I'm Just Like Every Other Teenager.

Focus is essentially nonexistent for me. Always.

It's not just homework, I just can't concentrate on anything. Even if I'm procrastinating on homework on, say, Facebook, after a little while, I get bored of it, and go on Tumblr. Then that gets boring and I check my e-mail. And there's rarely anything exciting there, because lets be honest here, what teenager uses e-mail to connect with their friends anymore? None. So, naturally I get bored of that and go back to Facebook. And the cycle continues.

I'm basically just like every other teenager when it comes to focus.

So on a normal school night when I'm writing a paper, this is how it typically goes. I get home from musical rehearsal at 6. I eat couple (ok, a lot of) snacks, then go on the computer for around half an hour to check all of the social media sites. Then my family eats dinner. After dinner, it's around 7:30. So I go up to my room to do my homework.

Now, going up to my room is really a terrible idea if I'm trying to accomplish homework, because my room is so messy, that the only clear spot to do homework is on the bed, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to fall asleep on my homework. But staying downstairs really wouldn't be the best idea either, because, as anyone who knows my family understands, my family is quite loud. And, sound carries quite a lot in our house. So really, I'm screwed no matter where I go in my house.

After I've got out my homework, found a sharp pencil, and sat down on my bed to start working, my phone usually goes off or I have a sudden urge to go online via my i-pod. So if I'm trying really hard to focus, I'll turn my phone on silent and throw it across my room so I don't get distracted. Also, I'll turn off my i-pod. So I work for a while, trying my hardest not to let my mind wander. If it's 2 in the morning and I'm still buried up to my eyeballs in unfinished homework, I'll take a shower, and if that's already been done, I'll turn on my radio or use my i-pod, and (prepare to judge) dance around my room like a crazy person. This is a daily occurrence for me, and while it wakes me up, it leaves me quite unfocused, because it exposes me to my biggest focusing weakness: music.

I could write an entire blog post (or book, for that matter) about how music distracts me, but I'll leave it at this: IT IS TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO FOCUS WHEN THERE IS MUSIC PLAYING. Any kind of music, whether I've heard it or not. It just doesn't work.

So that's my usual process. However when I was writing this paper in particular, it was quite a different situation because, as anyone who read my last blog post knows, I was in Orlando with the marching band. So most of my paper-writing process happened in an airplane or at 1 in the morning after a full day at Epcot.

On the way to Orlando, I tried (I'm using the word tried loosely here) to start writing my paper, but realized fairly quickly that it was simply not going to happen. So instead, I went insane with highlighters on the original article, and tried my best to make it so writing my paper later would be easier. And it certainly helped, but writing a paper is writing a paper, and when it came time to actually do it, I just had to write. Nothing else, just focus and write like mad.

And that was how my rhetorical analysis paper was made.