As I type this, I'm procrastinating on working on an assignment that was due last week. The professor said she'd go through what I've written tomorrow with me before I work on the second part, which is due next week. I added a few phrases to organize my thoughts earlier today, but which are things I knew anyway, so really, I haven't done anything.

For at least the past couple of years, I've had problems with studying. Especially with writing papers. I'm lucky if I get those done the last minute. It's like I physically cannot type. It's infuriating. I know what I have to do, and yet somehow it doesn't get done. Reading's another problem: I re-read again and again and again and again, and it just doesn't go through, although if I study at the very last minute (reading the chapter for the first time the night before the exam), it seems to lift somewhat. Unsurprisingly, I'm not that motivated to study (whether that's a cause or effect or both or neither, I have no idea).

I took a Clinical Psychology course and I got a grade in the low 70s. That was because I didn't hand in a paper: I didn't have anything to show for it. Not even a paragraph. (With this latest assignment, I managed to drag out something to avoid getting a 0, but a 10/40 isn't exactly stellar.) I pretty much lost 20% of my grade. Plus, studying for exams was horrible, as I mentioned earlier.

I ended up getting a 90% on the final exam in that class.
I have no idea how, other than I retain information well. Because honestly, I have no other explanation. Studying for me consists of reading the text at least once, if I'm lucky. I can have a horrible memory regarding people's names and faces and what I meant to say and what I said... but my memory regarding non-personal matters seems to be fine.

In the class I'm taking now, I got the lowest grade that wasn't a zero for that assignment — and the highest grade on the midterm. 94%. And prior to the night before, I'd only finished one chapter and a few scattered pages from other chapters (we were tested on six-and-a-half chapters, I think).

I feel like I'm just managing to scrape by. That I'm lucky that I've gotten this far. Who knows how well I might do if I didn't have these problems? But I do.

I went to college for a year. I failed almost every course that required an essay or paper. I've written two papers so far at the university I'm at now (my SAT scores made up for my low high-school grades, and thank goodness I managed the essay on it): the first paper had two marks taken off for being late, but otherwise full marks. The second paper, which was almost entirely done at the last minute, despite my thinking about it since the day it was assigned, managed somewhere in the 80s.

I'm planning to stay up all night to get something done for tomorrow. I was thinking about it earlier, and it hit me just how easy the assignment is — but it might as well be multivariable calculus.

I guess I'm mostly venting. It's just so incredibly frustrating, you know?