Lit: Procrastination Peanut Butter Cookies, Part I, by Kristen Miller

It’s 3:32am, and I’m here to tell you about the art of procrastination.

Like any good artist, I’ve spent years perfecting my skill -beginning in high school by saving every assignment to the five minute passing period before class.  If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute, right?  Right?

But college was truly the golden age of procrastination.  My telling signature quotation from that era was, “I think I’ve read that… oh, wait.  Nope, I’ve just written a paper on it.”  During these years I honed my routine to a science, pulling all-nighters for nearly every project and measuring out cans of Cherry Coke and 20-minute power naps with pharmaceutical precision.

The regimen, which I practice to this day, looks about like this:

An all-nighter usually begins around 9:30.  I make a pot of strong tea and turn on my computer.  For the next three hours, I alternate between pacing about the room, writing bits of sentences and getting a snack.  This continues well into my third pot of tea, until my brain is fried and I start using words like “concurrently” and stealing lines from nursery rhymes.

When I feel this stage coming on, I chug a quantity of caffeinated liquid (the colder and undiluted-er the better) and bear down for the Big Push.  Of this part of the evening, I never remember much.  There’s always a moment when the haze clears a bit, and I’m looking at a rather passable version of what the assignment was originally intended to be.

This phase of the process doesn’t always go as planned.  On a recent evening, I went through my customary preparations for the Big Push and an hour later found myself inexplicably in the kitchen mixing up a batch of peanut butter cookies.

Well, the caffeine is wearing off for the morning, so stay tuned for Procrastination Peanut Butter Cookies, Part Deux, in which I marry a therapist and receive lots of free insight into my pathologies.

Shameless plug no. 1: Need a little external motivation of your own?  Check out the Poetry and Fiction room of the Sojourn message board. You’ll find lots of creative and caffeinated people and the occasional oh-so-helpful deadline.

Shameless plug no. 2: Not that I advocate procrastination, but the cookies were actually really good.  You can get the recipe for yourself here. Happy baking!

Très Geek: The Spoonerism.  The spoonerism is a little-known literary device, cousin to the more popular alliteration, simile and onomatopoeia.  It involves a play on words (intentional or otherwise) in which corresponding consonants are switched.  The term was coined by the colleagues and students of one Rev. William Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford in the 1870s, who unintentionally popularized the spoonerism as a form and so became its namesake.  Well-intentioned, but not very well-spoken, Rev. Spooner was known throughout the college for elocutionary missteps, such as “Three cheers for the queer old dean!” (dear old Queen), and “The Lord is a shoving leopard.”  Thanks to Rev. Spooner, we are supplied with virtually endless geek-friendly punch lines for every occasion.  So, what’s the difference between a spoonerism joke and a sickly firearm?  (One is a ______ ­­­______, and the other is a ______ ______.)