Who do I still think I am??

This one's about waiting, being lost, and our divisions.

30DBC PROMPT: "Procrastination: a fatal flaw or a necessary evil?", courtesy of Fivesixer .

'Sup y'all? It only took me 28 days, but I finally came up with a halfway decent prompt...you have no idea how long it took me either. I finished my entry around midnight, posted it to the respective forums, didn't even bother to proofread it, and then opened up the 30DBC Group Mail template and just stared at it. The forum says I posted it at 1am...but I assure you it felt like it took much longer than an hour.

The topic of procrastination has been kind of a big deal for me lately...mainly because I seem to be doing it with more regularity (or at least more often than I'm accustomed to). With me, there's no middle ground: I either do something right away to get it done and over with and out of the way, or I wait until I'm down to the last possible remaining bit of time before I realize I haven't looked at Twitter in the last day or two, and there's these articles from this morning I haven't read yet, and I need a glass of water but I also haven't eaten in awhile so should I have a snack or something more like a meal, oh eight more Facebook notifications, and how is it 10pm already? It's, like, bedtime, and I really wanted to write that blog entry this afternoon, but then what would I do the rest of the night? What may look like procrastination on the surface actually plays out more like a structured lifestyle...or so I keep telling myself .

The truth is, when it comes down to procrastination, it's both a fatal flaw and a necessary evil. I'll fully admit that I'm a ginormous (wait...Charlie ~ and Future Mrs. B ..."ginormous" is a word? My spell-check seems to think it is...all this time I thought it was a made-up word. I think there's a conspiracy afoot.) procrastinator based on the principle that (I'd like to believe) I do some of my best work up against the pressure of a deadline; however, if there's something I'm waiting on someone else for and there's plenty of time before it's required, I'm that jerk who has 75 panic attacks when I see you doing something other than what I've asked of you. It's a vicious double-standard I've got goin' on...I never seem to think about the poor folks waitin' on me, but I hyperventilate over the thought of trusting others that things will be taken care of when they're not done immediately upon the making of a request.

I look at it more as a necessary evil though mainly because I try not to get myself into situations where either my own or someone else's procrastination will lead to unwelcome circumstances. I know people are human and being let down or letting others down is a part of life, but the more avoidable it is, usually the better off everyone involved is. You can argue that having something (for example, a term paper) done and ready early allows you the opportunity to revamp and make changes if necessary; I'll counter that having too much time to consider such measures can in fact be a bad thing and sometimes you've gotta trust your gut rather than trying to doctor a finished product with new avenues and thought processes. You can't adjust the recipe once dinner's on the table.

And chances are, once you've outed someone as a habitual procrastinator who continually burns people with the lateness, you're devising ways of moving on from their presence in whatever it is you're up to. When you have to start taking things like someone's track record on certain projects into consideration when it comes to setting deadlines, it's safe to assume that it's their character that's flawed...how you choose to let it affect you going forward is what determines whether or not it becomes fatal. If you like so-and-so enough to tolerate their occasional tardiness, so be it...but if that same person is an incredible douchebag and winds up costing you time/money/business, or generally makes you look bad, they should suffer appropriate consequences.

Clearly, I've been thinking about this in my subconscious for way too long, because I think I shot far past the finish line.

BCF PROMPT: "You’re stranded in a foreign city for a day with no money and no friends. Where do you go; what do you do?"

I find it kind of difficult to write about something from a hypothetical standpoint when that situation has actually happened (if you consider Canada a foreign country). That ordeal (which is covered in more detail here: "This one's about road trippin' and parents/teachers." ) involved being separated from my friends and my glasses at a large outdoor rock concert, and I had no money on me either as night fell over the venue. Had my friends not seen me as I followed the crowd toward the exits, I honestly don't know what I would've done. It was 1998, and not everyone had cellphones (and even if we did have them, it's unlikely our U.S. service would've worked in Canada back then) or a GPS. To my knowledge, Molson Centre in Barrie, Ontario is surrounded by nothing, so I would've had no idea where to even go to try and get help (assuming security would've been of little assistance). I really did get lucky that night...I knew my friends wouldn't have just ditched me, but I'm surprised at how they were able to find me out of all the people there.

I was also stranded at New York City's Penn Station once...I'd made a trip up there to see a girl and it started off well but it ended badly. I'd gotten to the train station early and was allowed to depart on the train before the one I was scheduled to be on, but soon after all the outgoing trains were cancelled. Turned out there was a fire in one of the terminals, but being that it was NYC around five years or so after 9/11, they weren't gonna screw around. They tarped off all the entrances, so no one could enter or leave Penn Station. I'd at least had a cell phone, but I was running low on cash and wasn't sure how I'd be able to get home. Eventually they bussed us to another station just outside of NYC, but we had to wait for a train to come through and get us. So instead of showing up at noon to catch a 1pm train and be home by 11pm, I got there around 11am to take the noon train so I could be home by 9:30pm, only to be stranded at Penn until around 8pm so we could be bussed over to some other place, where a train picked us up around 1am so I could get home at 7am (and I had to be to work at 8:30am that day).

