I promised to write for the magazine this month, then went back to playing Tetris. But soon, with deadline moments away, I realized I had to start writing. About what? The answer was just too obvious. I’m so good at it, I could teach a class.
Procrastination 101b: The Syllabus
Course Description: A survey of essential procrastination techniques.
Primary Texts: Anything you don’t actually have to read. Your books from last term, the entire series of “G is for Gangster,” “B is for Bitch,” T-shirts at Urban, porn, U.S. tax code, really, anything is game.
Course Requirements: Faith that despite all available distractions, which you will exploit to no end, you won’t fail out of college.
Weeks 1-3
Introduction and Overview: The less creative basics. We’ll move quickly through it all — IMing, away-message and e-mail checking, facebook profile updating, blog reading, iTunes browsing, showering — because real procrastinators are way past all that.
Assignment: Join as many friendster spin-offs as possible. Create different personas and post pictures of really hot people who aren’t you.
Weeks 4-6
Level One: Injecting variety and fun into your procrastination.
Assignment: Make mobiles with empty beer cans, play online games like “Wastepaper” (because trying to sink real crumpled up paper balls into your garbage can from across the room is so passe), build banana men with peanut butter adhesive in the dining hall and enlist your weirdest looking suitemate to lip-synch in a homemade Euro-pop music video. Eventually, don gym clothes, dig (from under the laundry you “forgot” to put away) up your Nalgene and the free iPod you got online, and head towards the door, because working out is better than doing problem sets. Then turn around, remove your sneakers and fall blissfully onto your bed. Nap until dinner instead.
Weeks 7-9
Level Two: Mastering the useless all-nighter and other (im)practical skills. Remember — only sissy amateurs finish work the night before it’s due. Completing an assignment an hour before class is acceptable. But finishing a paper while you should be in class, then sprinting — while editing by hand — to turn it in just as class lets out? Yeah, baby.
Assignment: Download. Everything. Until your hard-drive is a virtual museum of worthless fun. Make a to-do list, laugh and fold the list into an origami frog. Then go outside and sculpt obscenely-positioned snowpeople next to famous statues. Post photos of your creation online.
Weeks 10-12
Level Three: Becoming a professional.
Assignment: Write software for your own high-speed file sharing program and send it to all of your facebook friends, so they get carpal tunnel syndrome too.
Final Project: Sprawl bikini-clad or shirtless on a towel under the Cross Campus sun, and daydream about all the fun you’ll have at your summer internship. As soon as you get around to applying.