The perils of the First Born!

Well. Here it is on Sunday night. I’m for once trying not to procrastinate on a project, and the words are just refusing to come. I know I’m a good writer, but I have this problem on any writing project I attempt to start. The first few lines are just hell to get down on paper. The first paragraph gets deleted seven or eight times as the words just don’t seem to flow right.

There’s all sorts of reasons for justifying to myself why I should go back and delete that first paragraph. People don’t really want to hear all that mumbling about the creative process. The first paragraph is supposed to be your hook, the thing that draws a person into reading your essay, and heck, nobody will get hooked on that first paragraph. Oh yeah. And the rest of your work, it STINKS.

And with talk like that, you can see why it’s become easier to wait until the last minute, to pull off the buzzer beating shot, to just not care for once how good the essay is, the important part is that it’s DONE, and you no longer have to worry about that obligation…but it could have been better had you just sat down and wrote the darn assignment weeks before it was due.

Okay, I confess, I’m a bit (a bit?) of a perfectionist. It should, thus come as no surprise to learn that I am the eldest of two girls. I nearly was an only child, my sister was born 3.5 years after I was, and was a surprise to my parents. My mom had been told, barely even a month before she found out she was pregnant again, that there was a 90% chance she would never be pregnant again.

(discontinuity)

It’s now Wednesday morning. I had planned that I could finish typing this Tuesday night and still have time to study for my math test all on Wednesday.

But my life was thrown back into chaos Tuesday morning, as with the life of every other American. And that I’m even able to sit here and type today is simply amazing. This seems in some ways so unimportant compared to that. And I know that the best thing is to get my life back together, to try and finish papers and do my math test. I’m going to go in this morning, and write out my index cards, but I can’t focus at the moment.

Although, since this paper is supposed to be on birth order, it’s interesting as to how Jill and I reacted in our separate way about this. Although the mutual feeling was one of shock and horror, we reacted in different ways. My first reaction was to get as much information as possible, and I wasn’t the only first born who thought so. My IRC group (the channel of first borns) was passing along information as we had it. That is how we dealt with this crisis – with logic and seriousness, and a bit of intelligent gallows humour. We also started immediately deconstructing the events, wondering who or what could have done this.

My sister, on the other hand, had to keep popping into my room with one tidbit of news or another, which at times annoyed the heck out of me and my information gathering. She also seemed manically happy, which is, I know, a shock reaction. She needed people as much as I needed information. That’s a typical baby reaction.

(Can I redo this paper if this isn’t what you want? I can’t concentrate more than this.)