School is kicking my butt, which is a good thing. I haven’t been bored in a long time — I haven’t had time to be bored. What I call being “bored” now is being totally unoccupied. I don’t know what to do with my free time anymore, which is why I have resorted to dumb ways of wasting it. Like playing World of Warcraft again. Or Minecraft. Or watching the entire second season of 16 and Pregnant and developing a pathological and probably unsound phobia of babies as a result. Maybe those aren’t good enough reasons for not writing anything, but perhaps these are:

Five reasons I’ve been gone for nine weeks

5. Donuts

This is probably the worst excuse of all, so I put it first. The highlights of the last two weeks of my life have been finding, first, a maple and then a strawberry donut at the donut shop down the street. I treat myself to one every few days as a studying snack. I used to eat, you know, nuts and fruit and stuff like that, but healthy food is for wusses. Also people who want to live longer. But my donut habit can’t do as much harm, as say, my maple syrup habit. That’s a confession for another day.

4. Editing

I thought books editing themselves. I assume, if they did, their words would be as mean and cruel as these. I leave myself angry notes in my novel because they provoke me to be mean in return and kill off this character who wasn’t doing anything, or change that character’s name because it was more or less the same as an indigenous species of lettuce, and someone was bound to know. I still have huge chunks of chapters colored red. Some are highlighted yellow, you know, to make me really annoyed at how ugly it looks. SOMETIMES I JUST HAVE REALLY BIG TEXT, and that seems to work just as well. The secret to finishing your novel is to infuriate yourself until you get it done. You can deal with therapy later. And the schizophrenia somewhere in there.

3. Doodling

I’ve tried to keep a sketch book. Some days, all of my women look like men and all of my men look like women. Yesterday, I broke out my colored pencils for the first time in a year or so, and drew a not-too-shabby cliff and ocean. But I put the sun in the wrong place, and there go all my hopes of outplaying Rembrandt at his own game. You know. Because Rembrandt used a lot of colored pencils. I also keep doodling on assignments. I don’t know whether I’m trying to milk sympathy or partial credit out of my professors with it, or because when I have a minute left at the end of the test, my hand has a nervous habit of drawing oddly circular animals and labeling them. Personally, I think it’s pretentious, and I think my hand should shut its face.

2. Procrastination

My desk is littered with Post-Its. When I’m especially behind, I leave them on my monitor so I (supposedly) won’t be able to use it without addressing the notes first. I have learned to read around the notes or take them off, stick them in a growing pile of neglected notes beside my desk, and continue wasting time. Because this is what I do when I’m home from school. Of course, this is nothing compared to the problem that I can’t read or understand most of my notes because I picked those days to relearn cursive, and I wrote them in a state of unconsciousness. I am my own worst enemy.

1.5. This happened last week…

1. Outright neglect

Here’s the real problem. I forgot. I completely forgot I was supposed to be punctual and consistent and was waiting for something miraculous to happen that I would have to write about. Not my life, clearly. As you can see, that has only amounted to a predisposition for diabetes and a shortage of ball-point pens. But I’ll be better from here on out. At the very least, I’ll share my donuts.