Anyway, so the past few months of quarantine have brought out one of my natural abilities: creative procrastination! Many procrastinate by doing productive things, like working on their novel to avoid homework, or cleaning the house to avoid doing the taxes. That's cute. Many procrastinate by doing pointless things, like watching TV, playing video games, or scrolling through social media. I've done that. But I have a particular type of procrastination that is productive and pointless at the same time. I create things that have no purpose. I bring into this world things that no one asked for, and no one wants.
Some of the procrastination projects I do, despite themselves, have brought some positivity into my life, so I thought I'd document them on the chance that they'd inspire someone. And put them in a NUMBERED LIST ooooohhh
1. Plan a trip
"Oh but I can't afford to travel" yeah, neither can I. You're not planning a trip for actual real life. That would be PROPER productivity. What you're doing is planning your dream vacation, or a vacation that you think would be cool.
I've been calling mine the Great Map, and I'm working on The Perfect American Road Trip. Google Maps has a feature called "My Places" and within it you can make your own maps with as many stops as you want, which you can color-code, add notes and pictures, categorize through symbols, and sort into up to 10 layers. This allows me to organize all the hot spots.
Where do I get the ideas of where to travel? Well, I do online research. I started by combing through TripAdvisor, but I quickly realized that a more fun place to look is the website Atlas Obscura, which specializes in travel spots that are weird, less known, or off the beaten path. By looking through those, I get to find places I never would have heard of otherwise. I am obviously not sponsored by Atlas Obscura because who would sponsor me, but I'd like to think that if I were famous, they would sponsor me.
For some people, this activity might be depressing because it just keeps reminding you that you can't afford to take time off and pay for this awesome trip. But I like to take comfort in the concept that all experience is a sensory reflection of your surroundings, and in that sense, viewing and hearing footage of a place, plus researching its background and imagining what it'd be like to go there can be almost as rewarding as the experience itself.
The research, however, can actually lead to positive results. I like to imagine that someday, I'll have the time and money for a proper road trip, and on that day, my map will come in handy. No, I can't stay in the $200 a night haunted hotel or hit every obscure park, but it turns out there's a lot of awesome places that are free and easy to access, and that gives me hope that fun experiences could be in my future. Some are even close to home, which means that day trips (whenever quarantine ends) are also possible. And researching places can sometimes lead to experiences that can be done at home- like if a place you read about teaches you about a piece of history you never knew about, and you decide to start reading books about it. Or if you learn about a super cool art installation and it inspires you to look into that art movement. Or if you learn about the food traditions specific to a far-off place and then find out that the recipe is easy to make or that you can order delivery of that food.
Anyway. I love doing the Great Map, and I hope it inspires other people to do similar stuff.
2. Make a collage
I actually got the inspiration for this from my younger self, who did this a lot. Basically, if you have old newspapers and magazines or other colorful papers that you can cut up, this can be fun. If you enjoy coming up with artistic ideas, certainly create a beautiful image through collage-work- there's a long art historical tradition of collage being a fine art form. But if the thought of creating an original image is overwhelming, you can still make something pretty that has a fun process. Pick a theme or a color, and comb through the magazines looking for examples of that. In my case, I picked "rainbow" and I looked for any image that heavily featured one of the colors of the rainbow. I cut out everything I found, then sorted them by color, and then I glued them in rainbow order on a long strip of paper. The result is a beautiful rainbow collage that, although it's super simple to make, looks really nice and is filled with lovely images. You can pick themes like "eyes" which would be delightfully creepy, or "foods" if you like looking at food, or "beautiful people". Whatever it is, you basically get to piggyback off other people's creative work to make your own, which as I say it sounds like cheating, but it's not like you're selling this or submitting it for a grade, and found-object art/sampling is a whole tradition anyway.
3. Go through your old papers
This can get suspiciously close to cleaning, but still wastes a large amount of time. I ended up cleaning my room by accident in order to do this procrastination activity, but don't worry, I still wasted my life LOL.
