Last night I was sitting in front of my computer, researching the hundreds of sources (well at least ten) than I need to be able to write my assignments. This isn’t that unusual, generally speaking I do use the computer to do most, if not all, my assignments. What was unusual was the open punnet of strawberries that I had absent-mindedly been grazing from.

I don’t wish for you to think that a magical punnet of strawberries had appeared and I was shocked by it, rather I was surprised to find that I was eating healthy food while doing an assignment. On average I have perhaps 10 assignments per semester. They vary from group project work to online quizzes to the essay that I am currently working on. For the most part I find the assignments to be easy or at least easy if I have been keeping up with the readings and attending lectures. This all changes when the assignment in question is an essay. I don’t know what it is, some people call it laziness and others call it procrastination but I genuinely find it difficult to work on these sorts of assignments unless it’s in one great block. I have friends who do a bit of work in week 1, a bit in week 2 and finish it in week 3. I feel very jealous of their pain-staking preparation but no matter how hard I try to emulate their good study practices inevitably I find my concentration slipping away until I end up on Wikipedia doing random searches and reading articles on super-volcanoes.

I don’t wish for you to think that I never get my assignments done or that the essays even require that much preparation. Generally speaking I have only had 2 extensions and I always make the greatest of efforts to meet my deadlines. I also say with no small amount of pride that I have never failed an assignment. But that does little to mitigate my great feeling of shame that I do not seem capable of planning anything in advance. Murdoch actually offers seminars and workshops on dealing with procrastination and managing your time but I’ve never found the time to attend any of them and I hesitate to skip lectures to make the time. Anyways that’s not really the purpose of this blog post; rather I would like to take this time to explain why I found the strawberries so shocking.

I try to eat a balanced diet. I cannot say with any truth that I have ever really succeeded at this as, no matter how much I tell my body that broccoli or spinach is good for it, I still buy my fair share of snack foods. Usually this is because of my unusual appetite while I’m writing assignments. I tend to enter a sort of fugue state where I ignore everything including the passage of time, anything my flatmates say to me and my need to eat. Of course this rather upsets my stomach that then begins to whine and bitch about the lack of sustenance, so I fetch a packet of chips or some chocolate or some such trash to placate it. However as the night grows long the fugue state grows worse. I begin to eat things that can hardly be described as food until eventually I am chewing my pen into nothingness. Eventually I will leave this state and stare in amazement at the devastation that has been visited upon my desk, empty chip packets, chocolate wrappers, pyramids of empty cans and a very forlorn pen that looks like rats got to it. Sadly I never really have time to properly lambast myself as the assignment is then due.

After submitting it however I vow to never eat junk food again. From then on it will only be dry crackers, healthy fruit, and a 5km run every morning. This vow will have been completely forgotten by the time I’m next visiting the supermarket and I see the great specials on chocolate (3 for 2).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that practicing good nutrition is hard if you tend to favour the crucible method of essay writing so for part of the semester you may be susceptible to a mild case of scurvy (this actually isn’t a joke I know a student who has suffered from this after he attempted to survive solely on mi goreng) but every now and then your brain will make the right choices for you and you’ll look down and find strawberries.