By Jennifer Vanasco

It is Sunday night and I should be working. In fact, I should have been working all day.
Instead, I just played two rounds of cards with my mom. And then walked the dogs. And tooled around on the Internet. And made an ice cream soda.
This is pretty much how my day has gone.
Boy, do I feel guilty.
Though not guilty enough to mind pausing here, for a moment, while I go catch a TV segment my mom wants me to see on the Discovery Channel.
Cable is one of the prime benefits of spending a couple weeks at the home of a retired parent, since I don’t let myself have cable at home.
Why?
Because I work from home and I find cable too distracting.
“Hey,” she says. “Wasn’t the point of coming down to Virginia to be extra focused and get a lot of extra work done?”
I shrug.
“So ignore me when I talk to you,” she says.
She turns off the TV and sends me back to my computer. Then she turns it on again, and I can hear the silky purr of the narrator saying something about bats or stars or bears or something. I’m leaning over to listen. I’m leaning far, far over.
I fall off my chair.
My mom comes to the doorway. “Jesus, honey,” she says, looking at me on the floor. “Just do your homework.”
“It’s not homework!” I say. “It’s actual work. I’m 35! I’m a working writer!”
This is an old argument. I’m hoping to entice her into arguing for just a little while longer.
She rolls her eyes.
“Just do it, kid. Finish up so you stop moping.”
I’m back. Going to work now. Oh boy, sure looking forward to writing the column.
Sort of.
First, I call my friend Naomi, who tells me that she’s reading a book by Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the magazine The Idler, called, appropriately enough, “How to Be Idle.”
On the first page, Hodgkinson writes, “It is a sad fact that from early childhood we are tyrannized by the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible.”
I like this man.
In fact, I like him so much that I’m going to ease my fingers away from the keyboard for a minute and take them over to my guitar’s fret board, so I can try to compose a little jingle about Mr. Tom Hodgkinson, Master of Idleness.
Unfortunately, composing a jingle turns out to be a little too trying. Instead, I spent about 20 minutes idly strumming a few chords that are easy to play.
My mom wants to know if I’m done working, so that I can help her water the plants.
“No!” I call back loudly, banging down on the office chair. “Just got up for a minute! Still working!”
I go look up Tom Hodgkinson on the Internet. Basically, he lionizes sleeping, napping, drinking tea and just plain drinking as better uses of one’s time than pure industry.
I think about how Naomi said that according to Hodgkinson, “Early to bed and early to rise” is just a bad idea. Life would be oh so much better if we spent more time being idle. Mulling things over. Watching the world go by.
I look up “early to bed and early to rise” and find a study published in a British medical journal (it’s actually called “British Medical Journal”—I kid you not.) It says that there’s no evidence that being an “early to bed and early to rise” kind of person makes you healthy, wealthy OR wise.
This research team is clearly brilliant.
I love sleeping.
In fact, I think I’ll take a nap now.
See? I feel much better. More productive. Ready to tackle the column.
First, I think about whether this clearly brilliant research team has studied the beneficial aspects of procrastination. I troll around the web. I come up with nothing. I wonder if the study means that one can have a perfectly fine life if one never gets up early or meets deadlines.
The study says nothing on that subject.
In fact, the study has a disappointing paragraph noting that while one’s health, wealth and wisdom is not affected by when exactly one wakes or goes to sleep, people who sleep longer die sooner.
I take away the word “brilliant” from my assessment of the research team. I decide that they likely wouldn’t approve of procrastination, either.
And, so finally, I get to work.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Usually she writes about serious subjects. You can email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com, read her daily political blog at VisibleVote08.com, or check out her occasional personal blog and column archive at jennifervanasco.com.