I’m confident that productivity is overrated, and I’m not just saying it because I lean toward laziness. Far from it. Even when sitting on my butt in my PJs, I am hopelessly preoccupied with maintaining productivity by multitasking all my slacker habits at the same time: sorting through downloaded music, responding to IMs, scanning through blogs, uploading photos, cleaning through my TiVo while boiling water for tea and waiting for the laundry to dry.
Remember those hyper-motivational Army recruitment ads that promised you’d get more done by 6 a.m. than most people did all day? While I wouldn’t dream of challenging a grunt to bench-presses (unless he’s cute and bench-pressing moi), I dare any muscle-neck to out-slack me!
On a particularly heroic lazy Sunday, there was more that I could slack between 2 p.m. and sunset (by which time I may have finally stumbled into the shower) than most people can not-accomplish all weekend. I dare say that I power-slack. Sometimes I even über-power-slack with bonbons and comic books. Painting my toenails or balancing the checkbook seems like hard labor in comparison.
This may be the only instance in which I surpass my friends with their prolific and continually driven ambitions. Many, if not most, of my friends are hyper-productive. If they aren’t making more money than Michael Jackson’s lawyers with their power careers, they are extraordinarily gifted and prolific writers and musicians who gig on a regular basis and pick up new instruments while en route to starting their next tour. They juggle the responsibility of parenthood while running a political campaign. They shuffle church activities with software entrepreneurship. They work on that grad school thesis that they want to finish before leaving for their sabbatical in Morocco. They rescue abused dogs. They curate art shows right after they finish an interview with the New York Times. They craft pins, paintings, scarves and very swank custom laptop bags. You get the picture.
On one hand, I am delighted and invigorated by being surrounded by fascinating people who are pursuing and accomplishing such a great variety of interests. On the other hand, it makes me feel positively ordinary and unoriginal to be in their company. This, I suspect, is why I stick to my personal core competencies of making fun of people, kissing cute strangers and, of course, napping or eating bacon.
I suppose it makes me a bon vivant under the circumstances because how much can one really contribute to a discussion on collaborative meta-data folksonomies or pre-natal aqua-aerobics?
So is it wrong to relish a moment of Schadenfreude when they spit up on themselves after their fifth dirty martini? Or reveal a moment of utter human frailty when they chuck a shoe at a stranger or hold on to a hug for a bit longer than you’d think they would need? Goodness, I hope not, otherwise I’d have precious little, by comparison, to feel proud about.
