I consider myself to be a connoisseur of procrastination. It’s astounding how many ways I can find to distract myself from what I should be doing. There are obvious and easy distractions–video games, knitting, television, etc. After I can no longer justify doing those things, and the ticking clock starts to exert its pressure, my shifty mind tries to trick me out of doing work by leading me on quests that I’ll be 2o minutes into before I wonder why the hell I’m doing them. I’ll start re-organizing my computer’s folder hierarchy, or decide that making sure every song on my iTunes has artwork CANNOT wait. This can go on for hours.

But tonight I found a whole new way to procrastinate. My English instructor is a TA, who mentioned in passing (as if TAs ever mention their accomplishments entirely in passing) that he’d had an essay in a book that one of our other essays was from. Curious (and procrastinating), I Googled the book and his name together to see what it was about. I found not just the title of his essay, but his personal/professional site, a literary journal/podcast he used to do, and several media blogs that he contributed to. I haven’t read or listened to any of this yet, because it’s 2 am and I need to write, oh, 5 more pages and figure out how to properly use footnotes, but I’m still astounded when I find the digital footprints of someone I know. It’s voyeuristic and intriguing, and I’m not sure that I’ll ever get used to the fact that people are so easily trackable online just through Google alone. But anyway, had I known he was such an awesome web geek before, I probably would have paid more attention in class.

Except when he was lecturing on Freud. Don’t even get me started on why English academics have such a hard-on for Freud (and yes, I realize how that sentence lends itself to Freudian interpretation).