Brian Explains: Planned Procrastination

The main philosophy of planned procrastination is why do today what you can plan to do tomorrow?  I believe I started the beginnings of this philosophy in high school, but it truly blossomed in College.  I have a degree in English Composition that I am putting to great use by writing this article you are reading.  When I was in grade school, I did many book reports on books that I did not actually read or barely read.  The art of skimming a book and coming up with some BS for an essay on the book seemed to come naturally for me.  In high school, I was able to write original BS for which I got praised even more than the BS essays about someone else’s book about BS.  I decided that the BS skill could serve me well in a degree that may as well have been called an English BSing degree.  I always thought it would have been much more poetic if I had received a BS when I graduated rather than a BA.  Of course, I never really cared for poetry.  I saved the only two poetry classes that I was forced to take until my last semester at college.  One was reading poetry and the other was writing poetry.  As with everything else in my educational life, the BS poems that I wrote in minutes just before the class received much higher grades than the ones I spent days on making sure the pentameter, syntax, and rhyme (oh my) were just right.

How can planned procrastination help you?  Let me answer that question by asking you a question.  What could it hurt?  Give it a try.  You’ll like it.  Let me give you an example.  You are sitting at home and you get a phone call from your aunt asking you if you remembered that she invited you to her house for her birthday party in an hour.  You say, “Of course, I’ll be there.”  You hang up the phone and think, “This is why I didn’t want my aunt having my home phone number.”  After you calm down, you realize that you really only have a half-hour to get a present because it will take you the other half-hour to get out of bed, get dressed, brush your teeth and hair, and drive to your aunt’s house.  You go down to the closest store that sells cards, gift bags, and miscellaneous knick-knacks and slap it all together in your car.  As you are slapping it together, you realize that the card you bought is actually a “Get Well Soon” card.  Thinking quickly, you write inside the card something about being sick of birthdays or some BS like that.  You take the gift to your aunt’s house and she goes on and on about how creative the card is and how she always wanted a cactus shaped pot with a cactus in it.  Your family has an odd, but very real vote about how you are the greatest living relative and you live happily ever after.  What does this story prove?  Nothing really, but it does show that the procrastination (even though it really was not planned) did have a positive end result.

Who can benefit from planned procrastination?  Oh, just a small segment of the population known as everyone!  People spend hours, days, weeks, and even months planning things that are going to take place in the future.  People plan vacations, job interviews, and parties for what?  I say they are planning for big headaches, hours of frustration, and huge amounts of disappointment.  Why?  With planned procrastination, you let your subconscious mind take over.

Other people just want to help you organize your life by creating lists.  I am not offering you things you need.  I am offering you something you want – more time!  Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’d like to go to the movies today, but I have those things to do.”  Take that list of things to do and throw it out the window of tomorrow because, as I said at the beginning of this article, why do today what you can put off until tomorrow.  I know I said something along those lines.  I could look back and see exactly what I said, but I have a life to live.  I have to quickly finish this article so I can publish it in a few hours.  Now that’s planned procrastination!

Brian Explains: Perfection

I fear criticism for some reason and I don't know why. I grew up in a house free from biting analysis of my every word. Many times, the fear was not knowing if what I was working on was what I should have been working on in the first place. In my creative moments at home, working on an animation or drawing, writing a story, or creating a piece of music, I usually end a project before I consider it finished. If I take the time to show someone the progress on one of my creations, I usually preface it with great explanations of why it is not perfect.

I don’t like mistakes. I don’t like knowing I messed up, feeling like a failure, or being proven to be imperfect. Out it comes. I am a perfectionist. There are many of us around. Most of us remain in hiding until a mistake is made. Then, we leap from our stations in life and spring into perfectionist prevention mode. We want to know why the mistake was made, how we can prevent it in the future, and who knows that we made the mistake. Survival dictates that others must not know of the mistake. Preventive measures go into affect, but sometimes someone else finds out about the mistake before you do or your preventive measures don’t get implemented soon enough to prevent the word from getting out that you . . . I can hardly say it . . . made a mistake! Once the word gets out, you go through the stages of post imperfection. The first stage is denial. You look for anything that indicates it was actually someone else’s fault and not yours. Next comes the self-hating stage. You can’t believe you made the mistake. You must be an idiot to have made such a huge error. You shouldn’t be allowed to do what you messed up on ever again. It is the end for you and that faulty activity. Finally, you accept your failure (this could take weeks for a persistent perfectionist). You can try to prevent it in the future, but you there is no denying that it happened. Killing yourself would only be the biggest mistake of your life and the blundering trend is becoming redundant. It takes approximately 2-3 weeks for your perfectionist status to be reinstated. In the end, all that can be done is to focus on the future when you can consider yourself a perfectionist once again.

If you are not a perfectionist, consider yourself lucky. Every perfectionist realizes that perfection does not actually exist. We who are perfection hunters are not shooting for (or at) perfection, we just want to get as close to perfection as we can. You can hear a song that you think is perfect from beginning to end. I assure you that the artist who created the song can point out every mistake and flaw that exists in the song. Some artists would say that it is the flaws that make the song special. I would rather have an interestingly flawed life than a boringly perfect life. I feel like I could have said more about perfection than I have in this article, but sometimes you just have to consider something done before it is actually perfect. I think this last sentence is pretty darn representative of my thoughts on perfection.