Anyway, if you're anything like me, you have piles and piles of papers all around your room and/or entire living space. Old assignments, important documents, mail, birthday cards, doodles, etc. I literally had every single binder from middle and high school piled in my closet, still filled to the brim with all my old homework. Finally, I decided to sort through them. Why? Because sorting is fun. It capitalizes on the human instinct to archive without overwhelming the human fear of finality.
When you go through your old papers, you get to toss massive amounts of paper into the recycling, which is super fun, because you finally realize, "Oh! I don't need every single one of my old algebra worksheets!" You also get to have a fun trip down memory lane as you rediscover papers you forgot about that bring up memories of your past self.
What I ended up doing: once I sorted out all the garbage and filed the actually important papers that I found (yikes, I am seriously a mess of a person), I turned the "fond memory" papers into scrapbooks of a sort. I took all of the empty binders (those that hadn't been completely obliterated) and filed in all the papers, taping the small scraps onto the backs of others, and hole-punching those that weren't already prepped for the binder. Too-big papers got put into boxes or folders. Now, this requires a lot of tape/glue, a three-hole punch, and several functional binders or file folders, so if you don't have those or don't want to buy them, this may not be the approach for you. But you CAN sort the papers chronologically or by subject and put them into boxes or drawers for later perusal whenever you want to check out cute stuff from your past.
4. Catalogue recipes
I assume you can apply this technique to things other than recipes, but recipes are the most relevant to my life. Basically, I noticed that I have several cookbooks, a whole bunch of food magazines, and a ridiculous amount of bookmarked recipe links, and yet I find myself not knowing what to make for dinner quite often. So I decided to do the obvious: catalogue the recipes.
What I wanted was some sort of computer program that would let me input all the recipes with data about their ingredients and categories, and then I'd be able to sort them at a later date. But I have no programming experience and I certainly didn't want to pay for a program or make my poor dad/sister/friends who like computers do my work for me. Therefore, I decided to make a side-blog where I could post each recipe, tagged with ingredients, and with information in the post about what kind of food it was and where to find the recipe. I spent a few weeks cataloguing all my recipes, and then I created meal plans so that I could go grocery shopping for a concise set of ingredients and have recipes ready for all of them that overlapped well. Also, when I run out of ideas for dinner, I can look in the fridge and then search by ingredient in the catalogue. I know there is already a website that finds recipes in this way, but mine is tailor-made for my specific tastes, because it's only recipes that I think sound good. Plus, now I can always remember where any particular recipe is, because I have it documented where I found it.
5. Advanced list making
This is my most common and most useless procrastination activity. As a child, I was enamored with the game Scattergories, where everyone's given a list of categories and one letter, and they all have to come up with an example of each category starting with that letter in a certain amount of time. I dominated at this game, and as I grew older, I enjoyed manufacturing my own versions in my spare time. I did discover the Scattergories app, which I had to delete because it took over my life, and my dad created an Alexa app called "Game of Lists" which functions as a similar game. But my own versions were a bit more flexible.
The nice thing about listing is that I can do it in my head to avoid dark thoughts or anxiety spirals during showers, falling asleep, or on long car rides. I'll think, "time to list 100 foods starting with b" and that'll occupy the next couple minutes. Within a few years, I created a mnemonic device to remember some basic list categories for easy listing on the go, but there are variations you can create on this theme. List foods that start with B... but only ones you like. Foods that start with B... that you remember being featured in books. List foods that start with B... which are under four letters long.
Some lists CAN be useful. Listing all the songs I know allows me to sort which ones I like and want to put in playlists. Listing all movies I remember from childhood might inspire a fun movie night. Mostly, though, the lists are excellent procrastination.
