How I Procrastinate

Bert Williams, from Wikipedia

For the past few months, I’ve had lots of time on my hands. I left my full-time teaching job in May, so now I am no longer burdened with course preparation, grading, and committee meetings. I can read whatever I want whenever I want, and, despite doing quite a bit of traveling, I have plenty of time to devote to writing my  second novel, to researching topics of interest to me, and to developing whatever musical talent I have.

Of course, I’ve made very little progress on any of these things, because when time stretches out in front of you, it’s very hard to accomplish significant things on a daily basis. However, I’ve accomplished a number of insignificant things, and, by way of tallying up my achievements this year, I thought I’d make a list of the things that have taken me away from what I once considered the important things in my life. So here’s how I spend my time when I’m not doing what I should be doing:

• Knitting. It’s become an obsession for me, which is kind of pitiful, because I’m really not that good at it. But, as I once told a friend, the lack of artistry in a pair of mittens does not affect its status as mittens: they still function as mittens. My inability to keep my tension constant, or my lack of talent at picking up stitches for the thumb, do not detract from the “mitten-ness” of the mittens I’m producing. I can always sew up holes and fill in gaps with a yarn needle, anyway. Still, I’m not sure it’s healthy to need to be knitting at all times. I’ve actually wondered whether one can knit while riding an exercise bike, although I’m happy to say that so far I have resisted the urge to try it.
• Which brings me to another time-sink: Exercising. I’ve joined a gym in the apparently vain hope of losing some serious poundage that has accrued as a result of indiscriminate eating and ready access to good wine and beer while spending a month in a cramped camper in Europe earlier this year. So I have been spending a good deal of time on an elliptical machine or a stationary bicycle, sweating away. On the bright side, I’ve listened to an Audible recording of The Martian in its entirety, and am presently making my way through the history of Broadway musicals.
• That last bit has led me to searching the internet for old clips of Bert Williams and the Nicholas Brothers so I can understand what the musical scene was like in the first part of the 1900s. There are some great clips on YouTube, and account for a couple of hours of completely wasted time. The picture above is a portrait of Bert Williams, described by legendary comic W.C. Fields as “the funniest man I ever saw–and the saddest man I ever knew.”
• Once you enter the world of the small screen, it’s hard to back out of it. I won’t mention all the time I’ve spent on social media sites, because even I have my limits when I’m in the confessional mode, but I will admit to watching several episodes of The Supersizers (Victorian and Restoration periods), whole seasons of Call the Midwife, The Politician’s Husband, and Broadchurch (season 2). All I can say is that it’s a very good thing that season 2 of Les Revenants is not available on Netflix yet. Most embarrassing, perhaps, is my compulsion to watch every single episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show. I can think of few activities in life that are less relevant and more pointless, but then again, someday I might actually put together a course on the history of the situation comedy. Then all I’d need is some college crazy enough to want to run it.
• I’ve also been finishing up some MOOCs (Massive Open On-Line Courses) I started months ago. If you haven’t tried these and have some time on your hands, I recommend them. They’re worth at least three to four hours of generally impractical but interesting edification a week. I’ve been indulging in Wordsworth on FutureLearn and Historical Fiction on Coursera. Both sites are very good, and I’m glad I left teaching before I became completely redundant and unnecessary as an educator.
• I still have my old standby of reading. What kinds of books have I been reading since my time is all my own? The usual miscellaneous mish-mash: Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart (a very different book from her Pippi Longstocking tales), Far from the Madding Crowd, Three Men in a Boat, The Life of Pi, Wordsworth’s Prelude (the long version), and P.G. Wodehouse’s Picadilly Jim and Something New. I mustn’t forget Mrs. Edith Alec-Tweedie’s A Girl’s Ride in Iceland, published in 1895, and full of interesting and completely outmoded information on Iceland.

So that’s it. It turns out you can do a lot of procrastination when you really set your mind to it. I pride myself in achieving a great deal in the way of procrastination this year, and offer this list not only as evidence, but as a public confession of my inertia. Here’s to hoping that in the new year my list is much less diverse, and that I can actually make some progress on my next novel.

