Being Responsible is Hard

I hate being an adult. It's summer, so I don't have classes, so instead I have to do dishes, or clean the house, or do laundry, or get stupid ideas like starting blogs and promising to post every week. I can't do anything! But instead, I play a little MMORPG I like to call Guild Wars all day, or watch daytime TV, or goof around on the internet by pretending I'm shopping for things I can't actually afford, or by clicking random ads that look interesting (the best/most interesting/weird ads usually begin with Facebook).

I have been perfecting procrastination for a very long time, since middle school, when classes actually got harder than a piece of cake. I recently began the journey to perfect the art of procrastination during my senior year of high school. I was in AP English, and our teacher was telling us how to bullshit an essay in under thirty minutes. This is useful, considering that one is given a small amount of time to complete many essays during the official AP English exam at the end of the year. This also became useful when I started college, which requires many long essays in a short amount of time. My best grade was on a bullshit paper on a story that I had only gotten half-way through reading. You see, we all want to sound smart in our essays by using big words and fancily arranged sentence structures. But we fear that our reader will think that we are just pretending to be smart, so we dumb it down just a little bit. Instead of using the word "preposterous" we use "absurd," or even "silly." You also limit your connections between story and meaning by vaguely describing the symbolism of the pile of gold. This doesn't work. The teacher seems to expect you to be smarter than "silly." On your next paper, you actually use the words you think to use first. You make all the connections you found in the story and explain its meaning to the fullest. Such a method also does not work. This time you are wrong. For the next paper you fall asleep reading the novel, and in desperation you write an essay in thirty minutes at midnight before you go to sleep, look up the craziest synonyms you can find, make up crazy meanings behind the text that you know aren't correct, and fall asleep on your laptop. Your teacher thinks this is wonderful, A+! He/she wants you to be smarter than you are. You learn that not trying is the best way to go.

The above story is evidence that society forces us to become procrastinators, even those who were champions of responsibility to begin with. It is also a guide on how to write a good college paper if you get all the way through your English and composition classes as an average writer, take a reading class to discover that you suck, and need help. You're welcome. :)

What brings me to this blog post today is my hatred of all things responsible in matters of "homemaking." I have been putting off doing the dishes for a long time, several days in fact. I wanted lunch today. I got out some hot dogs that were yet unopened. I grabbed some scissors and prepared to let out the hot dog marination/preservation juices, only to find that the sink was full of said uncleaned dishes.

Here is a fact about me: I hate dirty things, but as long as they are contained to one spot, I'm okay with it. This is how the dishes were allowed to accumulate. However, I also hate sticky, juicy ickies dripping off of meat of an unidentifiable origin.

I was not about to let hot dog juice get all over my dishes, dirty or otherwise. I set aside the hot dogs and began to clean the dishes. Surprise! The dishwasher is full of clean dishes! That's okay, just move on to empty the dishwasher. Done. Fill the dishwasher. This is where it gets hard because I'm obsessive-compulsive to an extent, and I have a very hard time putting bowls on the bottom rack. The water won't make it to the top, and ALL my dishes will be dirty still! I survived. Run the dishwasher, hand-wash the things that don't fit or aren't dishwasher safe. Done.

Open hot dog container, drip juice on the counter, have a fit, microwave hot dog, hot dog explodes, clean microwave after another fit, use bread crust instead of hot dog bun because to poor too afford hot dog buns in addition to bread, eat hot dog, spill mustard on self, have a fit, do laundry. Done. Write blog post to procrastinate folding laundry. Done.

And here we have a paradox! I originally promised to write a blog post once a week. My procrastination with the dishes served as a tool of responsibility in creating a post! This blog post (responsibility) is serving as procrastination for not doing laundry! And now I feel inclined to discuss literary terms and theoretical physics at the same time! But I won't. I'm going to go do laundry. And I become responsible once more.


Buttons of responsibility and procrastination belong to Allie Brosh, at Hyperbole and a Half. Read it and revel in it.