in summertime, when I'm working at Aqua Pacific every day, I don't have time to think about where I'm going and why. When back at uni, it's far too easy to fall into a big pit of existentialist goo. You quickly lose the motivation to get up in the afternoon.

So what I should probably do is just hurl myself into busywork until after the exams after over, and always fight the urge to ask "why". To start with, I'm going to pledge to write something on here at least once a day for the next seven days.

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