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How to Get Nothing Done | Dec 13 2001

Brooding helps.

As does obsessing over things beyond your control or ability to influence.

Try re-reading the newspaper, looking for articles you skipped the first time around.

Nap.

Write emails that need not be written.

Edit them to eloquence.

Search for ex-girlfriends on the web until you discover that one, a biggie, has returned to her hometown where she is employed in the Budget & Finance department of the local university and serves as a “team member” on the Dean’s Office Feedback project.

If possible, locate this woman’s email address, but do not find any recent photographs of her, however comprehensive your search.

Consider writing to her, and in fact begin several such emails, but then dig up your last letter to her, written four years previous, a letter in which you tell her the story of how your roommate had told you that she, your former girlfriend, had called and had wanted you to know that she was in town for just one day and was sad that she had missed you; a letter in which you tell her how much this had moved you, the fact that she had called after five years of silence, and how it had made you realize what a jerk you had been to harbor bad feelings for so long, and how you had gone to bed that night filled with such happiness and relief, only to discover the next morning that your roommate had been wrong, that it was a different woman who had called, a woman with the same first name as your ex-girlfriend.

Space out.

Make lists.

Remember the first time you had sex with the aforementioned ex-girlfriend and how her recent ex-boyfriend at that time, who also happened to be your boss at that time, appeared at her door in the middle of everything, and how she went out into the hall to talk to him while you stood naked on her bed, not knowing what else to do, and then remember how you listened as they argued about the fact that he wanted to come into her room, only she wouldn’t let him—not for any particular reason, as she told it, but because he had no right to enter her room, and how he kept saying that he knew someone was in there—because he wasn’t, as he kept saying, an idiot—and how she kept saying that although no one happened to be in her room at that time, there was nothing stopping her from having someone in her room if she wanted, and how he kept saying that they both knew who was in there, and how she kept saying that he for one knew nothing, and how you yourself wondered if maybe you should put on some clothes just in case this rather large and angry man decided to storm into the room, because you had a better chance in a fight with him, as you figured it, with clothes on.

Contemplate new shelving strategies.

Also, put on whatever music contributes to a certain melancholic mood focused mainly on a woman who never loved you and whom you never loved, as you would each periodically remind the other, and then discover upon further research that she placed 29th out of 37 entrants in the 34-39 age division of the 2001 Run for Independence 5K.

Calculate that as 10:36 a mile.

Repeat as necessary.