Procrastination

I know I said I'd write a post on this theme a while back, but I kept putting it off. [See what I did there? Ha, that's called humor!]

Seriously, though: "Hi, my name is GeekMom and I am a procrastinator." If there isn't a Twelve Step Program for this, there ought to be. Although I can appeal to a Higher Power all I like, my affliction doesn't seem to improve. Only fear seems to work: fear of public humiliation, fear of not meeting a deadline, fear of the stern look of disapproval on an authority figure's face. I have to create my own deadline for these blog entries and be my own stern authority figure in order to get them out in a timely fashion.

If there's a way of putting something off, I will, especially if it involves the writing down of coherent thought, or the filling out of forms. Thank God for accountants, or I would be under investigation by the IRS for never filing my taxes. But there are many other things one can put off nearly endlessly: trimming the hedge, washing the kitchen floor, taking the pets to the vet,  getting the car inspected, sending thank-you letters, doing the laundry, writing a blog entry on procrastination.... Paradoxically, these can all be used as procrastination devices in turn for an even more onerous task, such as organizing one's office files. I find I never have a cleaner kitchen than when I'm preparing to do some filing.

Toad's To-Do List

I wasn't always a procrastinator. As a young child, I constantly drew up schedules for myself and followed them rigorously. I would cross out each item as it was accomplished, as Toad did in Arnold Lobel's story "The List" that appears in his book, Frog and Toad Together. In elementary school, I always did my assignments as soon as possible. My mother was suspicious that I never seemed to have homework, because I would do it during lunch and recess and leave it in my desk at school (Yeah, I was a serious nerd, even at age 7).

Once I got to junior high, smaller assignments would be done while having my milk and cookies after school at the kitchen table, larger assignments would be done a week in advance. I would wait until the deadline to hand them in, though, so I wouldn't provoke the jealous ire (or ridicule) of my classmates. By then I was getting an inkling that being a nerd was not going to be a social advantage.

By high school, however, I was starting to slip. I'd do the last of my trig homework at midnight, or finish copying a paper over at breakfast (back when papers were written in cursive in pen--only our term papers required a typewriter (What's a typewriter, you ask? Oh Lord, you're making me feel old!)). I'd find myself folding my laundry or sharpening all my pencils or making myself increasingly elaborate snacks as the night wore on, while successfully avoiding any actual work.

 Then, with college and its concomitant lack of parental supervision and parentally supervised bedtimes came the dreaded All-Nighter, with its many cups of coffee and bleary, staring eyes, as I racked a brain that had mysteriously gone blank in my frantic quest for tree imagery in As You Like It or examples of the commodification of women in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. And finally appeared the fair and bewitching apparition of The Extension. Oh joy! To be given a day, two days, a week extra in order to complete a paper! Of course, you had to grovel before the Dean, but I learned to take groveling to a high art. I once callously used the premature and tragic death of someone I slightly knew from high school as an excuse for why I couldn't finish the paper in time, overcome as I was with grief at his passing. Even now I squirm with shame as I make my confession. Yes, I was shameless back then. And I still ended up staying all night to finish the paper, as I wrote nothing at all in the intervening week of grace.

So why do I procrastinate, if it makes my life so miserable? Why do any of us procrastinate? Well, as I'm a word geek, let's start with the origins of the word. It comes from Latin, the pro- meaning "forward," and crastinus meaning "of tomorrow" and its first known use was in 1548 by Edward Hall in a non-pejorative sense, to describe events leading to a wedding between two illustrious families being delayed by agreement. It wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century, according to Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown in their book, Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research and Treatment, that procrastination began to take on its current, negative connotations. Schraw, Wadkins, and Olafson, in their paper, "Doing the things we do: A Grounded theory of academic procrastination" (Journal of Educational Psychology, Feb 2007, 12-25), have stated that, for the putting off of a task to be considered procrastination, it must meet these three criteria: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying. The "delaying" bit seems obvious; the other two not quite as much, but, after some thought, it becomes clear that these other two conditions must also hold true if a delay is clearly to be called procrastination. If you delay finishing a task because there is a fire in the building, you cannot be said to be procrastinating. If you delay finishing a task because you want to bake chocolate chip cookies first, it is procrastination. There is a sense that all the attempted definitions of procrastination ultimately point to a sort of psychological disorder.

In James Surowiecki's review in the New Yorker of the collection of essays entitled The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (ed. Andreou and White, Oxford: 2012),  he says:

You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

 Wow. The Fluidity of Human Identity. The Basic Impulse. I like that. So when I put off working on this blog entry, I am only experiencing the flow of my own identity, and am succumbing to that basic human impulse–to delay as long as possible. It's not a psychological disorder–it's human nature!

There are attempts at a Freudian definition of procrastination as the use of the pleasure principle to avert the stress and anxiety caused by the deadline for a difficult task, and there is the physiological definition of it as a struggle between the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of executive brain function--things like planning, impulse control, and attention--and the limbic system, which governs things like emotion, behavior, and motivation. This whole argument, though perhaps not rigidly scientifically explained, is discussed quite charmingly by a young British vlogger called Charlie McDonnell in the video below:

"Stop Procrastinating" from charlieissocoollike on YouTube

Charlie also gives helpful advice on how to avoid the temptation to procrastinate. This particular vlog entry, I might add, is about his inability to get to work on his video log, just as the subject of my blog is how I've been procrastinating on my blog. My, it's all so meta!