Because of technology advances though, I don't think it'd be too difficult to be in a foreign country these days by yourself. I mean, you got there somehow, and who goes to another country without telling someone? All you'd need to do is find a person with some internet access, and you should manage alright before you're rescued. Unless you're kidnapped by the government and dropped literally in the middle of a country's wilderness that also doesn't let you access American websites. If that's the case, I think you learn how to communicate with animals then and get accustomed to the ways of the local creatures...they're your new family now.

MUSICAL BREAK!!

This used to be considered a rare song in the Pearl Jam catalog. I'd had it on a soundtrack to a movie that I guess wasn't very popular, and I'd also heard it on a couple of unauthorized bootlegs in the mid-nineties. The story was that they used to play this song to close their shows all the time before they got huge, and when they started headlining they retired it from their sets. It's always been a favorite of mine.

THE DAILY BOX SCORE:

"Differences and similarities: which divides us more?"

Differences. Totally. One has to look no further than two of the most richly debated topics out there: politics and religion. Could there be anything more polarizing? You wanna talk about some people who absolutely can't stand anyone who disagrees with their point of view, you can't have a discussion without political extremists. I see it all the time on Facebook; you can't have an opinion that differs the slightest bit from some of these zealots without getting flamed or branded as "stupid" or "an idiot" or some other form of hate-speech. It's sickening, and were it not for the fact that it doesn't matter which party is in charge of what or is actually in the right (or wrong)- most of the news and decisions made by politicians don't affect 99% of the population anyway- people like that would've turned me off from politics a long time ago. And religion...y'all know already how I feel about that. Yet what some people don't understand is that if you're a deep-seated religious fanatic among a group that's largely apathetic toward any/all organized religions, some people will have a hard time responding to you. I'm not talking about anyone on WDC; it's just something I saw posted on Facebook this morning...someone had made a comment on a thread in a group that was primarily atheists and non-believers, and someone responded with the standard "If you know Jesus to be your savior, all your problems will go away", or something like that. And the discussion turned away from trying to help someone into this whole argument over "my faith can beat up your faith", which was so far from the point it was almost disturbing. What kind of religion says to their followers "If someone needs your help with something but they don't believe in the same God as you, screw 'em...they're on their own"? Religion might be the most divisive topic of all.

Conversely, don't you tend to unite more with people who you share some common ground with? Isn't that more the hallmark of a solid friendship? Look, I get the whole "opposites attract" thing, and it makes for a nice story, but eventually don't you get sick of dealing with someone who feels like they're constantly right about something you feel completely different about? Would that get old quick? You feel comfortable most around like-minded individuals, where you can share the same beliefs and ideals. When an outsider joins your little group, don't you find yourself practicing some kind of informal vetting process to see if they're worthy enough to be a part of your clique? What about the new guy at work? You kinda test that person to see if he's cool or not. Is he a fink for the boss? Or does he want to fit in? It seems childish, but being a grown up at times is almost an extension of the same ideas...everything tends to boil down to popularity contests and likability. Fall short of either and suddenly you're on the outside with your differing views and opinions.

But like I find myself saying a lot these days, it takes all kinds to make this world go 'round. Life would be pretty boring if everyone agreed over every little detail, wouldn't it?

This prompt totally reminded me of a picture that still gives me a little chuckle every time I see it:

Well, my experiment with using Lazarus is officially over, at least for the time being. See, my laptop tends to run a little slower if I leave it on for a few days, and it'd probably been over a week since the last time I properly shut it down, so I did so this afternoon just to give it a rest. And when I turned it back on, Chrome wouldn't load the Lazarus extension because "it's not in the Chrome store" (I imagine hearing that in my head in some kind of whiny four year old's voice). So I tried uninstalling it and reinstalling it, and Chrome wants no part of it. There's even this article   about Chrome extensions you should have, and Lazarus is the first one! But nope...my laptop doesn't want it. And I just remarked to CJ Reddick something about me finding a way to screw up Lazarus...well, that didn't take me that long now, did it CR?

So somehow I managed eight hours of sleep last night (which, trust me, I'm not complaining). I woke up this morning, diddled around the internet for awhile, went down to the farmer's market for a few minutes, picked up a light lunch (tuna sandwich and some cookies), and proceeded to take a solid two hour nap. I was nodding off trying to catch up on some reading, and boom...out. Talk about a waste of a good day...but that's what I get for staying up late and getting up kinda early a few times this past week.

Well, I think that's about all I have to say for myself today. Hope you're all doing well and enjoying your weekend! Peace, I tried to explain, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!