Procrastinating

It’s “procrastination central” here today. So far, I’ve managed to roll out of bed, pull on a housecoat, chow down on some reheated grub, talk on the phone, and browse the internet for various useless things. I should be busy cleaning the house, and tend to the sorely-neglected floors, “de-hair” the couch from cat fur, unpack the suitcase I had taken to Mexico, and throw in a couple loads of laundry. I should also be designing a novel unit for Grade 12 English. (I don’t know why I hate teaching the same novel in consecutive years, since I have a novel unit made up from last year already…. I guess I must love piling unnecessary work on myself.)

But I have an excuse! I’ve been feeling under the weather the past few days. For someone who, in five years, had never gotten sick in the dry arctic climate, I sure am feeling like burrowing under my duvet and not crawling out for a week or two. It started with a sore throat, then moved onto sniffles and sneezes, and finally the congestion and coughing, coupled with a low fever. A typical cold, in other words. There’s nothing like living alone (with just a kitty-cat for companion) to intensify the self-pitying babyish response that kicks into full gear whenever I get sick.

I’ve been looking at the websites of various universities that I’m considering for the fall. Nothing has been decided yet, except that I’ve already missed all the deadlines to apply into any undergraduate or graduate programs. My plan is to take a year of undergraduate courses as a “special student” who doesn’t need to register into a specific program, to gain the prerequisites I would need to apply for a Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology. I had always been fascinated by language, but more by literature, the abstraction of language, the subjectivity of it all, the experiences brought forth by the acts of writing and reading. I had never considered language as something more scientific until recently. But now, I’m fully intrigued by the idea that language is linked to psychology and biology, that even as part of that is genetically pre-determined, there are parts that could be controllable, concrete yet malleable. I’ll spend a year brushing up on Linguistics and Psychology, with the hope that I’ll get accepted into a graduate program for the fall of 2009.

I’m procrastinating calculating the costs of living in a city again, of going to school full-time for another three years, without a full-time job that pays northern wages. Rent in Vancouver and Edmonton, the two cities currently on top of my mental list, is high, at about $1000 for a one-bedroom apartment.

That’s enough procrastinating for now. I’ll tend to the work at hand first, and stress out about the future later.

* I’ll post pictures from Cabo next time.