This is How Productivity Ends...

For Eliot, it was the world; for me, it's something close, I'm afraid. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. After my truly fabulous stretch of work, I managed to take a day off, and then just haven't been able to get back on the horse. Yes, dammit, I'm mixing metaphors--sue me.

There are several thousand Google images of procrastination. One of the most common, and the most aesthetically pleasing, can be found at a site optimistically named despair.com. Here's a link to their store, where you can buy yourself somethin' purty. Meanwhile, feast your eyes on their take on procrastination:

Now, I love these people for shamelessly mocking those horrendous, smarmy motivational posters that academic administrators and coaches tend to hang in their offices. In fact, now that I think about it, those posters are probably the adult equivalent of the "hang in there!" posters we used to have in 3rd grade classrooms--you know the ones with a kitten dangling above an abyss by a single claw? Who ever thought that crap was funny? Regardless, as much as I love the despair.com peeps for performing such a necessary public service, I object to their equation procrastination=laziness. Because what have I learned from my in-depth study of my own neurotic attachment to refusing to work? Not laziness at all! No, on the contrary, finding ways to eat time is hard work (I'm sure George W. would agree with me). And like all hard work, it's driven by fear and insecurity. I am the very model of the "anxiety-based procrastinator." And basically, I'm giving the virtual finger to those lucky "relaxed, pleasure-seeking" procrastinators. They don't need a demotivational poster of their own! So really, those people at Despair need to get back to work. If I had photoshop, I'd do it myself, but here's the one they need to attach procrastination to:

Or else I'm going back to the kitten poster. Seriously.