achieving active slackerdom in five easy paragraphs
I woke up and looked out my window and said "My god, it's a beautiful day; I categorically refuse to spend such a lovely day in my windowless concrete box of an office." The cats said "Mrrrrrrrowwwwl!" (in minor thirds) which in this context translates roughly as "we don't care what you do as long as we get our breakfast right now, and if we don't get it we're fully prepared to eat you instead."
Having fed the cats, I double-checked my planner, which indicates that I have no on-campus appointments today, and in fact no time-sensitive commitments of any kind until BtVS. I checked work e-mail and nothing's come up that requires my immediate intervention. (Side note: working with faculty occasionally makes me feel like an underpaid babysitter.)
So I decided to stay home, because the work I have to do today (commenting on the fourth chapter of truepenny's dissertation, working on an article about The Well of Loneliness, sexology, bisexuality, and cultural memory) can easily be done from home, and my apartment, unlike my office, has many big lovely windows. Plus there's leftover rum cake and the possibility of afternoon walks.
Then I checked my procrastination e-mail and found vid encouragement from renenet; and I looked at my desktop and found about ten vids that I have dl-ed and not watched and really want to watch. I noticed, too, that my computer (which had about 4 Gb of files deleted yesterday and got defragged overnight) is uncharacteristically un-sluggish, and looking, as a matter of fact, not only ready but positively *eager* to handle the vast sticky swamp of processor suckage that is Premiere. (Yes, I project my own moods onto my computer. Back away slowly.)
So: screw work! (Well, I'm still going to workshop the dissertation chapter, because truepenny spent pretty much an entire week on draft-commenting call when I was finishing up the BtVS article the first week of October, so I owe her many, many commenting debts.) But mostly, I'm staying home and having a vidding day: watching, sending feedback, building the clip library, and -- wait for it -- starting a new vid.
Slackerdom isn't just liberating, it's a total nostalgia trip. It's like reverting to being fifteen, except without the having to forge an off-campus pass, and without the getting stoned and eating tacos with annoying semi-friends, and the ride back to school in the hideous yellow Chevy Nova, and also without the being in Texas part, and... okay, so it's basically nothing like being fifteen. And not being fifteen is pretty much an unambiguously good thing, come to think of it.
We're only young once, but we can be immature forever.