Brian Explains: Being Macho

Soap operas are the down-fall of women. I’m not saying that men don’t watch them, but most men find the melodramatic events in soap operas a tad too emotional to take. I’m not one of those men. I cry all the time. Gossip is one of my favorite hobbies, along side knitting and doing the dishes. (Pause) Okay, I’m lying. I rarely cry, hate soap operas and gossiping, and buy into most ideas of what “macho” men are supposed to do. There are a few “macho” things in which I don’t participate. One would be “hanging out with the guys.” I usually have one or two good friends (now that I am married, I have a good friend and wife in one). Getting together with a bunch of guys and drinking beer (another “macho” activity I avoid), talking about women, and complaining about your job is not what I was put on this earth to do. I was put here to hand out pamphlets that say “What?” on them.

A large activity of the macho set is watching sports. I myself can't really imagine anything more boring than watching a sporting event. I don't care what kind of sport, they are all boring. The one sport I can stand to watch, basketball, still denigrates into a boxing match every now and then. Hockey denigrates into a boxing match every other quarter or whatever time frame hockey operates under. If you love football, I am sorry for this next sentence, but you had to be told at some point. Football is the single most boring, idiotic, and cruel sport ever invented. It preys on the stupid and suckers them into thinking that a future in getting hurt makes sense. Boxing is the ultimate in stupid cruelties that they call a sport, but football disguises itself with strategy in order to make itself look like a sport with skill. One person has skill on the field and he is not actually on the field. He is on the side lines and calls himself the coach. It is as if he is a chess player who is playing with real people who really get hurt. What does he care? They are just pawns in his chess game.

The final “macho” item, though not the final of a complete list of machoisms of which I do not participate, is that being a man means not being able to control his want for sex, their rage, or their mouths. I have control over my body and my mind. A man that rapes a woman and says he just couldn’t control himself long enough to hear her saying “no” or a man that beats his wife and says that he just couldn’t control himself belongs in jail. On a smaller scale, the man who says whatever he pleases even when he knows it hurts or offends the women around him needs to live life in the shoes of a woman some time to appreciate their world. I realized long ago that women’s lives are much more in control and much more difficult than that of a man (except that whole getting beat up and ridiculed thing by other boys when you are younger). Women are more sophisticated than men, they live longer than men, and they deserve more respect than men. I have more to say on this issue (and probably will say more in my speech to the League of Women Voters), but not a lot of space left in this paragraph so I will stop the paragraph here. Well, on second thought, maybe I will stop it here.

Being macho seems more about proving to yourself that you are macho than actually about being macho. All the things that make up being “macho” are in your mind. I am sure many people considered the Village People macho and they may have been. They were all the male stereotypes of what being macho was all about. “YMCA” is sung at just about every sporting event and so is “We are the Champions” by Queen. I guess being “macho” is the new gay. “Macho pride” will be the new chant of the macho people. Who am I to judge? If they want to be loud and proud to be “happy” and macho, I say more power to them. Don’t expect me to march in the Macho Pride Parade, though. It’s just not my thing.

Brian Explains: Complaining

I love to complain, but I do it well so I’m allowed. My wife is also a good complainer. Some might say (myself included) she is an even better complainer. What do I mean by a good complainer? Some people whine when they complain. This is bad complaining. This is what most teenagers do and no one wants to be like teenagers.

The basic rule of complaining well is to be entertaining while you are complaining. By entertaining, I don’t mean you juggle and squirt water out your nose, I mean telling a good story. You make the complaint a joke. An example is: “I waited 50 billion years in line at the store when the lady in front of me pulled out a purse the size of a Buick full of coupons from the 50’s.” This is much more entertaining than the following example: “I went to the store, stood in line an hour, and got sore legs. Can you rub my bunions?” This is not entertainment; this is what my job would be in prison.

Comedians truly understand the art of complaining. People pay money to watch them complain on stage, on TV, and in the movies. It is a big business. Millions have been made by the top complainers. In some ways, you almost have to be born with a dirt covered spoon in your mouth to be a top complainer. Having things to complain about when you are a kid helps you develop the skills you need for a career in the discontented arts. A miserable kid is a funny adult.

The other part about complaining is knowing your audience. You don't complain about waiting in line at the bank while you are still there waiting at the bank. Everyone in line is just as annoyed about having to wait in line so hearing you complain about it just adds to the annoyance sandwich. When you get home or back to work, you can entertain them with your tales of stressful lingering. Be sure to mention the lady who pulled out her life savings in pennies.

Complaining is cathartic. It allows you to relieve the stress you received from the difficult experience you had. Just don't give someone else that same experience by recreating it depressing blow by depressing blow. The rule for good complaining is, if you want to tell someone what a bad day you had, be kind, don’t whine, and entertain. You might get a promising career out of it.