Of Rats And Sloths

I was going to post a picture of a sloth here, but they're honestly some of the most hideous creatures I've ever seen outside of Congress, so instead, please enjoy this picture of beloved actor Jimmy Stewart, and try to imagine him every time I say 'sloth'.

As I’ve mentioned before, half of my readers are either attending MIT or trying to attend MIT. Based on the two MIT students I know, I take it that you’re all highly motivated, energetic people who feel at a loss when you’ve got no new problems to solve. As for everyone else reading this blog, I’d like to assume we’re more like ordinary people, the sort of people who do what needs to be done and then head home and have a beer, play some Team Fortress 2, and maybe look at a little goat porn on the side.

Let it be known that I don’t like to be busy. Many of my friends, both in high school and now, get to be like lab rats a few weeks into every term. Have you ever noticed that lab rats will periodically decide that enough is enough, that they’ve procrastinated for too long, and that they have to do everything they’d been meaning to do in life for the next ten minutes? It sounds meaningful until you remember that lab rats have the life expectancy of a non-Bauer CTU agent and live in a small glass enclosure that’s pretty much empty. Regardless, you can be watching and suddenly one of the rats will jump up and go running over to the water bottle and sucksusksucksucksuck and then he’ll tear up the alfalfa to get to the exercise wheel and runrunrunrunrun and then he’ll jump out and try to bury himself in the alfalfa and digdigdigdigdig and then he’ll be so exhausted that he’ll fall asleep. This has been a pretty long metaphor, so I’m going to remind you that I’m describing about half of my friends right now. However, I definitely prefer to not be busy. If I were an animal, I’d be a sloth, and I’d love every minute of it because if you can get a deadly sin named after you then you’re probably a badass. However, this term it’s come to my attention between all the work I’ve been doing that I’m taking 20 credits, which is kind of a lot at a school where the recommended number is 15, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep doing this sloth thing anymore (however, ladies, if you’d like to help me out with lust you need only give me a call).

So how did the lazy guy come to be taking 20 credits? I blame wizards, and not those benevolent Dumbledore types, either. Whenever I’m not busy, which, and it saddens me to say this, is not that often these days, I start worrying about whether I’m going to be able to graduate in four years because of all the crap I’m not doing. To be honest, none of the classes I’m taking are harder than a couple of the AP classes I took in high school, but this is mainly because the guy who taught those classes was arguably The Best Teacher In The Universe™. If I were return to the animal metaphor, he would be like the Jesus of lions, combined with an eagle, and all the water-centric skills of a shark, and he’d have opposable thumbs so he could use guns whenever he was tired of killing people who turned in homework late with his 12-story scorpion tail. Point being, my college classes don’t keep me quite as busy as my high school classes did, which worries me because I’d been preparing myself for a tidal wave of work in college which honestly still has yet to fully hit me. Whenever I’m not busy, I start to worry that it’s either because A) I’m neglecting some highly important work or 2) Because I didn’t take enough credits and I’m just going to burn more of my parents’ money by staying here for an extra year. I worry about this even now, when I’m one credit shy of the University’s maximum! Granted, I did just wake up from a three-hour nap so I could check my email and update my blog, so maybe the sloth in me lives on.

Yesterday was one of the days that made me feel like a lab rat. I got up at 7:05 so I could go to Spanish, had a bowl of delicious Raisin Bran, went to Visual Communication so I could learn to unlock my intuitive mind through meditation and thus improve visual literacy (keep in mind that this is a required class for the journalism school, lest you ever forget that Oregon is chock full of new age hippies), studied with my Spanish partner at lunch for our midterm, went to my humanities class in which my partners and I tried to use a series of abstract runes to describe a picture of a waterfall in order to prove the importance of a standardized language, rushed to the student union so I could help to film an episode of a campus TV show I wrote in which an activist throws a dead fetus at a public safety officer, went to a three hour workshop in which I was taught how to use PhotoShop and InDesign (and yes, geeks, that does mean I now have additional ranks in ‘Forge Document’), met with the other writer for aforementioned TV show so we could write an episode in which a public safety officer unsuccessfully tries to hide a massive erection, and then went to bed so I could get up at 6:50 this morning for an oral exam, and not in the spanky fun way, either. Mind you, I don’t do coffee or energy drinks, which might be why I took a few surprise catnaps during my classes (including one while I was trying to do a sketch for Visual Communication, which resulted in a straight line quickly becoming diagonal).

At the moment I’ve weathered the homework storm and have a few days of ease ahead of me. I’m a much happier camper this way. However, I’ve found that I only really get pissed about being busy when I have time to think about how busy I am, and when I’m busy I don’t have time to think about much anything but not trampling an orphan in my haste to get to class. What does that make me, then? A person who can handle being busy, but also handle being idle? By that logic, I embody the greatest qualities of both lab rat and sloth*! It’s true what all your hot female friends have been telling you – Truman Capps is truly the greatest human being on Earth, and also a spectacular lover.

*I embody the greatest qualities of both Southern California and El Paso! I embody the greatest qualities of both Metamucil and Oat Bran! I embody the greatest qualities of both Crystal Pepsi and New Coke! I’m like a Transformer that transforms from a forklift into a small, weak robot that can only lift things!

Truman Capps is truly the greatest human being on Earth, and also… Wait, crap.