In which Christian's pestering leads me on some unsurprising tangents...

In wondering why I'm so obsessed with finding work that fascinates me, Christian said of himself:

"My dream job doesn't exist. I'm not excited or passionate about anything. I don't have the skillset to do anything glamourous, and am honestly pretty damn lazy."

I'll set aside the obvious (and probably true) cliche that Christian just needs to find something to really motivate him. Instead I'd like to point out right now that I'm about the laziest sack of turds I've ever encountered. I procrastinate to a degree that would promptly level civilization if one person in ten followed my lead. I've been known to spend ten hours a day surfing Wikipedia instead of doing my paid job. I didn't start writing my honours thesis until twelve hours before it was due. I can (and do) waste time with the very best of them.

That's why I force myself into asinine deals like my current pay-per-blog imbroglio. I love to write, even thuddingly dull blog posts; I cherish how healthy I feel after I've torn around the Stanley Park Seawall on a disintegrating rented bike; I enjoy a hefty sense of accomplishment as much anybody else. It's merely that that alone won't get me off the couch at any particular moment. Lazy as I am, I still curse myself for days wasted and creativity unexpressed - just never enough to motivate me to do anything substantial. The end result is a predictable spiral of slothfulness, foul-tempered discontent, and ill health. So I rely on my (very) rare moments of proactive lucidity to create contracts that punish future inertia. I get jobs (like my current one) where people rely on me every instant - occasionally with more than their profit margins - because then I can't slack off. I make promises to other people that I'm too cowed to break. I enlist your help in forcing me to write daily. Stiff penalties either financial or social usually suffice to spur me to consistent action, while guilt alone at a wasted life rarely does the trick.

I've accepted my laziness, and now I spend my life defeating it merely by rank self-betrayal. It's worked well enough for me these recent years.

But there's one productive pursuit to which I've never needed any trickery to motivate me: politics. I've been thinking a lot lately, lamentably separated from the great game as I now am, about why that should be so. I'll write more about that tomorrow. Not that this is particularly gripping to you - but it's helping me shine lights into ill-understood chunks of my mind, so I'll be on this tangent for a wee while.