Late nights and low expectations

Sleeping. Fast food. Television. Girls Gone Wild commercials.
With all of the free time I have, you might think I would find something more productive. But I haven't. I've put off an oil change for my car for a week, neglected to wash more than one load of laundry since graduation and still have not unboxed any books.

The lack of motivation, Pangloss, is one of the many negative factors of our condition. When we first graduated, this was called decompression. We had earned the time off. We deserved an uninterrupted break. But I can't seem to break the cycle.

Part of it is undeniably my job. If I keep late hours, spend my mornings asleep and eat high-carbohydrate food without exercising, I'm going to be sluggish. But the job can't bear all the burden. If I wanted to do so, I could be asleep most nights by eleven thirty. Instead, I stay awake to play "Asteroids," which wasn't cool in the 1980s and isn't cool now.

I think that another part of it, though, is that I'm able to get away with it. I have such low expectations for myself that I hardly have any interest in motivating myself to exceed them.