McCain got my vote

John McCain announced that he would like to implement something similar to the Prime Minister's questions if he is elected. Which raises the pressing question: Does CSPAN have the capability to bleep out swear words?

How To Waste A Summer-Part 2

Part II-The Daily Routine

The Wake Up

Much as breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the wake up can set the tone for everything you will (or won’t accomplish). The most pressing issue about the wake up is when it is. If you could control whether you woke up at all (assuming you could wake up at some point, otherwise you would be comatose) then you would have the ultimate time control technique. Unfortunately our bodies are programmed to reboot after a certain amount of time. You might be able to push your sleep past the twelve hour mark if you have stayed up the entire night before (very dangerous, late at night when no one else is awake there can be a strong temptation to accomplish something), but soon after you will slide out of the dreamscape to the waking world.

The risk of waking is that once you do, you can accomplish things. You can, however, minimize this risk without resorting to pharmacology. The trick is to find the appropriate hour. It has to be late enough that you won’t be able to accomplish anything before your first meal (hopefully lunch, if you are awake for breakfast I can’ do much for you), but early enough that you develop your sleep debt. Your sleep debt grows as you stay awake, once it reaches a sufficient level you can fall asleep again. If you wake up right before a noon lunch, say at 11:55, you won’t be tired until late at night. If instead you wake up at 10:30, you will be able to sleep an hour and a half earlier at night and still not get anything done before lunch.

After you wake up you cannot get straight to work, there is a routine you must go through. To start with you must leave your bed. Postpone this as long as possible. If you are awake in bed you are wasting time and building a sleep debt. The best ways to stay in bed are to whine to yourself about needing more sleep. You should look at your clock, roll over, look back, and then hit your pillow. You might even want to grunt or growl. Be careful not to be too loud in this process, doing so might energize you (Keep your energy down!) or awaken a roommate/loved one. One of the worst ways to waste time is to spur others to action. This creates a guilt debt that, unlike the sleep debt, does not further your procrastination.

You must at some point leave your bed to keep up appearances. If you do not appear to be active, people will start making comments, which can increase the guilt debt. To combat the guilt debt while still in bed think of all things you will accomplish during the day. Set out a rough schedule in your mind that is overly optimistic. This will create the impression you have accomplished something even before your feet touch the floor. Once out of bed, check your email. This is one of the most useful tools at your disposal; check your email as often as possible. Along with your email check your facebook account, sports scores, and the news. Develop a routine of regular websites that you cycle through. With practice you will not be able to leave your computer until you have completed a full cycle.

News websites and scholarly sites should be prominently featured in this rotation. Reading articles about culture or current events can help you “expand your mind.” Expanding your mind is a great way to waste time. You can read (or rather skim) articles and feel like you are accomplishing something (decrease the guilt debt). The beauty of the arrangement is you do not have to let the articles to spur you to any action. You do not have to follow the advice of the author or even think about the content. You should no some specifics, however, so you can bring this up with friends and appear engaged with society.

After completing your cycle you have some flexibility in your next move. You can get a drink, go to the restroom, or take a shower. The best course is to do all of these things with a partial internet cycle in between each one. Some of the activities are too short to justify a full cycle, indulging in one will increase the guilt debt. Take some time to make sure that you have fully milked your grooming period. Shave, clip your toenails, and be sure to floss. If at anytime you feel like you are being a little too active, sit down and stare at the wall for three minutes. This should calm you to a restive state.

By this time it should be near lunch time, but it should not be lunch time. If you find your morning routine is taking an hour and a half, wake up a little earlier. You want to have a time cushion of about 27 minutes before lunch. This is not enough time to accomplish anything worthwhile, but it is building that sleep debt. Fill this void in whatever manner you feel appropriate. In times like these resources like comic pages, YouTube, and online video trailers can be of assistance.

