I really shouldn't be writing this right now, but I feel motivated to--and it will qualify as a form of "productive procrastination". (I just coined that.)
What I should be doing is synthesizing the prose for a three-page history paper on the 1950s. My topic of choice? The Feminine Mystique. I discovered two years ago that a shortcut for me personally when writing history papers is to pick a book and write a summary and reflection on it--it beats research. Previously I've done all fiction novels (Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Twist, 1984), but this time On the Road by Jack Kerouac was already taken and this was the only candidate left.
After taking a decent bite out of the beginning of the book "yesterday" (I informally demarcate days by when I would normally get up, not by midnight, so in this case I mean Saturday) I tore through the remaining ~400 pages in the past few hours, typing some notes and page numbers. I have my material, I have my mandatory three sources, I just have to write--but as I said in December, Writing is Hard.
Beyond that, I don't want to do it. I really just don't want to. It's not for laziness or lack of caring about the assignment in terms of a class, the grade, or the consequences--I want it to be done and it to be something I can be mildly proud of, but I don't want to pour a single drop of effort into it. In hindsight, by waiting this long to do it (considering the class got an extension from Friday anyway) I have exhausted my finite reserves of willpower for the time being and poured a lot of effort (however begrudging) into it already.
For the past few years this feeling about work has grown and grown. I often muse to myself that I am not as hardcore at working as I used to be. It started as just a hint, that little sigh of resignation that I have to perform this task. It developed into regrettable misappropriation of my time--for my entire high school career I have rarely, if ever, gotten a "full" night's sleep. Again, it's not procrastination out of laziness: I am avoiding putting pencil to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or whatever, because in some mental way it hurts to do this work.
There are exceptions. I always enjoyed working on the assigned problems for Computer Programming. Sometimes chemistry homework is a little bit fun. Math can be too when I can be really productive with it. I like reading books assigned for English class, sometimes. Freshman year I remember positive experiences writing reflective personal essays--granted, they were only one to two pages, not the wild senior year frontier of four pages expected.
A related phenomenon would best be described with a scientific term. Activation energy sounds right. The hardest part of doing the work always comes right at the start (the common example being the blank text document), and some anxiety comes before I approach the mountain. Once I muster the resolve to take that first cannonball into the cold swimming pool, the struggle eases to some degree.
I guess writing is therapeutic. I feel an infinitesimal sense that I could make writing this thing fun, in some odd witty way. I might as well convince myself to take advantage of it, because the thing is due in three and a half hours anyway. Blargh.
EDIT: I finished it at 7:00 am.
