Working hard is hardly working

To work, I wear high heels every day. I straighten my hair, put on slacks that I have unwrinkled in the dryer. I put in some earrings and curl my eyelashes. And then, the second I get home from work, I peel off the slacks and trade them in for some sweatpants. I take off all my jewelry and put my hair up. In ten seconds flat, I can morph from the professional in slacks to the professional slacker. And oh how I love the latter.

In all honesty, I am somewhat jealous of those “Failure to Launch” type guys who sponge off their parents and laze around all day playing Xbox. Although I wouldn’t play Xbox, I would read, do puzzles, go buy things for our house, write. I would frame pictures and maybe even scrapbook. I would buy lemonade from the kids down the street and stop and chat with the neighbors on a breezy day. I would purchase endless items off eBay that we didn’t really need but I thought was a decent deal.

People always tell me they can’t picture me without a job. I’m such a hard worker and so productive that it just would never happen. Well I can picture it, and the picture is sweet. I would still be productive, just around the house with the chores and fixing things and I would send in poetry more often and read more books.

We call them deadbeats, these people who don’t work for “The Man” and don’t have bills, but perhaps we should call them offbeats instead. They are modern day Henry David Thoreaus, reflecting on simple living and philosophizing the true meaning of life. They march to the beat of their own drums.

Sometimes we collide, me the professional and me the slacker. While I’m working double what I have to and trying to be recognized, my slacker self is saying “go unnoticed and give the Man a nice punch in the gut from me.” Somehow the professional wins out, but only because she’s the one wearing the complete, untorn pants in the relationship. And the slacker wimpers that yet another 40 hours has elapsed from the life that could have been.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. ~Henry David Thoreau