Sloth

As one of the seven deadly sins, sloth gets an undeservedly bad wrap.  I am, quite possibly, the laziest man alive.  Maybe that’s me being melodramatic, prone to hyperbole (or, as my students would correct me, “hyper-bowl”).  But I am definitely the laziest man I know.

Perhaps there’s some mathematical relationship of which I am unaware—the more active your imagination, the more inactive your body.  I’m sure a lot of people understand where I’m coming from, maybe you too like to indulge in the occasional TV marathon, your ass never wandering beyond a six inch radius on your couch.  But this is a genuine concern for me.  When furniture shopping, I always make sure to ask how much a couch will hold up under strenuous wear and tear.

The salesman will smile knowingly, “Got little’uns jumping around on it?” he’ll ask with a chuckle.

“No,” I admit. “Law & Order marathon on cable.  My last couch didn’t make it a year.  Plus, I just got HBO; the cushions are worn paper-thin.”

I’m not a terribly fat guy, but when I settle my weight on my couch, it’s like a glacier eroding the Himalayas.  Over the course of a single day of lounging, my cushions drift like tectonic plates, new mountain ranges of foam and upholstery rising in majesty at my feet.

Ensconced in my nest, it’s often very hard to rouse myself to any level of physical activity.  Walking the dogs is a necessity only because cleaning up their messes would require a greater physical effort on my part.  Thankfully, one of my dogs eclipses me in laziness and it’s merely a matter of strong-arming the other dog into an abbreviated walk no more than two blocks from the front door.

My gym is two minutes down the road from my house; I literally have only two turns to make before pulling into the parking lot.  When buying my house, I chose one not only within reasonable commuting distance to school, but also one with quick and easy access to a gym.  Ink still wet on my deed, I marched my butt over to the gym and signed up, allowing the fine folk at the home office to deduct forty bucks a month from my pathetic bank account.

I’ve rarely gone.  The few times I have dug my workout clothes out from mothballed storage, it was motivated by guilt.  Perhaps the night before I’d powered my way through an entire bag of salt and vinegar chips, or the morning found me licking the lingering crumbs from a store-bought dozen of sugar cookies.  I dust off the running shoes, recharge the iPod shuffle, and sigh my way down the street.  After thirty minutes sweating through my sorority girl workout on the elliptical, I pack it all in, and consign my gear back to the attic, to return only once the numbers on the scale start to creep back up.

Periodically I’m struck by fits of inspiration, usually around New Year’s or other momentous occasions (such as the arrival of swimsuit season), where I dedicate myself to a regimen of health and fitness.  I ransack my kitchen, throwing out any food bordering on unhealthy until I am left with nothing but water and canned tomatoes.  I run to Wal-Mart and clean them out of workout DVDs and home exercises.  I map out a schedule on my calendar: when I’ll start (tomorrow, inevitably), which routines I’ll do, which healthy meals I’ll cook.  On the dawn of the new, healthier me, I dress in my gym shorts, fill my water bottle, press play on the DVD player, and settle down onto the couch.  Never will I get up and join them in their workout.  Occasionally I’ll pop open a beer (this is hard work!), kick back, and wistfully dream of the day I am just as lean and sexy as the men and women sweating it out on my TV screen.

My reticence to engage in physical activity extends its reach into my housekeeping.  I like to think that at my core I am a very neat and orderly person; I live by lists and rules.  I could not function without the score of legal pads littering my home, classroom, and car.  In times of chaos and stress, I make lists of tasks which must be accomplished, often ranked in descending order of importance and complexity.  It’s not unusual for me to write an item I’ve already completed, if only for the orgasmic satisfaction of crossing it off and feeling that self-satisfied glow of accomplishment.  My DVD collection is organized alphabetically.  My books are organized not only by genre but by size.  Cans in my pantry are grouped according to vegetable, and mode of preparation.

Somehow none of this order translates into my daily life.  I’m like a goldfish, who grows to fit the size of its bowl.  I, conversely, will fill my house with so much clutter that I leave only the bare minimum of livable space.  No matter if I live in a one bedroom apartment or a palatial estate, there will only be enough space to walk from the couch to the kitchen to the bed.  No need for any extraneous spaces.  My coffee table has not been seen in years; it remains buried under mounds of junk mail, forgotten books, and notepads that I swear one day will find a proper home.

