In the grand historical scheme of things, the life of an Ivy League undergraduate in 2002 is pretty worry-free.
When I consider that a different spin of the wheel of life might have made me a eunuch slave to a medieval chieftain, a club-footed Russian serf or Louie Anderson, I thank my lucky stars for the painless hand I've been dealt.
That said, even we lucky college kids have conflicts of our own to tackle, and none is more vicious or more worrisome than the daily battle against laziness. Although the dire nature of this conflict becomes most apparent when the semester nears its end and deadlines loom larger in our minds, it's always lurking.
In every hour of every day, someone on this campus faces the decision of whether to work or to chill.
There's the freshman who has to decide between his biology book and his neighbor's bong. There's the sophomore who has to figure out whether three hours of MTV Spring Break programming beats out 3,000 words on Tolstoy. Then there's the assistant professor who has to flip a coin to decide between finishing chapter 5 and finishing Police Academy 5.
In cartoons, a guy debates moral decisions with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. For me, my wrestling with procrastination occurs with former President Teddy Roosevelt on my right side and Jeff Lebowski, The Dude, on my left.
T.R. was, for those unfamiliar with the details of his life, a badass in almost every conceivable sense. Weakened in his youth by asthma and other ailments, T.R. developed a work ethic that enabled him to act like a mensch-on-wheels for decades
on end.
When he got home from his life as a political luminary, Roosevelt wouldn't crack open a beer and recline. To the contrary, he'd probably spend five or six hours either writing one of the more than three dozen books he penned in his life or reading voraciously on any of the topics with which he was expertly acquainted.
After his literary tasks were finished, T.R. would box.
Sure, he occasionally was too bold for his own good -- leading a bad-idea Rough Rider charge up San Juan Hill or deciding to give a campaign speech during his Bull Moose run for presidency with a fresh bullet wound. Still, his resolute belief in the strenuous life is a lesson to anybody who flirts with laziness.
As soon as I read Henry Pringle's biography in high school, the image of an exhausted T.R. punching the heavy bag in the basement of the White House was embedded in my mind as the paradigm of a work ethic.
On my left shoulder in moments of incipient sloth sits a very different character -- The Dude, Jeff Lebowski, the plump ex-hippie protagonist in the Coen Brothers' gem The Big Lebowski.
Just as reading about Roosevelt the badass made an immediate impression on me, so did watching the too-laid-back-for-anybody's-good Lebowski.
There's something pure, something untarnished about The Dude's life in the movie. Sure, he's too burnt to react to the chaotic events around him. Sure, he has to write bad checks for milk at the supermarket. Nevertheless, there's something irresistible about that kind of leisurely attitude.
I'm sure many of you know somebody who reminds you of The Dude -- at least, at times. My housemate Adam, for one, has flirted with a Dude-like penchant for chilling.
His power to procrastinate peaked during his freshman year, and it was never more apparent than on what I like to call 'The Day of The Postman.'
On a weekday morning, Adam woke up early in his Hill House dorm room to begin work on a paper that was due at 5:00 p.m. Wisely, he planned to devote the whole day to it, forgoing class and track practice.
Adam, like many before and since, was a fan of Resnet's movie selection and turned on the tube to discover that Penn's in-house cable channel was playing the Kevin Costner flop The Postman.
Never one to judge a movie by what the critics say, Adam went ahead and watched the film -- two times straight through.
By the time the Costner double feature was through, he had precious little time to finish the paper. Undaunted, he pounded it out, ran across the street to Bennett Hall and turned it in.
His grade on the paper: a gentlemanly B+.
A possible moral: never do now what you can after six hours of a crappy Kevin Costner movie.
Will Ulrich is a senior Philosophy major from the Brox, N.Y.
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