in which i dawdle

before i get to the main point of this entry (dawdling. which is, of course, what i'm doing right now. in fact, i'm even dawdling on my dawdling, since i'm writing this initial paragraph about dawdling itself. of course, you don't know that yet, since i haven't even gotten to the point of the pre-point portion of this entry.) i'd like to take a small side-trip into the world of linguistics. a very brief side-trip (though it is getting longer by the moment, isn't it?) dawdle is a very silly word. [and here, i was going to end the pre-point paragraph, but i realized that just saying "dawdle is a very silly word" is not much of a point, even for me. so then i was going to try to be just a little bit rigorous about it all and give some sort of linguistics-based scholarly reason *why* dawdle is a very silly word, but i couldn't, off the top of my head, think of any appropriately scholarly reason. so i asked laura (who is sitting across the table from me), and she got my back on the silliness, but couldn't think of anything other than "it sounds sort of reduplicated" to explain the silliness so i think i'm going to have to just give up.]

so, marching onward to the real point of today's entry, which is not about the *word* dawdle, but the concept of dawdling. i'm sitting here, on the day before thanksgiving, at school/work (i have a difficult time knowing what to call it--school or work--but that's another story for another time), surfing the web and chatting with anyone who happens in. i've got a couple of assignments (as such) from my advisor, one of which is to read a journal article on the processing of passive sentences (sounds great, yeah?). anyway, i've printed out the reference, but since this journal is not online, i've got to go to the *actual library* (yeah, i know, what a hardship, esp since the library is just across the street from where i'm sitting) and photocopy it.

so, i'm sitting here, surfing the web, pointedly NOT photocopying my article. i mean really (one part of my brain says to another), you're just going to haul the article down to virginia (where mom lives) for the weekend and not actually read any of it, so why bother? i'll bring it, and feel guilty for i'll bring the article with me for the holiday, and not read it, and feel guilty for not reading it [side note: this is one of those things that makes grad school different from work (because they are the same in many ways)--in grad school, you go home in the evenings after a full day of dawdling and work. or, if you're more like me, you go home after a full day's dawdling and feel guilty about not working. my real-job friends assure me that one of the most wonderous things about having a real job is that the job stays at work (most of time, anyway), and when you get home in the evening, you get to forget there's even a concept called work. you get to play, like you did after school as a kid. unless, of course, you're a parent in which case you get to work more while your kid(s) play.] it would be altogether more productive if i would just stop surfing the web right now, go photocopy the article, and read it now. then i could leave it for the weekend and NOT feel guilty about not reading it because i will have already read it! but no. this is not the borogovesian way.