Lunch

When you go to lunch take stock of all of your options before selecting your meal. If you are in college, walk around the entire dining hall before you even pick up your tray. If at a restaurant, read the entire menu and ask the waiter for a children’s menu, a drink menu, and if there are any specials (all on separate visits to your table). Try your best not to eat alone. Having others at your table can increase the meal length exponentially. While you are speaking you cannot be eating. If you have not finished your food you should feel no compulsion to move on with your day. While conversing with friends set down your fork when you speak. This will make you appear more attentive to your friends and slow your pace of consumption. If for some reason you are forced to eat alone grab a newspaper or magazine (or both). Use it much as you would use a friend to slow your pace. Hold the periodical with both hands so you cannot hold fork or finger food. If you are eating finger food (pizza, fries, burgers) be sure to wipe off your fingers on a napkin after each bite. You would not want to dirty your reading material with grease prints (especially noticeable on glossy magazines).

When all the food on the table has been consumed (on your plate and your companion’s plates) there is an allotted time you can stick around and chat. The length is dependent on how many people from the original group remain and how interesting the topic is. If you sat down at a table with eight people and only 2 remain you should only stick around if you are trying to spit game or the conversation is milk-out-of-your-nose funny. Someone pouring their heart out to you also qualifies.

After Lunch

Check your watch frequently during the meal. You want to finish before your next appointment, but not too long before. Much like the wake up, you want to finish your lunch late enough that you cannot accomplish anything before your next appointment. Also like the wake up, you do not want to finish your lunch directly before the appointment. In general you want about 28 minutes between anything you ever do (this can be adjusted depending on the person). If you usually have somewhere to be at 3 and you are finishing your meal at 2:50, push back the appointment to at least 3:15.

If you have to go somewhere offsite for your commitment make sure you leave early enough to ensure you will not be late. A good rule is to think about all the possible inconveniences you could meet along the way (traffic, lights, police, break downs, getting lost, trouble finding parking) and add up the cumulative time they would take. Add this total to the normal travel time and then add 20 minutes just to be safe. This new total is how early you should leave before your appointment. As you can see, travel greatly expands the normal 28 minute cushion. Use this as much as you can. But don’t travel too far as that adds stress (buying tickets, packing, etc.)

Evening

Time your arrival back to your room so that you have your personally-tailored time cushion between you and dinner. At dinner repeat the lunch routine, only this time with more food. As this meal is the culmination of the day you can also feel free to stretch out your conversations a little longer than you would at lunch. You should also indulge in whatever desserts you have at your disposal. If you are eating in a dining hall you should not put the desserts on your tray when you get your meal. Go back after you have finished eating your dinner and have chatted with your compatriots an appropriate amount of time. This greatly increases the dinner time window.

After you have finished dinner take some time to relax and digest. Take your internet routine for a spin, you might have received important correspondence during dinner. If you have not yet passed your daily bowel movement this is a great time. Take a book with you and enjoy the experience. The book will make you feel like you are “expanding your mind” (see above) and give you the impression you are multitasking, doubly decreasing your guilt debt.

At some point in the evening you might have to actually do something substantial. You need to just enough so that the next day you will be able to look back and focus in on something positive. If possible accomplish your work on your computer. Maintain an open browser and long into whatever instant messaging program you regularly use. Either do not put up an away message or set your away message to something that will encourage your friends like “Doing work, please distract me!” or “Soooooooo bored, send me a message.” Initiate several conversations if no one takes the bait. While accomplishing whatever task you are faced with, frequently cycle through your internet browser and the open conversation rentals.

This brings up an important point on procrastination, wasting time with others is always better than wasting time alone. Social interactions are inherently guilt reducing. We humans are social beasts. Interaction with others provides needed growth, but if you control your interactions you will not have to grow too much. During the day leave your room (or office or cubicle) and rotate through your neighbors. Bring up the headlines from your internet and newspaper readings to show everyone how plugged in you are with the flow of the world. Hold a stack of files, notebooks, or textbooks while you talk, this will make people think you must be very proactive to be able to get so much done and stay informed on world affairs.

