The Stranded Guide to Delightful and Detestable Procrastination

The harsh clack of your keyboard, dredging another essay from the well of Good Enough. The sting of the sunrise, piercing your eyes as you desperately try to format that data table and stop getting error messages. The cold hand on your shoulder grasping you from beyond this mortal coil, pulling you into a carnival of the damned as the deadline comes and goes and you accept that this just isn’t worth it any more. Don’t you wish there was a better way? Or at least one more listicle to read prior to actually doing all that?

Stranded has heard your screams in the night, your whispered prayers for a rogue asteroid to ruthlessly smite this unholy institution. The only salvation we can offer is a knowing shake of the head, and a hollow sigh of resignation. Stranded knows what ultimately breeds this cycle of horror, these tortured nights: procrastination. Slipping into nightmares is not so different, as the pleasant and dream-like gives way to utter despair. Gather round, and hear the woeful parables of The Strand’s miserable masses; how they once felt the warm embrace of procrastination, and how it turns to a chilling stranglehold. Behold: the Delightful and the Detestable!

Delightful: Lying Under a Blanket Doing Nothing
For me, the most fulfilling activity before starting to consider my responsibilities is just simply lying under a blanket for a really long time. Not looking at a clock or phone is a requirement. It can be in the dark or not, doesn’t really matter. It’s often better if darkness starts to creep in andto indicates that a lot of time has passed, but you can’t really know say how much.

Delightful: Cool Wikipedia Lists
There’s few pleasures purer than a well-curated, fully-realized Wikipedia list. Sure, most of the great ones involve death; “List of professional cyclists who died during a race”, “List of entertainers who died during a performance”, “List of inventors killed by their own inventions”, etc. But let’s be real: if you’d turn your nose up at a list of every fatal alligator attack in the United States since the 1970s, then you are probably the least fun person you know by a wide margin.

Delightful: Costume Dramas
One of my favourite forms of procrastination is watching costume dramas in several parts on YouTube. Nearly all of the good ones from the 1980s and 90s are on there somewhere, as well as a good many of the shittier ones from recent years. The formatting can be a little offbeat, and quality is often wanting, but you really don’t notice after the first hour or so. The 1995 Pride and Prejudice with Portuguese subtitles in 48 parts? Sounds good. The extremely shitty 2009 Desperate Romantics with spotty audio and significant portions of episode 4 missing? Absolutely. I love it.

Delightful: Rec League Sports
One of my favourite non-school activities is playing for a soccer team on Sunday nights. The busier and more draining school becomes as the semester winds down, the more I look forward to those end-of-the-week games and begin treating them much more seriously than anyone should treat a rec league. I mine the league’s standings for statistics, assess our biggest threats, mentally craft post-game pros & cons, and draw up defensive schemes. Ideally I’d devote more preparationtime to schoolwork, but ROSI does not reward me with a tuque emblazoned “League Champions” (cue “Sweet Victory” by David Glen Eisley).

Delightful: Smoking
I’m ready to work. I’ve got a lot of ideas, and I’ve been thinking about this essay all week. It’s going to be great, and it’s going to be easy. Time for one last indulgence: I sit on the bench outside of Robarts and light a cigarette, basking in the sharp buzz of my Peter Jackson Blues. I’m not addicted, because I only smoke as a luxury. And what a luxury it is.

Good procrastination is that feeling when you wake up and realize you have more time to sleep. It’s the freedom of knowing you could work on that thing you need to work on, but you don’t need to at this point. You can delay, because your eternal lover Time has not crunched its thighs around your head yet. It’s the wise words of J. Alfred Prufrock telling you that “there will be time.” And you can spend three hours playing Zelda instead of doing your essay.

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Detestable: Cleaning Every Surface in My Apartment
I don’t love to scrub toilets or do all my laundry that’s been piling up for several weeks while I was lying under a blanket doing nothing. But if I have a lot of essays to write, it’s the perfect time to do all of these things, as well as collect and wash all of my own and my roommate’s dirty dishes, sanitize the inside of the microwave, organize all my shelves, sweep and mop the floors, and so on.

Detestable: Sad Wikipedia Lists
Alec Guinness complained a lot about being best known as Obi-Wan Kenobi toward the end of his life, but all things considered he got off easy. He could have been remembered as “Actor who appears most often on Wikipedia’s list of films featuring whitewashed roles.” He also could’ve had the unfortunate fate of reading through the entire “List of political self-immolations” page. Or finding that only the third film in the Atlas Shrugged trilogy is included on “List of films with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.” Maybe those two shouldn’t be compared, but my point is don’t spend too much time on Wikipedia.

Detestable: Hate-Reading
My absolute least favourite form of procrastination is hate-reading MRA or PUA material online. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it is invariably several hours into an essay-is-due-in-the-morning all-nighter. Really there’s not much to say here because it is obviously the very worst. Did you know that Bang: The Most Infamous Pickup Book In The World is available in its entirety as a photocopied PDF for free on Google? You don’t even have to download it. It’s the worst. I don’t know. Just don’t read it.

Detestable: Drawing Out The Inevitable
I have a routine to ease myself back into work. It often begins with a run down to the Harbourfront at the crack of dawn so I feel like Rocky Balboa ready to take on defending heavyweight champion Sidney “ROSI” Smith. Then comes a philosophical shower lathered with deep existential thought. Following a quick round of ‘procrasti-cleaning’, I settle into a newly organized workspace and am reminded of the Gorbachev quote “We can’t go on living like this.” I then initiate the my study habits desperately need, fighting off resistance from hardliners such as Rick Grimes, Dwight Schrute, and Gennady Yanayev.

Detestable: Smoking
When Lindsay Lohan went to the hospital for exhaustion, was that legit? I wonder if I can get a doctor’s note for that. It’s three in the morning. Class is at noon. The first floor of Robarts is not conducive to all-nighters. Absentmindedly, as I’m still very absorbed in this whole exhaustion gambit, I go to light a cigarette before I realize that it’s actually very illegal to smoke inside. I go outside, where the street meat guy is the only one there to judge me. He is judging me.

Bad procrastination is the sinking feeling that arrives when you understand that, no matter how much coffee you ingest, you are not going to be able to recover the hours you’ve lost. It’s sitting and doing nothing because you have so little time left to finish the thing you need to finish that Time has become an abstract concept. You can no longer comprehend the shit you are in. It’s realising that you really should’ve dared to eat a peach while you still had one to eat, because now all you have is disappointment, a terrible GPA, and the knowledge that Hyrule is safe.