Still waiting

In my search for perfection, I've been working on my procrastination skills. I already had a fairly impressive ability to be diverted from whatever I was supposed to be doing, as I noted last night. But I think I've taken the art form to new levels but typing 'procrastination' into Google.

I think the most disappointing thing I found, though, was just how many websites are out there trying to convince people that procrastination is bad. Mottoes like "Why put off until tomorrow that which you can do today?" could be found. I tend to ask, rather, "Why do today that which can be put off until tomorrow?" There were religious overtones to some of the sites advocating enthusiastic embrace of tasks at hand, meaning they were never going to grab my attention in the first place other than to make me marvel at some people's ability to link two such separate issues (what, God is going to smite you if you don't get through your chores? As a side note, has anyone else noticed how the word 'smite' seems to have made a come back recently? I'm sure I never heard it spoken until about a year ago, and now it crops up everywhere).

My favourite find, though, and the one that led to best procrastination results, was to discover the existence of Robert Benchley, an America wit, friend of Dorothy Parker, and member of the Algonquin Round Table (I just wanted to work that last bit in...not really relevant, but there you have it). Benchley was the author of such aids to procrastinators as "Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment." * He is also quoted as saying that, "The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him." I lifted that last one off a website filled with his quotations, so a certain amount of irony there. But one way or another, I got very interested in a man who even claimed to be able to use a pipe as a tool to keep him from doing his work - not only smoking it, but laying it across his typewriter keys, and so preventing him from typing. A man after my own heart, clearly. He led a fascinating life, once he got past the fact that, on hearing about his elder brother's death in the Spanish-American war, his mother is famously supposed to have asked why it couldn't have been Robert who died. Involved in the early days of cinema, a writer for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, among other publications, his wikipedia entry reads like a who's-who of literature and film in the first half of the twentieth century. I'd never heard of him before today.

Imagine if I hadn't been killing the morning, to borrow Harper Lee's description of Mr Radley, "buying cotton"? I'd never have known about Robert Benchley. So I had to spend the afternoon find out out more about him and reading his advice to authors...There were no other demands on my time, of course.