For me, however, procrastination has become a way of life. I have actually been accused of thriving on it, which makes me crazy, because I hate the feelings of stress and desperation induced by prolonged procrastination. On the other hand, there is something about the rapidly diminishing minutes that drives an adrenaline push to that final effort, and there have been times when the pressure of the time crunch has led me to make certain leaps in thinking that might not have occurred to me had I been working in a more leisurely manner. So maybe my accusers aren't entirely wrong about this. Procrastination: it's not all bad.

Reunions

I went to my college reunion a month ago. Not a milestone reunion, but a general one for those who graduated in the '80s. I was hoping to see a lot of my friends from the years above and below me, but turnout was low, except for the Class of '88, which was having its 25th reunion. Only 6 from my year (from a class of under 300, but still....), but it was wonderful fun nonetheless. I hung out in the dorm, walked around campus, chatted with old friends and old classmates, found out who had a wonderful career, who had a wonderful marriage, who had started over in a totally different profession, who was getting divorced. I don't know why I get such a kick out of all this. It's not like I dwell fondly on most of these people during the course of my normal day. Or week. Or at all, come to think of it.

I know there are people who never go to reunions, some of my friends among them, and I don't understand it, not really. I've gone to all of my college reunions and most of my high school ones. The people who don't go explain that they see their real friends all the time, and aren't interested in the others. Or they're ashamed that they aren't successful. Or that they don't have a career. Or that they don't have a spouse. Or children. Or a new book coming out. I find that they are laboring under the delusion that reunions are for showing off.

Sure, there must be some people who come to reunions to show off, especially if they felt underappreciated in their undergraduate/high school years. But that is not my experience in general. My former classmates are happy to see me, sympathetic to my life struggles, my lack of accomplishments, and supportive about my small triumphs and my plans for turning my life around. I think many people go to reunions to recapture their youth: the cameraderie, the intensity, the seriousness of purpose, the sense of seeing the future opening wide before us. It's bittersweet, of course, because that vista has been steadily narrowing over the years. Still, there are the shreds of shared hopes and dreams waving raggedly in an amber light...

Not my classmates, but I did attend an all-female college.

I guess what I'm talking about is nostalgia, a dangerous emotion. Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, "to return home" and algos, "pain" or "ache," so nostalgia could be defined as the pain of homecoming. Originally, it was a medical term, coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries longing for their homeland. These men were literally dying to return home. When we think of nostalgia today, however, we think of getting a bit weepy, a bit maudlin about fondly remembered events in the past, but I don't believe most of us think of pain or sickness. Yet pain is the source of those tears–the pain that that time can never be visited again. Hell, Proust wrote an entire epic eight novels on this theme! So, why do I call nostalgia dangerous? Because it refers back to a hazy past that might not actually exist. Unlike those Swiss soldiers who were missing their very real homeland, when we experience nostalgia, we are pining for an imagined past that seems better than our cold and harsh present. It may well have been better, but nostalgia implies a sort of over-emotional idealization of that time, as seen in its definition as "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition" (Merriam-Webster). So the modern definition of nostalgia involves a displacement in time, rather than in space. And what are college days if not an irrecoverable condition of the past?

Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychology, puts it a different way. He writes about the "paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia–for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled.... All of us, finally, are exiles from the past" ("The Landscape of His Dreams" in An Anthropologist on Mars,  (Vintage Books, 1995). It is the fantasy of those college days that holds me in thrall, not the reality.

I know that my time in college had its rough patches, and that there were times when I was quite miserable. Especially when it was 2 a.m., I was jittery from unaccustomed amounts of coffee, out of Wite-Out, and I had two papers to write by 9 a.m., plus a calculus test to study for. There were times I became filled with dread at the formless mass that was my future, and there were times that I thought I would never, ever have a boyfriend (attending a women's college might have had more than a little to do with that), and that I would die old and alone in some book-crammed, dusty apartment with no one to notice I had gone until the stench wafted into the hallway. Still, even as I record these more somber memories, nostalgia creeps in, and draws a gauzy curtain over all that angst.

But why shouldn't we give in to nostalgia once in a while? It's better than smoking opium, right? I loved being at reunion and giving in to the onrush of feelings evoked by those familiar stone buildings, those well-trod paths, that computer center–wait a minute! Computer center? Where did that come from? That wasn't there in my day! And we segue immediately into curmudgeonry.

Well, my real reunion (30th!) comes up in two years, and I fully intend to go and wallow in all that nostalgia. By then, I hope I'll have a little more direction to my life. It will be fun to compare notes with my classmates, not in a competitive way, but to see what odd and quirky directions our lives have taken. You can go home again; you just can't stay.

Okay, back to being more reliable: I promise to post once a week from now on. End of the school year and its concomitant madness put me off my stride. Also, I like to procrastinate.... Hey, that could be a topic for a future blog!