6. Moodboards and playlists
I put these two together because they're a similar idea, kind of like the collage above: combining the creative works of others to make something curated for your tastes. Playlists are fairly common- pick a theme and create a list of songs that evokes that theme. I create playlists for each month that evoke the mood of the particular season. You might create playlists for your favorite book characters, your own books, holidays, people you know, extremely specific moods, memories, etc.
"Moodboard," as far as I know, is a term that emerged from Pinterest or Tumblr or some such. Essentially, it's a collection of images that evokes a certain aesthetic. Like the visual version of a playlist. You can scour websites to find various pictures that you like, then cobble them together to create aesthetics for any particular mood or theme. Commonly, writers make them for their works in progress. The important thing to remember is to either keep these for yourself and friends to look at, or to properly credit the original artists/photographers. Making moodboards can be very fun and easy and you can even just combine pictures that have no connection beyond being cool and then try to put together a story or theme based on the pictures.
7. Plan a food tour
This is pretty similar to #1, and like #1, it can lead to real-world benefits. I actually held a food tour on my birthday last year, and I was going to do one again this year because it was so successful, but obviously that isn't happening. What I did was make another one of those handy Google Maps things, but this time, I mapped restaurants. Because I live close to New York City, I looked for ones in the city, but you can pick any place for a food tour- even if you don't live near there, it can be a fun waste of time to imagine about it.
There are plenty of blogs and websites out there full of restaurant reviews and lists of "best foods in the city." I actually went through this website's collection of best foods in the city- they had articles for best pizza, best cheesecake, best tacos, etc. Some were obviously absurdly expensive, but they're still fun to map out and read about. And some are pleasant surprises that I hope to check out someday (like the $1.25 pumpkin bao in Chinatown... that sounds so good and affordable!).
The procrastination and imagining finally came in handy when it came time to plan my 23rd birthday, and I said screw it, what I want most of all is delicious food. I picked four restaurants that were relatively close to each other, checked the menus online and decided on items that fit within the budget, then paid for me and my friends to get one thing at each place. We pretended to be food critics and wrote reviews for all the food. In case you're wondering, we ended up trying vegetarian sushi at Beyond Sushi, khachapuri (Georgian cheesy bread) at Oda House, bubble waffles filled with ice cream at Egloo, and finally my favorite Neapolitan pizza with a side of burrata at Eataly Downtown. Due to my map research skills from above, I also found fun places to stop along the way to check out non-food stuff. The day was a bit expensive but it was my birthday and there are absolutely ways to do it cheaper (I just really wanted that pizza...); in fact I made a few more food tours on later dates that were much more affordable, if still a bit of a treat.
8. Make characters sing songs
This one is the most menial and silliest of the tasks, I think. Have you ever seen those videos where Obama sings the lyrics to "Sexy and I Know It" and stuff like that? Well, they got me thinking. If you have access to a database of transcripts, plus videos and a video editing program, you can make anyone sing anything, provided that there's enough footage. So I decided to edit the characters of the TV show Frasier singing "Truth Hurts" by Lizzo and "All Star" by Smash Mouth. Yes, these videos exist. I might share them online sometimes. It is hard to tell at this point whether that would be a good idea. Basically, I downloaded the transcripts of all the Frasier episodes, which are available at a fan-made website, and put them all into a large Word file, where I was able to search key words and phrases to piece together the lyrics. I then took my dad's collection of Frasier videos and started picking out clips and editing them, which was an extremely precise and painstaking process, but totally worth it to hear Frasier singing Lizzo.
Anyway. As usual, I rambled on a LOT about each of these topics. But I did want to share because I've been having fun with them. Believe it or not, in addition to this stuff, I've done a lot of actual work in quarantine- OK, mostly emotional work, because my therapy is closed, and personal stuff that I won't share, but yeah. I have actually gotten back to schoolwork and stuff, though. Still, there are plenty of hours in the day, and with my workplace being closed for quarantine (and now, summer vacation, because it's a school), there's even more hours. And what better to fill them with than
Thanks for reading! Or for not reading, as the case may be. See you whenever I update again!
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