Underachievers, Please Try Harder

Summer always presents me with a confusing conflict of interests. Summer is vacation time. Time to be lazy, sit around doing nothing particularly ambitious--to recover from the academic year just passed and to rest up for the coming one. I start my summers in this traditional fashion. Mid-May, I can most often be found sitting on my posterior watching one of the millions of episodes of Law and Order on TV (At any given time, some channel, somewhere, is playing an episode. I swear, Ice-T is inescapable.). Or perhaps sleeping. I do a lot of that too.

But somewhere around early July, my typical overachiever-nerd habits return. I find myself making all sorts of ridiculous plans for future projects and setting absurdly high goals. There's nothing especially wrong or unnatural about this. I've always been a little too high-reaching for my own good. Only problem is that by the time I get around to the meat of my projects, school starts again and I am too burned out by work to persue my side projects with the fervor and gusto they deserve. I spite my work for taking me away from the things I'd rather be doing, and feel like a slacker for never carrying through with my original plans.

I don't know that the cycle will ever be broken. I can tell that I'm already a bit over my head for the fall. That is, if I am to keep all my self-made promises and my obligations. Some are things I've been meaning to do for years, some more recently developed desires.

Overachiever trapped inside an underachiever, I suppose.