aimless thoughts turn into procrastination

I guess I feel a little better after writing all that out, even though nobody is going to read it (that's actually why it's safe enough to post). I can hear my housemates in the kitchen making dinner and chatting so I'm going to stay hidden away in my room. This is actually a good metaphor for how I usually feel - I'm hidden inside an invisible shell, observing everyone else and trying to prevent them from realising there's anyone in here. My brother used to call me "bubble girl" - he's pretty good at descriptions like that; my dad being a "pet rock of a father" is another.
I was going to get so much done today. My qualifying exam is in a few weeks and I haven't even been able to bring myself to think about it, let alone start working on my proposal. Instead I got up for half an hour to eat breakfast at 1.30, then couldn't face my housemate finishing off her proposal so went back to bed.
I watched Memento, though and ate my birthday chocolates, which were amazing. I've been wanting to write more here so I guess that's something.
I bought Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" a few weeks ago in an attempt to increase my productivity. It sounds like a great system - the key to it is writing down every single thing you need to do and going through the list as often as possible to complete the next specific action required for each task. The idea is to free your mind from the job of keeping track of all your errands, projects and long-term goals and get more time to think about more important issues.
This makes sense to me because I always seem to have an overwhelming mass of things that I need to remember to do and when I feel like doing something on the list it's too much effort to even think through what I should be working on, which things are important and what I have to do about them.
Of course, I haven't actually done anything about this because of my usual procrastination - another topic that's been discussed on my blogroll lately (I'm not sure I like that term; it sounds a little too much like bog roll to me, but I guess Americans don't have the same association). I found this post very interesting and this one linked from there. I can definitely identify with the idea of resistance and that's what's keeping me from getting started making my lists of things to do. I'd rather not think about how long such a list would be, too. I did clear out my email inbox once, but it's getting larger again, because even though I know a lot of the ones I should reply to would only take a couple of minutes I'm avoiding writing back because I have too many amorphous worries about whether they hate me for not writing sooner, what to say to explain myself, how to pretend I'm happy here and having fun etc etc. Dealing with anything more demanding than email just brings up even more fears so I end up just refreshing my RSS feeds and email in the hope that something will come up to distract me.
Sometimes I feel like depression is just another procrastinatory technique, too - obviously trying to analyse myself and my problems is important so it's okay to spend hours rehashing past mistakes and irrational thoughts when I should be doing school work...
I have so much resistance to even thinking about my thesis topic, when I should be planning my experiments in detail; it makes me think even more than usual that I don't belong here. I was complaining to one of my housemates about not feeling up to writing my proposal well enough to turn into a real grant application (as my advisor wants me to do) (whingeing about academic insecurity is the closest I come to talking about my feelings or interior life) and his response was "well, you're at Prestigious University; you should be doing world-class research. Why did you come here if you're only going to do mediocre work?" So comforting... I didn't want someone to actually agree with me that I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be fishing for reassurances though.
I do have a lot of conflicting thoughts about being here. I applied because this is one of the best programs, but I didn't really think I'd get in. As it turned out, I didn't get accepted to most of the lesser universities so I wasn't about to turn this one down. I felt like it was all a mistake though, especially after my honours supervisor joked that his perjury in my recommendation had paid off. I still feel like I'm the weakest member of my class and I'm struggling to prevent anyone else from finding that out. That should be motivation to do some work, but it's not. Instead I'm paralysed with fear.
This isn't really going anywhere, but it's nice to let all this out and besides, if I stop blogging I'll have to find something else to do until I can fall asleep and that something should be school work...

Update: I didn't do any work, but I managed to fool myself into feeling less aimless by finding the elusive un-cashed cheque that was unbalancing my budget. Now it's time for bed so I can put off thinking about work until tomorrow at least (as long as I play music to get to sleep, anyway).