The Great Procrastinator

My husband has a paper that’s due this week. He’s gone back to school and I’m pretty sure he’s not liking it. I don’t think he realized that it would be hard work or that he would struggle to put thoughts onto paper, but it’s been an eye-opener for him. My eyes have been opened in another way. Up to this point, I’ve always felt like a slacker next to my husband. He remodels a room, washes our family’s pile of dirty clothing and manages to jump on the trampoline with the kids in the time it takes me to think up something to make for dinner (that I have the ingredients for.) But now he is going to extraordinary lengths to procrastinate working on this paper. It’s a whole new side of my husband that I never knew existed.


He’s turned avoiding the computer into an art form. Last night he scrubbed the fingerprints off our walls, sat down with me to watch a Lifetime channel movie, and willingly did Yoga with me. The night before he volunteered to help with my son’s Scout project and he used a backhoe to dig a fountain out of the front yard. When he came in for dinner, he asked if I wanted him to bathe the cats. For the record, he doesn’t even like the cats.

When he finally sits in front of the computer to work on the paper he winds up surfing ads for garage sales or luxury cars. And, although he denies ordering it, a humungous tube-slide showed up at my front door courtesy of a local Craigslist advertiser. If I find out that we belong to the jam-of-the-month-club, or if a box of Omaha Steaks shows up in the mail, I’m going to kill him.

What is it about the stuff we just don’t want to do that scares us so badly? When you think about it, if he had just done the paper right away then he never would have had to dust the tops of the kitchen cabinets or vacuum the coil in the refrigerator. Or take his daughter pants shopping, or try his hand at buzz-cutting our son’s hair. But this entire series of bizarre chores were born out of his desire to put off today that which is due tomorrow. All I know is that I’m no longer going to feel guilty about curling up on the couch with a book or going out to the movies with my friends, especially since I’m not much of a procrastinator. After all, I already have my taxes done.