the Sunday effect

I have a long-standing dislike of Sundays, which I blog about at least every 3rd or 4th one. Which I know is tedious, dear readers, especially when I haven't been blogging about very much else recently. And yet I'm trapped in my own consciousness at the moment. I stayed up too late last night, so I've been sort of dragging around this morning. I've got lots to do, a fair amount of resistance to doing it, and only intermittent flashes of inspiration and energy.

My watch battery stopped on Thursday, and I haven't yet gotten around to replacing it. At home, I have enough clocks, and when I've been out, I have my cell phone. But I much prefer to have my watch. Unfortunately, it's one of those styles that requires the special tool to get the back open to replace the battery. At Target, the jewelry counter staff used to be able to take care of it (after all, I bought the watch there) -- but the last two times I needed a battery, the person who could do it wasn't available. So I've been going to the little specialty watch shop to get replacement batteries. It's pricey, but they can take care of it in about 5 minutes. But how long is a watch battery supposed to last? I feel like I've been burning through these batteries in an awfully short time. Less than a year, for sure. Is this part of the specialty watch shop's racket? Or could it be something about my now-aging watch?

I have to start grading my first set of long papers from my undergrad course today. They've done shorter assignments, but this is the real test of their writing and analysis. I'm procrastinating a bit on the grading, as I always do -- which breaks down into the following reasons: (a) resentment of the task itself; (b) fear of boredom during the task; (c) resentment of what feels like my students invading my weekend (grading is an oddly social experience for me, I usually feel drained afterwards as though I've been conversing with my students for hours -- which, in a sense, I have been); (d) fear of finding out just what my students don't know; (e) fear of not getting anything else done. (Obviously, I'm using "fear" in a very general sense -- Fiore says that most procrastination comes from fear or resentment. Mine surely does.) Actually, it's useful to spell it all out like that to see just how ridiculous my procrastination is. Especially (e) -- after all, if I just get the grading done, then I'll have time to do other things.

Necessary Tasks Today:

• grade papers (at least two-three hours' worth)
• read novel for this week's teaching (includes taking notes which slows me down)
• note-taking for current research project
  
• house cleaning & laundry
• bills, household paperwork, etc
• phone my mother (which I can hopefully multitask while cleaning)
  

Rewards:

• take dogs to park
• get some "free reading" at public library
• go to the gym
• blogs
• something with pasta for dinner?
  

Blech. Sunday.