Pretty Soon....

“Never put off until tomorrow, what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well”

---Mark Twain

It’s not something to brag about, but honestly, putting off unpleasant chores or boring errands is something I do really well. Actually, it doesn’t have to be something unpleasant or boring; I can stall anything.  Seriously, procrastination, for me, has hit expert level. My standard answer when someone asks me when I’m going to finish a task, or, more often than not, start one, the answer is invariably, “Pretty soon.” Pretty soon is vague enough that it satisfies the asker, and yet doesn’t actually require me to make a firm commitment to an actual deadline. Expert level indeed.

The problem is, there is always a deadline. A hard time and date for completion of a task, or delivery of work. This is a newspaper, and it runs on the concept of deadlines. No one at Gannett is going to holler, “Hold the front page, BKK isn’t done yet!” 

Never gonna happen

Deadline for me is high noon on Fridays. Right now, as I’m writing this, it’s 11:35AM Friday morning. No worries, right? I got plenty of time. The fact that I can procrastinate at this level and still never be late for appointments is just one of the quirks that make me who I am. Legit, in my world of time, five minutes early is on time, on time is late, and five minutes late is a felony. However, 20 minutes before I have to be somewhere that is 15 minutes away, you’d find me madly rushing about my kitchen, looking for my keys, my glasses, and my purse, while cursing the dog and wondering if I have time for one more cup of coffee. Common sense says that my purse, keys and glasses should have a spot where they are always kept, to avoid the last-minute dash, but “common” and “sensible” are not words that are ever used to describe me, and I’m good with that.

 

In a perfect world, we would all set aside specific times to work on specific tasks, being mindful of deadlines, expectations, and other responsibilities. It’s not a perfect world however, but it really doesn’t need to be, does it? Can’t most of us operate in less than ideal circumstances and still get our work done in a timely manner? Yes, of course we can, it’s simply that the pressure of an impending time or date is what pushes me. In college, in my senior thesis class, my assignment was a 25-30 page paper on Ernest Hemingway, his life, his work, and how his mental difficulties and environment influenced his writing. So, you know, not anything really complex. 

The class was structured so that the work could be allocated over the course of the semester. I read the syllabus, with the proposed breakdown of work all in neat segments each week. I’m fairly sure I snort-laughed and muttered, “yeah, that’s gonna happen” in class when the professor explained the workflow and how it was designed to keep the paper on point with minimal stress to the writer. My classmates all looked at me like I had three heads, but that was hardly the first time that happened.

That fall, at my beloved Saint Michael’s College campus in Vermont, I walked among the foliage, went to parties, sat up late at night with dorm neighbors eating popcorn and watching bad television, and spent entirely too much time with my boyfriend. Then, just like that, it was the day before the paper was due. Let’s remember for a minute that this was 1984, and despite Orwell’s predictions, I was still tapping away at a low-tech baby blue Smith Corona typewriter, that was electric, but temperamental and given to ribbon malfunctions and inky disasters. No internet, no word processor, no autocorrect.  Just me, a stack of Hemingway novels, a package of highlighters, and a ream of typing paper. Oh, and a really big pot of coffee. The journey of a thousand words begins with the first shove of the carriage return, right? My roommate wasn’t pleased, but she was one of those annoying planners, that never left work until the last minute, so what did she know?

There is a poem called “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross, and while I’d read it, it wasn’t until I was dissecting old Papa Hemingway and his wild and crazy life of literature, women and booze, that it became clear. For the record, I finished the assignment as the sun was coming up over Mt. Mansfield. Throwing the pages together in a folder I dashed off to class, handed it in, sat down at a desk and pretended to listen to the lecture, while nodding off and drooling. A week later, it came back to me, with a few slashes of red pen, and a big fat “A” on the front cover. Take that, planner people.

Nearly 35 years later, I’m still a last-minute Lucy. I’m used to it, and my editors, employers, friends and family have all given up on changing that. Sure, it hasn’t always gone as well as my senior thesis class, but I’m still standing. Sometimes we just have to embrace procrastination as the motivator it can be. In the meantime, it’s 11:56AM so I better wrap it up. Thanks for reading!