Yep... I've Still Got It

So I was wrote a paper for my friend. She is in grad-school and was stressing about writing her paper. I kept telling her that she had an easy subject - "stress in the workplace" - and that the paper should be easy to write. 10 - 15 pages, piece of cake. My helpful pointer (learned from my college days): one paragraph per page. The first paragraph is the opening, including the thesis statement, and the last paragraph is the conclusion. That only leaves eight to thirteen pages of body paragraphs, which is obviously only eight to thirteen major points to make in the paper. All effective papers easily have eight to thirteen points. No big deal. She suggested that I write the paper since I was the one who thought it sounded so easy. So that's how I got myself into the mess in the first place.

Luckily, she had all the sources together when she handed me the information packet. I did have to surf the web and find a few more things, but that was no big deal. The biggest deal was that I procrastinated. I wrote a blog several months ago about John Tesh reporting on procrastinators and their Scarlette O' Hara "after all tomorrow is another day" outlook on life. That hit me pretty hard because I am the queen of procrastination. Also, I was writing the paper the very same week that my assistant at work was quitting, I was having the stomach ulcer issues, and I was supposed to be going out of town to visit my friend. I never made it to my friend's house. But how ironic that I was writing a paper on workplace stress while I was suffering from a workplace stress related sickness?

Roommate helped me immensely. Looking back, I'm sure I could have done it without her, but panic hit me at the last minute. It suddenly occurred to me that this paper carried a lot of weight on her final grade. Also, I was panicking because even though I always made excellent grades on papers when I was in college, I haven't actually written a paper in five years. I was afraid that I had lost my touch. And how terrible would that have been to learn that I had lost my touch on someone else's grade? Oh mercy... It was more than I could take. Roommate tried to help me write, but basically I used her as a sounding board, thesaurus, spell checker, and proof reader.

Roommate assured me that the paper was excellently written, and I thought it was too. But I was very nervous in awaiting the grade. And... I MADE AN "A"!!! Yes, that's right... an "A"! I am so excited about that. I guess now that I know I can still turn out high quality work, it's time for me to go back to school and finish my degree.