 

My Short, Unhappy Life as a Politician

 

Four years ago, I made a decision that turned out to be a mistake–a real whopper of one. I ran for state representative. It is a decision that I still regret today.

Why would I, a political innocent, so to speak, decide to run for office? The extent of my experience in the political world at that time was knocking on doors for Barack Obama back in 2008. I knew next to nothing about the real political climate. I was naive and optimistic, and, excited by the events in Zuccotti Park (the Occupy Wall Street movement), I thought I saw real possibility to be the  change that President Obama had called for. I thought I could make a difference–that my very innocence in the realm of politics might make me more credible and hence more  attractive to voters. Of course, I can see now, at a distance of almost four years, that I was not just naive, but downright stupid. It probably isn’t the first time a candidate has been motivated by silly, misguided ideas.

The real question is this, however: why did I, a person with a more than adequate supply of humility, decide to run in the first place? What made me think I could make any kind of a difference? I’ve been considering that question for the last three years. Looking back, I see there was a perfect storm of situations that made me believe that it was not only my right, but my duty to run for office. First of all, as a community college professor, I was teaching writing and public speaking to a population of largely underprivileged students. I realized that not only could I gain valuable experience as a teacher if I ran, but that I could also serve as an example to my students. After all, at the end of every semester, I would offer both my writing and my speech students this parting advice: “Now you know how to raise your voices. Go out and do it. Make trouble for other people. Be good citizens.” Running for office was a chance for me to practice what I preached, and it would help make me a better teacher.

Primary Night Tally

(Side Note: This much was true. I did learn a lot from campaigning, which I tried to incorporate into the tiny textbook I wrote for my speech students. I used what skills I had in writing and in public speaking several times a day, and I found that teaching those practical skills was both meaningful and necessary. I do think I became a better teacher by running for office.)

Second, my position as a community college professor in a very rural area allowed me to see that the people whom recent legislation hurt were my students. I felt obliged to help them as much as I could. Third, as union president, I was also able to see the willful ignorance and arrogance of those in office. Fourth, my husband is a whiz at numbers and finance, and I knew he would make a fine campaign manager, and that by sharing the experience with me, we could be partners in a greater good. Fifth, I knew many people in my town, and they all told me they thought my candidacy was a good idea.

All of these things added up to a feeling of excited inevitability, which then turned into a sense of obligation to run. The only way I can describe the result of this transformation is to compare it to a statement found not once, but three times in Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart: “There are things you have to do even if they are dangerous, otherwise you aren’t a human being but just a bit of filth.” This may be overstating the case a bit, but at the time, I really felt that if I didn’t run, I would be shirking an important responsibility, and that I would be avoiding an unsavory but necessary duty.

The result of all this will not be a surprise. I lost–and by a hefty margin. I don’t mind losing the election; it was probably the best thing that could happen to me personally. But I lost more than the election, and that’s what really bothers me. Somewhere along the way, I lost my my faith in a political system that unabashedly favors those with large campaign coffers. I lost my desire to talk to and get to know people, which had been so useful in the classroom, and which I am only now regaining. I lost a good deal of self confidence, too, because I saw the limit of my own ability. Most tragic of all, I lost what had started me on my journey in the first place: hope.

Even a wonderful group of supporters can’t guarantee a victory.

For three years, I have tried not to talk about my abortive foray into politics. To be honest, I look upon it as if it were a stupid stunt I pulled while on a bender, as if I woke up one morning to remember that pulling off my clothes and jumping into the fountain was not a dream, but a horrible reality. And, like a hungover college student on Monday morning, I now regard my actions while under the influence with a sense of bemused shame:  I’m impressed with the enormity of my mistake, because I should have known better than to have exposed myself.

But I am healing from my experience, and perhaps the best evidence of this is my willingness to analyze my feelings about running for office. I offer up this post as a testament to a person’s ability to recover, if not to learn, from unpleasant experiences.

A collector’s item