This Week’s Strip: “Pro-crastinators”
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 by Jen Sorensen
It occurred to me during a recent bout of procrastination that putting off work can sometimes be more laborious than the work itself. So why not commodify it? I’m not sure this cartoon has any deeper significance beyond the absurdity of outsourcing slacking, but if you find it to be a profound statement on globalization, feel free to let me know.
Speaking of procrastination, I finally finished reading
Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
by Tom Lutz. (For some reason, my cartooning colleagues at SPX found it endlessly amusing that I was reading this book, perhaps because I tended to sleep later than everyone else.) Doing Nothing serves as a sort of history of American counterculture, as seen through various figures’ work ethics (or lack thereof). Some of our greatest Americans were slackers, you know. Benjamin Franklin was a lush who loved to take “air baths” in which he lay naked on his bed for an hour a day. History is filled with incarnations of the slacker, as seen in The Lounger’s Miscellany; or the Lucubrations of Abel Slug, Esq., a British fortnightly which ran for twenty issues from 1788-1789. Interestingly, many self-professed idlers were in fact workaholics and vice-versa; many of us, myself included, find both ways of being tugging at us — the result usually entailing some amount of work and some amount of Youtube.
