Procrastination Station

So my brother’s old roommate, Gayathri, has this blog wherein she pays homage to my Craigslist ponderings by posting a mind-boggling array of friendster love letters from strangers.  After careful consideration, I’ve realized that anyone who fails to take advantage of the opportunity to read these letters is simply a bad person. 
Be good, read the letters, and ascend to that Platonic ideal of the well-rounded person. Only then will you understand what would make someone write a sentence like:
Some of my Favorite Numbers: Words, Everything I do, Till I die, Its my life

Anyone who has EVER used Craigslist knows that about 80% of the responses you get are from grammatically challenged people who just can’t commit to that $30 dresser.  Never have I had to wax prosaic for pages and pages on the qualities of the three-drawer Ikea dresser before I met the thrift-happy Manhattanites of Craigslist. 

Today, however, was my first Craigslist scam– and I’m sorry to say, I bungled it a bit.

In all honesty, I wasn’t even sure it was a scam at first: 

I mean… who wouldn’t be disappointed?  The protean stab at psychological manipulation gave me a moment of glee– like the initial "I don’t want to be involved with stolen goods" thing designed to put me on the defensive, this fantastic emphasis on trust and understanding was MARVELOUS.  But overall I felt a hollow emptiness, as Napoleon must have felt when he realized that there’s nothing left after grabbing your crown from the Pope and doing that coronation shit yourself.  I mean, here I have some two-bit scam artist, probably still heartbroken that the romance with Kevin McCrary didn’t work out (see the Times article), and I’m pretty sure the FBI and postal inspector won’t be interested in investigating some crap in Nigeria, especially when the crime hasn’t gone down yet. 

Plus… what if this guy sends me the play money, I macrame it onto a tray or stitch it into a baby tee or something else lame, and then his uber thug gang (NYC branch) comes looking for me to menace me into sending the change.  While that would be unlikely, the idea of giving my address to this dude is less than awesome. 

So I figure I’ll find the postal inspector’s home address and have him send it directly to him, but… schockingly, he’s unlisted.

So this sadly early end came out of all of it: 

So today is the almost-culmination of my move, and I’m partly thrilled to have sold the bed (Ah, Malm, ye were kind to me, argh!) and finally parted with — unbelievably — 38 button-down shirts that have been unworn for the past two years. 
"Why?" you may ask.  Believe me, if you’re asking, then you haven’t seen my armpits.  I leave those glistening girls behind and sweat like a piggity hogg with the most elephantine of my male counterparts.  So my shirts end up looking like poorly executed Hypercolor button-downs after approximately five wearings, and I can’t force myself to toss such a relatively new item, so… it gets stuffed back in the closet for insulation in case the next door neighbors ever take after the upstairs neighbors and take up late-night furniture moving. 
I think the genesis of this inability to toss trash lies with my ridonculously frugal parents (who promise me they are improvements upon their stingy hoarding forebears) but the fact is that I can never remember throwing anything away, ever. 
Everything got downgraded again and again until it finally ended up at the cabin, where crazy Herb Nesbitt invariably ended up stealing everything anyway– true fact.  This crazy man ran "The Dam Store" down the mountain at the Kettle Creek Dam, and once my parents arrived to find the cabin burglarized.  Trundling down the mountain to buy provisions and a lantern or two for the weekend, they found themselves repurchasing their own from Herb’s Dam Store.  So, imagine you spend a good number of weekends at a cabin where the bar of soap is one your great great grandmother made out of lard during the depression, and suddenly the La Brea armpits at the back of my closet seem less bizarre. 

Moving has been good, but slowly executed, partially out of fear of finalizing this step.  As long as I had a bed and another place, there was a retreat, not because I planned on abandoning Sean during the first hardship, but because sometimes a strategic pause keeps the cabin fever at bay.  And nobody likes cabin fever.  Mostly because of the lard soap involved.

So here’s the quandary… this blog is entitled "Procrastination Station," and last night’s entry was done in avoidance of work… but tonight I’m actually NOT procrastinating, I’m… done.  Such an odd feeling, to have something accomplished a full eleven hours before it’s due. 

Beyond this euphoria (and sense of loss… I mean, what am I, if not a slacker?), there is the other nagging existential question– if this is a procrastination blog, and this post is not made in procrastination, does it cease to be a post? 

This is the sound of half a brain bleating, perhaps, but caffeine and carb select ice cream have conspired to make this cranial crash, and the question is whether anyone will hear it– because the procrastination blog and the non-procrastination post should have combined and destroyed each other like the neutrino and anti-neutrino I’ve always feared. 
In Bleak House, there’s a case of spontaneous combustion– I vaguely remember some story from Physics class, some rare particle that (spurts forth from the sun?  blinks into being randomly? travels beyond the speed of light?)  would kill you if it hit you.  For some reason, I’ve forgotten all the details of this particle, or perhaps I made it up entirely, but I’ve no doubt that every case of spontaneous human combustion has been just the after-effect of this particular invasion. 

This first post comes– wait for it– fewer than 48 hours before I have a final paper due.  AWESOME.  You, the savvy reader, should interpret this to mean that there will be precisely three more postings– before each of my other final exams. 

Things I’m learning through this paper:

• even when I care about a class, I don’t care about "doing work." 

• Dickens’ Bleak House– long book v. really long book, the debate doesn’t matter, the "I can’t find the right quotes" part is all.

• I think that I don’t expect Inspector Bucket to constrain himself according to the good or evil effect of his actions, yet I certainly expect that of myself… does this mean I’m an elitist… or that I’m just overly neurotic and / or don’t bear much resemblance to a Victorian detective?

In the unrelated family of things that parade through my head… while blog is clearly the abbreviated form of weblog, it’s serendipitous that it’s a homonym for "blague," a word which, appropriately, blasted me from the Central Pennsylvania Spelling Bee Championship in seventh grade because I had not studied, and had only style sans substance to back up my arrogant head-tossing whilst speed-spelling technique.  Anupam Dass took the trophy, that bastard.