Sunday, September 18, 2005

Procrastination

It's 8:30 pm and I'm unpacking and doing laundry after a weekend trip out of town. Or at least, I was unpacking etc.

Now I'm sitting at the computer instead. I just read a few online comic strips and then came here. Because I want to be folding laundry at 10:30 pm? Or because someone is paying me to waste time and write this fascinating blog entry? Or is it that I hope the laundry will magically go away if I run out of time to do it?

And then I wonder...how many blogs have an entry with the title "procrastination." So I use Blogger's Blog Search and find that there are 78,625 posts matching procrastination. At least I didn't start reading them.

In my ongoing fight against procrastination, I've begun to realize an uncomfortable truth. It's like weight loss - I already know what I have to do, how to do it, when, where, why, etc. I'm just not doing it. (Obviously, I'm not talking about people who have hormonal/illness/drug-interaction issues. Bear with me, this is just an analogy.) So here I am, ignoring my laundry/exercycle and eating twinkies made of time instead of high fructose corn syrup.

Guilt-ridden as any yo-yo dieter after a mallomar binge, I begin convincing myself to hop out of this chair and get moving with the Spray 'N' Wash and the tedious hanging up of shirts. And then I have a revelation.

A few days ago, I watched the first ten or fifteen minutes of Martha Stewart's new show. Martha was trying to teach Marcia Cross (of Desperate Housewives) how to fold a shirt. Martha laid two impossibly flat, perfectly ironed tee shirts down, did something complicated with her hands for about a quarter second and held up a perfectly folded shirt. It was like watching a good close-up magician. Marcia was standing right next to her trying to follow along with the other shirt and ended up as baffled by the sleight-of-hand as I was.

And now I see it: Laundry should be left to the professionals. This is not something to do casually at home. It's an art, dammit.

Procrastination solved.

 

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