Summer stuff

I figured at this point everyone would want to know what's going on with me this summer. What could be more important than that. I guess the short description would be somewhere between procrastination and willful neglect.

Now wait a minute, you might say, it's summer vacation, what could there be to procrastinate? And that's a fair question. But I've been reading up on what it takes to be a real citizen of the early 21st century and the one common theme is that it's really important to be busy at all times. So busy you have to be constantly checking your email and messages and too busy to have a coherent conversation without being dragged off in some other direction.

Now being a teacher, I don't actually have much of anything to do during the summer, so I have to invent a few projects that I can procrastinate. I've had mixed success with this thus far. I made the judgment error of picking unpleasant, sure-to-be-put-off tasks that were actually useful and almost necessary. The outdoor furniture, for example. Why in the world would you clean outdoor furniture? Outdoors is dirty. That's where all the dirt originates. This seems a perfect job to procrastinate.

However, we're having friends come and visit for the weekend and they may want to go outside and sit down. If you think about it, that's kind of an odd idea; there are lots of nice places to sit inside where there are no ultraviolet rays and no bugs. Outdoors is good for all kinds of things, like driving a car and throwing discus, but sitting is an indoor activity. You never know with company though; they're liable to sit almost anywhere. So out I go with a bucket of soapy and I begin to way the furniture.

I begin to notice as I work my way through this stuff that it's practically impossible to get the furniture totally clean. It's not that I'm a bad cleaner. As little as I like doing it, once I start I commit wholeheartedly. So I'm having trouble understanding why this is so hard until it occurs to me that the furniture wants to be dirty. That's how it adapts to its environment and cleaning it may cause it to be poorly suited for survival.

Surprisingly, my wife was unmoved by this line of reasoning, so out I went to finish the job. And after a while it began to actually feel kind of good. It was warm out and I was wearing a bathing suit so it felt good every time I got wet. It was quiet and all I could hear was the slosh of the water in the bucket and the inis tent hiss of the hose ready to rinse. It was a nice moment. And now we have clean outdoor furniture, except for the occasional surface I missed. Now what?

I have to create a new class for the fall trimester, so maybe I'll try doing that tomorrow. That'll probably be more interesting to report on than the furniture.