Time Flies When It's Wasted

Until today, all the words on this page have been prepared and posted from my desk in Lovernich Apartment A34 in (weather-related adjective) Malibu, California.  My desk, which is cluttered with all manner of things that don't belong on a desk and which faces a wall covered in newpaper clippings, is a good place to write.  Today, though, I am sitting in a booth at a Village Inn restaurant in El Paso, Texas (the very restaurant, by the way, in which Cormac McCarthy composed All the Pretty Horses, a book you must read as soon as possible).  I am trying my damnedest to get some work done--just something--before I get up from my table.  I've been here for two hours, and despite the fact that I'm researching a thesis, have two papers due next week, and need to review 67 application essays by Monday, this post is the closest thing to productivity I am likely to encounter.

The real problem, of course, is external.  I'm sitting in my booth opposite my oldest friend (She's only 22 years old.  Obviously I have friends older than that.  I just mean that she's been my friend longer than anyone else.  And even that isn't actually true, but just in case she reads this when it's posted I want her to know that I like her and I am having fun not studying with her).  She's a terribly distracting person to sit across a table from, because she is interesting.  A word of advice: if you are the kind of person who likes getting work done, only make friends with boring people.  Interesting people will distract you for hours simply by sitting across from you and being interesting, and reminding you that you like to listen to interesting people more than you like accomplishing tasks.

The unmotivated man has any number of tools at his disposal for wasting time, many of which are as simple as a piece of paper.  Today, hidden behind my upright laptop screen, I've constructed my personal favorite: the paper airplane.  She's over there reading--she'll have no idea what's coming until it beans her right on the top of her studious little head. 

For something made of so standard a material as a piece of notebook paper, the paper airplane takes a great variety of forms--there's the long and skinny, the pointy, the wide and stubby, the glider, the trick plane, and the obviously-doomed-to-fail.  And really, there's very little in the world as pleasing as a functional paper airplane.  Look at what we have created, we think.  Out of nothing, SOMETHING!  And something that flies, no less. 

We live in an interesting day.  Screens and computers everywhere, digital music on a whim, TV on demand, children's toys so complicated no college graduate is fully prepared to operate them.  Yet the paper airplane remains-- a steadfast reminder that the wholly mundane is often the best fun.  We're not so technologized that we've forgotten the tremendous pleasure of the purely physical--the fun to be had here and now, with no digital help.  A piece of paper, precisely folded, to be thrown at your  friend's head.  Now that's fun.