Laziness Forum One: Doing Stuff is Hard

For some reason, I decided to watch TV tonight. I'm not sure why. I usually don't watch TV. I did back in college, when I had cable, but now that I only have five channels, I hardly ever turn it on.

I guess I just remembered the Simpsons was on, and started watching then. I'm not sure why I kept watching, but I did. I watched TV almost the entire night tonight. I watched it even when there was nothing on to watch. Halfway through a PBS special on mountain lions, when I was yelling, "Kill! Kill the rabbit dead! Kill it dead with your paw!", I realized something. I realized that when I watch TV, it keeps me from doing a lot of other stuff that would be much harder.

Let's think about it. What do I do in my free time? Lately, I've been learning how to make little cartoon movies with Macromedia Flash. The program is very difficult to learn, and it makes me frustrated. But watching TV isn't like that at all. TV is easy. You don't have to learn how to watch TV.

Plus, it's easier to drink my soda when I don't have to type and move the mouse around.

Plus, I can turn on the closed-captioning, and tell everyone I spent the night "reading".

Plus, my record player broke, and now the TV's the only thing in the living room that isn't rivaling me for the title of "dullest object in the universe".

Sure, I'd gain a lot more by reading a book, or cleaning my apartment, or actually talking to a human being at some point during my day, but those things are all hard.

You know what else is hard? Everything. Reading? I have to hold the book up. Hard. Listening to music? I have to switch the CD's all the time. Hard. Making dinner? I have to open the box and put the food in the microwave all by myself. Hard. Writing humor columns? I have to figure out a way to repackage the same lame jokes each night without anyone noticing. Hard. Getting up early to go to work? I'm not a "morning person", and I'm sure as hell not a "work person" either. Hard. Getting dressed each morning? I don't think I've put on pants even once this weekend. Hard.

But I don't even have to get dressed to watch TV. Unlike your senile grandparents, I know the people on TV can't look back through the camera and see me. And I use this knowledge to my advantage. I use it to reduce the amount of time each day where I have to wear pants.

I wish I didn't have to wear pants at work. That would be sweet.

But the bottom line is that I'm sick of doing constructive things. I want to dumb myself down, to the point where I can watch worthless horsecrap like "American Idol 2". I want to spend more time doing things that involve little or no participation or social skills, like watching TV, and sleeping, and ogling fine ladies.

Most people spend their entire lives wishing they could do more, but I aspire to do less. Watching more TV is the first step to achieving my goal.

The next step is getting a bunch of morphine, preferably in chewable tablets that look like Flintstones characters. It would make work just fly by.