Night

As the evening progresses, start to yawn and rub your eyes as you do your work. This will make you think you are “pushing through”, getting your work done even when you’ve hit the wall. Stop working all together after approximately twenty minutes of this. It is better to not work at all than work tired. Working while tired decreases the quality of your work. You want to be a perfectionist, if something can’t be done perfectly don’t do it all. This time of night is the only period in which I recommend watching TV. If you watch TV during the day the guilt debt will rise rapidly and create an empty feeling in your soul. But during the night time it is okay, because you won’t be able to get any work done anyways, you are too tired. Enjoy the rest of your night, tomorrow is going to be a big day!

How To Waste A Summer

How to Waste A Summer On Campus

No one ever seems to have the right amount of time, either there are not enough hours in a day or people have time to kill. The middle ground between stressed and bored is thin and slippery, without great effort you will slide to either side, risking scraped knees and heart palpitations. This conception is a passive view of time, and therefore flawed. You can control your own time if you try hard enough. This is something that I have learned this summer. I have perfected the skill of being neither bored nor stressed by manipulating time so that I never actually accomplish anything, but I also never feel like I am doing nothing. It is a simple process, if you read further I can teach you how to limit the amount of time available to accomplish your goals on a daily basis, and how to structure your goals so you are content with never accomplishing them. Any student with vague goals they foolishly committed to accomplishing in a moment of weakness can follow my instructions. In the first part of the series I will address how to approach and pace your summer, in the second part I will describe a typical day. While this is specifically tailored to a summer spent on a college campus the basic principles apply to a multitude of situations.

Part I-The Summer

Finding A Job

As the warm summer months approach it is natural to feel inclined to plan. Resist this impulse as much as possible. The earlier you start planning and looking for things to do the more likely it is you will find them. When you do start looking for some form of an internship, start with websites advertising government jobs. Most of these require background checks which take time, so it is likely the application deadlines have already passed. This will discourage and help form the notion there is really no job out there for you. This despondency should interrupt your job search for several weeks. After it wears off look through the competitive internship jobs that will be conducting interviews on your campus. Hastily write cover letters that are decent, but not quite good enough to merit an interview. These interviews can be quite stressful and require practice. Sure, a true procrastinator could go in without practicing but you risk looking foolish. No one wants to look foolish.

When you do not get selected for any interviews wait a week just to make sure they really aren’t going to call you. Then start going through web postings for jobs that sound promising. Immediately eliminate all unpaid jobs, you deserve to be compensated for your effort. Apply en masse to all the jobs that were posted for the summer before or do not have a date attached to them. You feel like you are applying but there is no danger of being contacted. Follow this up by applying to jobs that you would love to do, but for which you are unqualified. Past experience has shown me you should either love what you do or do nothing.

Around this time you should start looking for cushy on-campus jobs. These can include working in administrative positions, as an RA, or for whatever conferences will inhabit your campus over the summer. Place particular attention on research jobs. The more vaguely defined and self-motivated they are the better.

Outside Goals

With barely enough effort you can land something on campus part-time. The part-time distinction necessitates the development of other goals for the summer. When people here you respond to their inquiries with “I am working part-time …” or some variation they will judge you unless you add “and working on my honor’s thesis” or “and working on my novel” or some other noble outside project. The goal (or goals) you choose for the summer must be selected with care. It needs to be something that can be accomplished in part. For instance, you want to “make significant progress on” or “lay the foundation for” something rather than “complete” or “finish” it. With vague goals you can track your progress in whatever way you feel appropriate.

Pacing the Summer

Once your summer starts do not dive into work right away. You just finished a long and arduous year. You deserve a break. After all, summer is supposed to be about vacation. Take several weeks to “unwind” and “pull yourself together.” Make sure you get “grounded” before you actually attempt anything.

Once grounded, spread the work out over the summer. Do not set milestones. Milestones are only reminders of failure.