A Procrastinated Essay

What role does procrastination play in your life?

            I’m always late. Everyone who knows me knows that. I have the most tardies in the school. Teachers and coaches look directly at me when they remind the whole group of an early bus departure. It’s gotten to the point where my friends will invite me to things ten minutes earlier so I will be on time. While I claim that I am “fashionably late”, the truth is that it’s a problem of procrastination.

            I simply don’t leave the house on time. Logically, the solution would be to just leave more time to get ready to begin to leave the house. In theory it’s a wonderful solution – an innovation that exemplifies the problem solving minds that a lab school cultivates. However, it’s not as easy in practice. I always manage to use all of the time allotted. I set up my system: if my first class starts at 8:00, I should leave the house at 7:30 so I have plenty of time to finish printing a paper once I get to school since travel time is only twenty minutes with traffic. The plan is ten minutes for breakfast, three for teeth brushing, seven minutes for getting dressed and a couple extra just in case. Everything goes smoothly until I get distracted by an email or Facebook notification and decide it’s not a problem if I check it right now since I have loads of time to get ready. One thing leads to another and before I know it I’m knee-deep in college searches or cat videos with only five minutes left. No amount of reminders and alarms can keep me from falling down the rabbit hole.

            I try. I really do. But my priorities are skewed. I guess it’s what some people would call a hamartia – a fatal flaw. I get excited about things and I want to do them in that instant that I think about them. That’s why I read the sixth Harry Potter book in one sitting. The world needs people with energy and people that get inspired to the point where they can’t wait any longer to achieve their dreams. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough time for everything to get done and getting leaving the house gets pushed off later and later. Thankfully, I’ve been surrounded by kind and understanding people in my life. The administrator pardoned 5 hours of my tardy service. Teachers will hold the bus and extra minute. My friends still invite me to dinner. I try not to take advantage of it. I’m honestly not a malicious person. And I know that I’m wrong and that it’s something I need to fix. But not right now. I’ll work on that later. 

Mailing Memories

What’s the most memorable thing you ever got in the mail?

            

My parents always said that snail mail was underrated. They didn’t use those exact words but as a child they tried to convince me to write letters to my friends and grandparents because they would “appreciate” them. I never understood. It takes the letter at least a week to get to them and another week for you to get a response. By that time the sentiment has probably changed and you might not even want to talk to them anymore. What’s the point? I see my friends every day at school. If I have something I want to say to them I’m not going to send a letter. By the time it gets to them I’ll have six other things I want to say. My grandparents can be reached by a phone call. Letters are useless. This is the twenty-first century.

            

The only things they ever got in the mail were boring adult things that had to do with money. They got Macy’s and Pottery Barn catalogs. I suppose for adults it’s exciting to look for bargains on blenders.  Sometimes they got checks and pages and pages of coupons that we never used. But mostly, it was bills. There’s a saying on bills but I can’t remember it. Nothing is certain but death and bills. Maybe that was taxes.

            

Only during Christmastime would my parents look forward to getting things in the mail. All of our friends and family would send in their Christmas cards. As they arrived my mother would open them and read them aloud to us, showing off the creative and decorative front of the card. She would then tape them up one by one on the wall so that by December 24, the wall was covered in nativity scenes, sparkling snowflakes, awkward family photos, but mostly warm wishes from our loved ones. That was the part we all looked forward to.

One summer my best friend decided to go to camp. He told me would have no cell phone connection and no internet for two weeks. I asked him if he expected me to stay at home cleaning the house while he was off having the time of his life. He told me I could write him letters. So off he went and within three days I decided to send him a letter. I realized I didn’t know what I was doing. How do you write a letter? How do you send a letter? Is it supposed to be a formal affair? How many stamps do you use? After long deliberation I told him about how I was doing nothing and asked about his adventures. I liked the way my handwriting looked on the page.

            

I mailed the letter and all I had left to do was wait. And wait and wait. My god, why do letters take so long to get to the other person? Is this what life was like before the telegraph? Did people just spend their time waiting for their friends to reply? There is really something to be said about the impatience of our generation. After about a week I got an answer. He told me about the great time he was having. His messy handwriting switched from black ink to blue as he wrote on different days. It had the distinctive smear of a lefty.

           

It wasn’t so much what he wrote but I loved that letter. I still have it. I guess it must have been the combination of having to wait and that it was so distinctly my friend that made the letter so special. I suppose it’s the same sort of deal with handwritten birthday notes and Christmas cards. People like knowing that they’re worth the time and effort. It turns out my parents were right. There is something about getting something in the mail that makes it more effective than just a simple text or phone call. 

Boy Bands

Have you ever felt embarrassed by things that you used to like?

Like most pre-adolescent girls I also went through a boy band phase. Being the 12 year old hipster that I was, I didn't like the big bands like One Direction. I was obsessed with the smaller Big Time Rush. One Direction was and still is (kind of) the large multi-million modern British pop invasion. They had their faces in every magazine, life-size cardboard cut-outs, and world tours. Even grown women were fawning over them. By the time they were twenty they had released four #1 albums. Big Time Rush was like the more tamed and less successful second cousin. Big Time Rush (or BTR as the people who talked about them all the time on the internet and deemed it a waste of time to spell out the whole name called it) was formed by Nickelodeon for their new TV show, also called Big Time Rush. The show told the story of four friends from Minnesota who move to Hollywood to become a singing group.

I first stumbled across them while on vacation. My grandparents, while lovely people, are old. Old people take a lot of naps. Stuck inside the house on a 114 degree day in an unfamiliar city, I resigned myself to watching television. After SpongeBob rerun where he joins a jellyfish colony, there appeared on the screen the faces of four teenage boys with floppy hair and incredibly intriguing eyes. I was convinced they were calling to me.

They were living the dream. They were living my dream. Their life seemed so glamorous with all the interviews and the fame. I didn’t just want to be their fan, I wanted to be their friend. And so I attempted to connect myself with them in every way that I could. I never missed an episode, followed them on every social media, and listened to their album on repeat on my pink iPod shuffle. I begged my parents to buy me tickets to their concert in Chicago. They didn’t believe my love was real. And like all phases, the effect wore off over time. I slowly integrated different kinds of music into my playlist and un-liked them on Facebook.

I’m not just embarrassed because the music was bad or the lyrics were cliché or my brother made fun of me and now I realize he was right and I was wrong or because I spent my whole allowance on their merchandise or I believed the staged TV show was their real life. I’m embarrassed because this is the first time everyone told me not to do something and I did it anyway. Here is where I first started to become an individual and I wasted what should have been a grand and climatic moment that I would be proud of the rest of my life on four boys in their twenties who were being paid to look pretty and extract money from other pre-teen girls just like me. In trying to be different I became exactly like other people. That’s embarrassing.