Friday, July 1, 2011

Things I should have done a long time ago

So yesterday I purchased a new bed. Queen size, pillow-top, the works. It's pretty sweet, but that's not important right now.

What's amazing is that I put up with my double bed for so many years. I bought a double instead of a queen because once upon a time, when I first moved to these shores, I was staying in a tiny room. I wanted the length of a queen - the double bed was 6 feet long, which would fit me as long as my head was within about half an inch of the top edge of the bed. Which, as you can imagine, is not exactly where one typically tends to place one's head on a pillow.

The reason I got the smaller bed was actually because I couldn't afford the extra width. My desk was jammed right next to my bed, and the extra four inches was in fact the entire distance that my desk chair could move in or out. Deciding that I was going to spend more hours at my desk than my bed (and probably being right), I went for the chair space.

The bed also had numerous other quirks. Some of the sheets I had were for a queen bed, and hence kept getting pulled off the bed in the night. They always managed to bunch up in a ball somewhere underneath my lower back, which was convenient, since the mild back pain would let me know where to find them.

The reality, dear reader, is that I would/could/should have replaced my bed years ago. I was only in my tiny apartment for two years, and then in places that would support a bigger bed. I easily blew the cost of the new bed on all sorts of stupid junk.

"Sensible" procrastination (if there exists such a thing) involves doing something really fun now and putting off something necessary but unpleasant. The worst kind of stupid hyperbolic discounting is putting off something that will bring long-lasting benefit, while instead doing something that's not even that fun. Like, you know, wasting months of my life on the internet instead of buying a new bed.

I leave it to the imagination of the reader how many years of poor decisions this has constituted, and how many of those I can claim the fig leaf of income constraints versus pure procrastination.

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