Something from nothing / Something and nothing.

I just turned in my sick exam paper. I was thirteen minutes late and it amounted to about 200 words. It was, however, a matter of bare psychological self-preservation to just hand in something, since I'd failed to submit this exam first time around along with another one in my history course, and now the Angst was turning into lethargy. Which can be fine, that is, if you know for certain you will never come back to a lucid state in which you would be able to give a shit. But, as an oft-observed rule, you will bounce back. In this life you will ebb and flow between lethargy and various states of an everyday consciousness in waves stipulated by anxiety attacks and general thoughts of death and despair. Such thoughts had been the bulk of my mental efforts since seven o'clock the night before, but as they say, life has its ups and downs.
     In the morning I had one of these weird "back to optimism"-moments: I was squatting against the tiled bathroom wall, incapable of getting a grasp on the day laid out in front of me. I imagined going to class -- correcting myself when I was imagining the wrong instructor and worrying about not having read the relevant texts nor attended the preceding lecture -- and I imagined sitting there, stressed out from the thought of my twelve o'clock deadline, palms sweaty and the Angst droning away in my skull -- for four hours, until I would be off at exactly twelve o'clock, a beaten man with noone to blame but myself. But for once the mental images of the halls and classrooms of the institute did not depress me. The thought of the stacks in the library and the knowledge of the lecturers made me remember my hunger for knowledge and hope for self-improvement. I clasped on to the feeling of going there and grabbing the information I always somehow want. The freezing weather and my deathtrap of a bicycle hardly deducted from that on my ride to the institute, this in spite of me almost killing myself when absentmindedly I attempted to use the footbrake. Or maybe this little brush with certain death-by-tarmac helped keep up my newly enlivened spirits.
     I had been dealing with a cold going pneumonic and the usual fears and self-loathing and so didn't catch on to the nearing deadline of my last chance in a while to hand in an exam in a so-far failed course. It struck me on Monday to remind myself of the relevant dates in the online system used for these things, but didn't act on it until Tuesday (this gives you an idea of my general pace). I stayed at the institute library Tuesday until late to look for secondary lit but didn't really put anything down on white pixels until Wednesday. But I tried to feel a little accomplished at work's end Tuesday for scribbling down some notes on possible materials and relevant references. It wasn't until shit was about to hit the fan that I did hit some sort of a stride. In the eleventh hour, literally, I decided to at least have the five different sources required for the exam in order and scoured the internet and library database for the materials in question. I fell short of five different sources, failing to find a good 'scholarly article' in my rush, but now I at least had some sort of a sorry excuse for a bibliography to attach to my fragmented babbling. I haven't worked under pressure for so long that a bit of my current depressed stated surely can be said to come from my forgetting of my ability to do so. But something happened. I did not fulfill most of my requirements, but I did manage to take encouragement from the fact of seeing myself create something. Because adding something to your feeling of self when your self-esteem is around nil makes quite a difference.






(Yes, a hard-handed editing would suit this piece, but it is just there as a tool for me to work something out)
(And, yes, I am quite the whiner)