My car is a time capsule on wheels.  I have owned three cars in the time I’ve held my license, and there are things in my car now that were in my first car at age sixteen.  They move homes like a hermit crab and I will continue to drive them around until I am a danger on the road due to failing sight and motor coordination.  The yellowed, weathered Time magazine proudly featuring a shirtless Michael Phelps in celebration of his first Olympic games will forever be nestled in the seat pocket.

There are three concentrated areas of crap in my car.  Most items start off in my passenger seat, within easy reach should I need them.  In the event I have an actual passenger with me, the junk is unceremoniously shoveled into the backseat where it ages like wine.  When the backseat reaches critical mass and threatens to collapse on itself like an imploding star, I must find a new home for the collected detritus.

That home is most often the deceptively cavernous trunk.  I buy cars now based primarily on the available cargo space.  A cataloguing of the oddities in my trunk would read like an inventory of Mary Poppins’ handbag.  At last inspection, it included a miniature disco ball, two garden hoses, a serving platter embellished with a bedazzled skull, and an unopened birthday present from two years ago.  And that’s only what’s visible on the top layer, for cleaning out my trunk is an archeological dig.  Periodically, when I realize my mileage has been shot to shit from all the extra weight I’m hauling, I don my spelunking gear and clean out the trunk.

If you’ve ever scampered down the stairs on Christmas morning to joyfully tear open presents, you understand the excitement that comes from cleaning out my trunk.  I ooh and ahh over each bauble I rescue from the chaos. I brush aside the grime, wipe away the smudges, and fondly remember the day it came into my life.  I collect my treasures, clutching them protectively to my chest, and bring them inside.  Where I dump them on the coffee table and the cycle starts anew.  Circle of life.

I’m not a hoarder.  You will not see me on the evening news after I’ve been crushed to death by a collapsed stack of newspapers in my filthy apartment.  I just get lazy.  I’d rather do nothing than exert all the energy required to not only assign a space for everything, but police that everything stays exactly in it’s assigned space.  I have lots of piles, but I know exactly what’s in each pile; it’s organized chaos.

There have been moments when my house is clean and clutter-free.  Rare, brief, special moments, which is perhaps why I remember  them so vividly, like the birth of a child.  One expression of my laziness is procrastination.  Yes, I make lists, but usually only to solidify what needs to be put off until later.  And nothing wastes time like making a list.  My procrastination reaches a frenzied pitch when an important deadline is looming.  I am never as meticulous in my housekeeping as when there is something I really don’t want to do knocking on my mind.  This was especially prevalent in college.

Major paper due tomorrow?  I should disinfect the toilet seat.

Midterms in a few days?  This is the perfect time to scour the oven.

Pass or fail riding on this one final exam?  Let me organize my closet by season and then further by color of the rainbow.

My level of cleanliness is directly proportional to the importance of the task I am avoiding.

I wish I had the bizarre work ethic and aptitude for domestic hygiene of my mother, who seems to channel the undiluted essence of June Cleaver.  My mother has never been able to sit passively and watch a dust mote drift through the air, choosing instead to spring into battle with a can of Pledge and coat the entire house.  My mom has never gone to bed without having swept and mopped the floors at least twice that day.  Where I am content cutting a swath through my own filth to drop yet another dish into a crowded sink, my mother tidies as she passes through a room, often forgetting why she entered in the first place.

My mom’s inability to simple let it slide is a constant obstacle to ever leaving the house on time.  As the family is walking out the door, she can be counted on to pull out the mop, just so the neighbors won’t be offended if they drop by when we are gone and take a quick peep through the windows at our filthy kitchen floors. As a child, I came to associate the sound of a vacuum cleaner with leaving the home.  To this day, something feels amiss if I’m not locking the door to the drone of a Hoover. Other times, I’ll lose my mother after she calls for me to leave, only to find her in the living room reupholstering the couch.  “What if burglars break in while we’re gone?  I want them to think we have nice things!”

Sloth is not a sin, it’s a quirk.  I manage to get things done, just perhaps not at the speed most people would appreciate.  I manage to clean my house, with the approximate regularity of presidential elections.  I am perhaps best suited as a lector of world history, as I have special appreciation of the time period required for empires to rise and fall.  Namely, the same amount of time it takes me to accomplish any project.  There is hope: this post was completed in record time.  And I promise there will be one to follow, and it just might be ready before the ruins of a once-great civilization stretch from Atlantic to Pacific.