When I was in high school, the number one thing my mother told me was that I am so lazy. Lazy to do the dishes. Lazy to clean my room. Lazy to walk the dogs, mow the lawn, etc.
I never really thought about my laziness too deeply until recently, when I moved back in with her, after two and a half years of bouncing around San Diego and working at a job that hardly paid me enough to survive. It’s so funny that she still calls me lazy. I really am but I use it to my advantage.
My mama is actually the person I learned it from the best. She has this way of being utterly lazy but twisting it toward everybody around her so she can slouch on the couch watching American Idol while we all frantically vacuum and do the dishes to make up for it. I think it’s genius, really. Maybe the kind of power only a mother can have.
It reminds me of the time when I was still in grade-school and she would scream “DONNA!” from another room and I would walk over to her bedroom and ask “yes?”
“Go get me a glass of water,” she would say.
All that effort in getting my attention and waiting for me to mosey on out of my room toward hers to get her a glass of water possibly took double the time for her to simply get it herself. She was just sitting so comfortably in her King-size bed to want to move. I, of course, never said “no.”
Here are some ways being lazy has helped me:
When I lose the remote control and don’t feel like looking for it, I read a book.
When I’m lying in my bed, wearing my pajamas, staring at the ceiling and friends call me up to come out and about, I say “I can’t; got work tomorrow … early.” What I really mean is, “I don’t want to get dressed and put make-up on and blah blah blah.”
This helps me get some sleep in case I actually do have to work early, and possibly saves me money for the night.
When someone asks me a question, and I’m too lazy to think up an extensive response, I simply answer with a few words. This helps me seem witty.
When my friends and I make plans to do something, we usually decide to take one car where I’m definitely too lazy to be the driver. I rely on my car being an absolute mess to turn people off from getting in my vehicle. This helps me because I’m too lazy to clean it out.
Yes, laziness can sure have it’s advantages. It’s not all bad. It helped me develop patience, for instance. Not doing or getting something right away made me wait for it, forcing me to acquire patience.
Having to use the bathroom but being too lazy to get out of bed helped me wake up easier in the morning because by then, I wouldn’t be able to hold it anymore.
