I should preface this by saying that in addition to my day, this essay also has no value: it is not scientific, there will be no facts or research beyond a quick Google search if necessary. It was not intended to be an experiment of any kind, but like many things in life it occurred accidentally, and like many, many more things in life I did nothing to stop it.
In my bed on December 5th from around 11 pm to 2 am I watched the first season of UK TV show Black Mirror (amazing, by the way) on Netflix and then decided to call it a night, at no point considering that I was to remain in that bed for a total of approximately 14 hours. Indeed, I actually awoke at 10 a.m., and sat up, performing the millennial morning ritual of slowly rifling through various social media sites: I call it the Haverford System, so named for excessive and lovable Tom Haverford of Parks and Recreation. My Haverford System is in time order, as in how much time I spend on each app from least to most: Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and Tumblr. It is a complete time waster, I recognize this, but I also give myself over to it completely. I don’t mind criticism I would, or will, receive for waking up and reaching for my phone like a baby reaches for a pacifier and I refuse to be shamed for it. I’m sure other people wake up and immediately turn on a TV or, way back in the day, a radio. People instinctively join the world the minute their eyes open, and I for one think that’s okay. Unfortunately for me, after finding out that it was relatively chilly and windy in Austin, Texas I rolled over and went directly back to sleep; this meant at 12 pm when I awoke for the second time, the Haverford System began again. Except this time I offered my own insight: I tweeted that I had woken up and gone back to sleep. Which leads to the first thing I was to learn.
My tweets are basically half-hearted apologies AKA Tweeting as therapy*
I often feel that people expect me to do great things, but no one as much as myself. So when I tweet things like “Omg just woke up” or “Made it to class…10 minutes late” or even “the only thing I've eaten today is macaroni and fun-size candy bars” it’s my unconscious way of apologizing for not taking advantage of….everything. I don’t take advantage of mornings, or education, or a healthy lifestyle and I can’t quite walk around apologizing to myself every time I make a dumb, but not necessarily harmful decision, so I tweet it. But Twitter is also a bit like I would imagine an AA meeting: you sit in a big room, and yell out your vices so friends and strangers alike can pat you on the back and say “yeah me too." I can’t pretend that I don’t want the attention or the reassurance. To make a series of general statements, my generation glorifies a dichotomy of lifestyles: we crave beauty and laziness, an unhealthy lifestyle yet all sort of activities, fortune without work, and fame without talent. Often the drawbacks are ignored, and we spend all our time piecing together a puzzle that does not necessarily fit together. We want the fast car and the nice house, but not the job. We want to be famous overnight, to be Kardashians or the next Usher protégé, but we also want to make fun of them, to criticize their choices. We want skills we do not cultivate, people that don’t exist. So we will all continue to tweet our disappointments with ourselves and allow people to throw yellow stars and retweets of support in our direction. Will I stop tweeting such a way? Probably not. Will I second guess what I tweet from now on? Absolutely. I can’t help now but to think when I tweet “who is this really for? And what do I want from it?”
I laid in bed and received a call from my mother. I don’t so much as wake up hungry, but expect to eat. That’s what I do in the mornings, whatever time that morning occurs: I get up and I eat. I didn't sit up to talk, just laid the phone across my face, and groaned that I wanted pancakes. She responded, “So go get them.” Super easy right? I wanted Kerbey Lane pancakes, it was about a 5 minute walk from my spot on the University of Texas campus, I just had to grab some clothes and shoes and get out there. Instead I looked up the Favor app on my phone, a food delivery service available in only 3 cities, one of which being Austin, where people literally just did you a “favor” and bought and delivered you food. Too ashamed to actually get someone else to travel further than I would to get me something that I could get myself, I decided against it, and continued to lay in bed. My mother had asked me what I had to do when I got out of bed, and I had grumbled a kind of “I dunno, nothing. I guess,” which was only partly true. It was false in the sense that I have an essay due Monday and two finals Thursday before I get to go home for Christmas but true in the sense that none of it was pressing and immediate.
At two in the afternoon my roommate woke up as well, though hers had just been a nap, and became immediately frantic as she had forgotten she was meeting someone for lunch. I finally got on my feet and feigned some sort of activity as well, though I had already sort of put my mind to doing nothing. I shuffled around our small dorm brushing my teeth and hair and making a cup of coffee in a pair of men’s boxers and a free t-shirt I had gotten for volunteering in such a bright highlighter greenish-yellow that I couldn’t see myself ever wearing it outside unless I needed someone to spot me from more than a mile away. I took my cup of coffee and my laptop and yes- I got back in bed. In my defense there is little more to this room THAN bed, it is one of only two seating options. Just as my roommate left to do things I assume normal people do on Saturday afternoons, I learned something else.
Don’t drink a large cup of coffee on an empty stomach
This is much less revelatory than earlier, but still very important. Don’t do it. For about 10 minutes I was convinced I was going to throw up and die. Just don’t.
Instead of leaving to fill my upset stomach with pancakes, I chose to wait it out and ate a handful of stale Wheat Thins while finishing the second season of Black Mirror. I tweeted how much I loved Black Mirror, in hopes that Netflix my throw me a gold star. They did not. I was starting to feel guilty that I had nothing going for me at that moment. I began to want to do something of value and so I began some research for my essay. I still uphold, however, that I did nothing of value this day because I researched a total of two minutes before realizing how much all the screen-time had affected my vision; my eyes were blurry and itchy and a pressure bloomed at the back of my skull. So I got up and put on clothes: a pair of black yoga pants and a long sleeve UT shirt. I played around on the internet till about 5 and then put on shoes to go down to the dining hall and have dinner. Realizing I need to take my ID and phone and having not a single pocket, I threw on an over-sized red knit cardigan as well. My brother refers to it as a slanket or sweater-blanket. Then came epiphany number 3.
If yoga pants had pockets I’d never take them off AKA I put a precedent on comfort
I put on these yoga pants because I wasn't going anywhere and didn't need to look nice. I put on this long sleeve because it is my favorite. I put on a sweater for the pockets. I spent my whole day inside because I had nothing to do outside and inside was softer and (slightly) warmer. My life revolved around making myself as comfortable as possible. I allow myself to have off days without limitation and set no boundaries on my lifestyle. But I'm not really guilty. Sure there were going to be days were I was going to have to work hard, be up early, look and act my best, but there were going to be far fewer where I had to do none of it. At 18 years old, looking ahead on my life, I can’t see much, but I know I don’t want to spend the rest of it alone, or living in my parents basement (particularly because they don’t have a basement), so there was always going to be people that would see me, that would expect things of me. So for now yes, I was going to be a slob and wear yoga pants and not iron. I would tweet and expect people to laugh and tell me it’s okay. And I would talk to my mother about how to sew pockets on my yoga pants.
At dinner I ran into a friend and we caught up, and I noticed just how much I had to say. I had spent 14 hours in bed and 3 more hours with no one to talk to and my tongue was heavy with unexpressed thoughts. I left and returned to my dorm and watched a movie I began to dislike immensely before I was even half way through, but I finished it anyway. And then I began to grow restless. I began to consolidate my thoughts, and I wrote this. Tomorrow I will have to do work, the day after that I will have to study, and for almost every day forward I will have something that needs to be completed. But today I was a noncontributing member of society. I recognized the pitfalls of the Haverford System, I learned not to drink coffee on an empty stomach, and I had a new found appreciation for my own comfort. For me, laziness is not a vice or a lifestyle, but somewhere in between: a conscious decision to take my time.
*Yes, I am probably going to tweet a link to this essay. Yes, this entire essay is basically one large self-gratifying apology. I didn’t promise anything.