Natural laws of laziness

I learned in college that, no matter what hour of the day, someone on campus would always be taking a break from work.  Sleeping, partying, playing Frisbee, getting coffee–something that made you feel like an idiot for being at your desk, working.  And this was at a fairly nerdy school!

Each year I’ve taught I’ve seen my students facing the same situation, seeing another student abandon the books, and feeling that one would have to be a fool not to join him.  Most of the time, I smile in recognition and feel pity.  If you give into that desire to join in too often, you’ll realize eventually that you’ve been left behind academically (as all of those other people take turns keeping you at play, using their “off” time to get work done–usually at some wee hour of the morning).

What I forgot, however, was that the same thing happens in a marriage.  You just get ready to settle into a work day at a nice and early hour of the morning when your spouse appears, ready to go to school.  So you go too, glad for the chance to hit the gym.  Going to the gym will, of course, help you kick the twitches and settle into your books.  Good plan.  But after the gym time, just as you’re starting to feel the pull of the books again, your spouse decides that he needs a break: after spending the morning in class, he wants to go birdwatching.  Alrighty.  So an hour strolling around the lake, looking for birds, and then both of you are hungry.  Gotta get some fruit before heading home!  So by the time you arrive home, you, dumb spouse, have been sucked into the “take a break” phenomenon, and only have two hours left in the sun-lit day to get some real work done before you need to leave to take a visiting student and his wife out to dinner.  Oops.  So you give up and do laundry and, in the last five hours of that precious “work” time, write a blog post admitting defeat.

Erin