I have decided to dedicate this week’s column to something that’s on every college student’s mind at this time of year: procrastination. Personally, I take my procrastination very seriously. To me, it’s more than simply wasting time in order to put off something important that I don’t feel quite up to doing; procrastination is a form of art, really.
Procrastination is arguably the purest form of art. While others have claimed that graffiti drawn on bathroom stalls is the purest form because it is done neither for critical acclaim nor for financial reward, I believe that this is also true of procrastination. It is perhaps even truer of procrastination, as I’ve been practicing the art for nearly 21 years, and I’m far from financial stability. In fact, I’m not sure that anyone I’m not related to by blood has ever really acclaimed my writing.
Who wants to buy a novel that I’ve only written three paragraphs of, though I’ve been working on it since May? Who is going to acclaim a poem that I thought of writing but that I decided to put off because I wanted to waste time on Netflix instead?
I cannot tell you how many hours I have wasted on Netflix.com instead of writing this article. It’s not even that I spent all of that time watching movies or television shows or documentaries, which could somehow serve to educate me.
No, I make sure that all of that time is sufficiently destroyed by rating hundreds of movies on a simple five-star scale. In one sitting, I regularly rate up to 200 movies.
If I had to guess, I would say that I’ve wasted 72 hours at the very least by clicking through the selection on Netflix without actually watching anything. Sometimes, after I’ve spent a particularly long time rating, Netflix will tell me that it has no more movies for me to rate.
After receiving this frightening bit of information, a potential threat to my precious procrastination, I typically spiral into a desperate frenzy in hopes of continuing to not accomplish anything useful. During this time, I go back through all of the movies that I have not yet seen and rate them based on how much I enjoy their cover art.
Once I have exhausted this possibility and run out of all possible movies to rate, I go through all of the movies that I’ve rated and add about 20 percent of them to my DVD queue. As a result of this, I now have more movies on my queue than I will probably watch in my lifetime.
I realize that this sounds like a useless thing to do. Even I don’t understand why I do it, but that’s part of the point. It’s also part of what makes procrastination such a pure form of art. My time-wasting habits are so complex that even I, the artist, do not understand them.
Hopefully ReVisions will begin accepting this as an art form. I’m running low on poetry and paintings this semester, but so far I’ve completed several works of procrastination that I’m quite proud of.
Holly Combs can be reached at
