ESP was a cool paper topic. 
Funny how the role of deadlines changes over the years. I feel a swinging back right now, in favor of deadlines and meeting them. This from a year ago when I think I had a sick fascination with missing them outright.
Going to see if my library has The Now Habit. You always have good recommendations!
I can't listen to pre-1991 EBTG without thinking of college. Don't know why that could be.
I still listen to this one old ELO song ('Daytripper')when wanting to focus intently.
As I went to college for the 2nd time in my late 20's & 3rd time in my mid-30s, I took my studies very seriously - I was going into debt for this... I had been out working in the 'real world' for years & was trained to meet deadlines. Meeting academic deadlines was easy compared to working in professional theatre.
But I am constantly amazed by students who blow off the 3/4 of the semester & then freak out the last month & want to make an 'A'. How can they do that?
What drives me to achieve in academe is that I know through personal experience what the alternatives are & I prefer academe.
I typed my papers until my last year of college too! Ah, good times (not! VERY glad to have computers now).
I can't remember exactly what I used to work to, but there's a Kate Bush album (white cover with her picture on it) and then George Winston stuff that made up the soundtrack for enduring my freshman year. Oy.
I hesitate to comment here because most of your posts seem targeted towards a fellow professorial audience, but I'll comment on this one because I have my own child exhibiting tendencies to overachieve in this area (for, um, no good damned reason at all) and I say kudos to your mother for getting mad at you and she should have made you go to bed.
Staying up at that age to work on something until midnight, well, that's a display of something that would worry the hell out of me as a mother. Sure, if it was hell-bent, OK, but, man I just can't imagine this and it's so frying my brain to think of it; I'll probably cry if this happens to me. I think it's that sad.
I bought my CD player a year before I bought my first computer, which was also in my last year of college. I did have one of those dedicated word processing machines that I loved the year before the computer.
I remember listening to Material Issue on repeat a lot, and that was when Depeche Mode released Violator, so that was a big one, too.
Procrastination? Well, there's too much to say and no time to say it because I'm behind.
Michelle, I appreciate your concern -- though you should probably know that my mom always stayed up late to finish her own projects right before they were due -- the extent to which she was mad at me was the same sort of ineffectual "you should have done it earlier" rant most deadline-pushers say to themselves all the time. I'd only ever seen her lousy work habits modeled for me, so it's really no wonder I was up late with it. So whatever you model for your kids, consciously or not, will have some impact...
JM: hmm. I never could write to EBTG, though.
New Kid: I had that Kate Bush album, too!
Nels: Depeche Mode was a big part of my paper-writing soundtrack too -- how could I forget? Maybe someday I'll reconstruct it more fully.
I don't actually remember listening to anything while in the process of writing a paper. But that was a long time ago and I may just have a crappy memory. I can only think of four papers I actually wrote in college, period, so yeah, it must be me. Even now, though, I don't tend to have music or anything on when I write. Now, when I code, I absolutely have to have music on else I'll bore myself to death. In that instance, I have probably 20 different CDs that fit the bill, 13 of them being EBTG or Toad tWS. Old Depeche Mode would work, too, if I owned it anymore.
I would like to see a fully reconstructed list from you someday, if for no other reason than to remind me of CDs that I really have in rotation. I went through a four-year no-music stage recently, and I forget a lot of the good stuff.
err....insert "need to have" before "in rotation". Yeah, that's right, I'm looking to you for music recommendations.
Mel, yes it's one of the greater joys of being a parent that I get to witness some of my less enviable personality traits passed down. We all have them, even moms.
PS my comment yesterday was obviously insensitive as I didn't realize that you were patterning your behavior after your mom. sorry about that.
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