I Should Mop the Floor

I'm usually not a procrastinator.  I'm usually one of those nervous types who does everything in the house, makes sure everything is perfect, then collapses in a heap to sleep.  "Do what you have to do so that you can do what you want to do" is my normal motto.  No playing until the work is complete.

However, my procrastination is rearing its awful head on this beautiful, 75-degree Saturday in Indianapolis.  It's my LAST Saturday of having to study and do schoolwork.  I have a four-hour moral theology exam on Wednesday night and I've been working on a 54 question study guide for the last several weeks.  I have 11 questions left and it might as well feel like I have to pen a Calculus textbook or some equally impossible academic task.  Plus, I have to study "Vertitatis Splendor" which is a mile-long papal encyclical.  

I've already cleaned the kitchen, started laundry, put a pork roast in the crock pot, and sprayed weeds in the lawn.  

[See?  I'm desperate.  I normally do not touch the lawn nor do I cook.]

But it keeps ringing in my head that joke about graduating doctors.  "What do you call the person who graduates last in medical school?"  

"Doctor."

"What do you call the person who graduates last in an ethics degree?"

"Ethicist."

I already have the job I have dreamed of since college when I figured out what "ethics" even is.  I only thought that distinguished PhD's and tenured professors could call themselves "ethicists."  And here I am, neither of those things and I just received my business card proof with my new title and additional degree after my name.  It felt surreal...I really don't feel smart and it caused a semi-identity crisis to see this person represented on a card.  

While my healthcare system has requested that I work towards a PhD in moral theology or ethics, I am definitely taking a year or two off.  I did the math the other day; with the exception of age 0-5 (when I started Kindergarten), I have been in school for all but five years of my life.  Part of that is because I had to take 1 or 2 classes at a time as I worked full-time (and in this ethics degree, could only take one class because of my insane work schedule and the heady subject matter that made me inwardly cringe and ratchet up the stomach acid).  

But man, I cannot wait to blare Alice Cooper's "School's Out" on Wednesday after I finish my exam.  Even though I have a comprehensive exam this summer, it does not involve the regurgitation of Aquinas' logic or biblical exegesis.  Thank the Lord.

With that, time to stop procrastinating and nail these last 11 questions. 

Hmm.  Maybe it's time to empty the trash and trim the shrubs in the front of the house!