My Secret Failure That No One will Believe

My dirty little secret failure that no one will believe? Procrastination! I suppose no one wants to believe it because I seem to do a lot. Actually, I cannot deny that a lot of things do get done, in some fashion, in my life, especially when I start to tote up totals for Jennifer Fulwiler's 7 Quick Takes Friday. Nonetheless, I, and only I, know that I could tons more if I did not put things off until the last minute and sometimes put them off until they become OBE (overcome by events).

Take this current trip to Jordan, for example. I put off packing until 3:00 of the morning I had to leave. I grabbed my passport without looking at it. When I arrived at the airport in Amman, I looked for a clean page for the visa stamp before handing the passport over to the immigration official. Yikes! Only two pages - one to get me into the country, one to get me out, and no pages for arriving in the USA. Hm. I am curious what will happen upon arrival there! Frankly, I am not that curious. I am going to have to give up Wednesday morning at work and go the US Embassy. Hopefully, my predicament will be sufficient to get them to sew additional pages into my passport overnight. (This is getting ridiculous; my passport is only half-way through its term, and I am on my third set of 26 pages.) If my predicament does not touch hearts, then hopefully my begging and wailing will.

Then today, I could have done all kinds of things, including taking a trip to the Dead Sea with my students, but I put it all off. I kinda like having a day that is truly "off," and I have been to the Dead Sea before, actually experiencing the healing of a long-term dermatofibroma, a benefit of those Dead Sea minerals. However, I missed the day, in general. Oh, yeah, I read personal emails, let my office know that I could not reach my work mail because for some reason my work-assigned Blackberry is not working in this country, got some numbers I will need to deal with the bank tomorrow morning when I have to explain that its ATM machine ate my bank card last night. A few things like that, but nothing significant. Well, I did read and edit the first half of the manuscript a friend gave to me upon arrival. An interesting book, and I am glad I did spend some time with it, but I also spent too much unstructured time to make someone who tests as J on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator satisfied.

If this were just one time, I would pass it off as a small deterrence from normal behavior, but, unfortunately, it is a trait that colors my life. I could have done so much more in the Soviet Union (which no longer even exists) and the other 22 countries where I have worked upon occasion if I had made better use of more of the minutes there. Maybe that is a J talking, and maybe I am just being realistic and honest.

Take my cooking. There's another area where I deceive people. They think that I am a bad cook. That's probably not exactly true. I am a procrastinating cook. I wait until I hear the boiled eggs explode before checking on their progress -- and finding the whites all over the floor, the yolks clinging to the ceiling, and the pan, irregular hole burned in the center, smoking enough to set of the alarm. Oh, yeah, it was the alarm that pulled me away from whatever else I was perseverating with in order to check on the eggs, obviously quite some time after the timer had gone off and I figured it would be "safe" to wait "just a few more seconds." The Christmas ham received similar treatment, ending up with a black crust and no meat. I suppose, then, that I cannot blame my daughter-in-law for not allowing me to be in charge of family Christmas dinners.

And now here is a primary example right in front of my eyes. I have procrastinated long enough in preparing this post that I am going to have to do the actual posting later or I will be late in meeting friends downstairs in the lobby for a night out on Independence Day in Jordan. Oh, wait, it's too late not to be late!

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And now I have returned from a lovely evening of conversation with tried-and-true Jordanian friends at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the city of Amman as the meal was served in measured Arab style, with Jordan Independence Day fireworks exploding in the background somewhere along the outer hills of the city -- seen but not heard. As usual, I lucked out with my tardiness since Arab culture assumes being late as normal, as long as it is not much more than 20 minutes. I was ten minutes late, and my friends arrived five minutes later, so becoming none the wiser about my bad habit of procrastination.

There is help for me, I think. I could ask God to help me get over this procrastination problem, but I keep forgetting to do that, uh, putting off making that request, uh, procrasting about it!