KAWACHI: On procrastination

College before technology must have been a hell of a lot more productive. Sure, computers make many things in life more convenient — research for an infinite number of subjects and the ability to communicate. It’s a never-ending aid in production and creation. But in its ability to provoke procrastination, computers are a vortex. They have an amazing ability to really get to you. The Internet takes a particular toll, and I have seemed to discover its worst form in the last few weeks.

Netflix. Netflix is the bane of my productivity. You’d think it would be enough for me to keep up with a handful of television shows currently airing. On various days of the week, I’m searching the Internet for the latest episodes as soon as possible, and boy do I have many shows. Not having a TV here at school is a bit of a hassle in that way … although it’s probably for the best.

Netflix, however, is keeping me more than occupied in my TV-deficient state.  Since the company began its online streaming service, it has become a large part of my life. Surprisingly, a lot of very good movies are on their online database. I always seem to stumble across movies that didn’t get much acclaim but are brilliant, nonetheless. But the best part? The TV shows. Seasons upon seasons of a variety of TV shows are right there, at the touch of my fingertips after a few keystrokes and clicks. It’s extremely convenient and all too time-consuming.

In the past three — maybe four — weeks, I’ve watched all seven seasons of “How I Met Your Mother.” I even found the first few episodes of the current eighth season online somewhere else. That was a lot of episodes — about 170, each about 25 minutes each. And I absolutely sped through them, watching episode after episode as often as possible. It became obsessive, but to have them there so conveniently was hard to deny. It’s so easy to click “next” time and time again. How I’ve managed to watch them all so quickly during school is beyond me — luckily, I didn’t have much work this past week, which may explain how I managed to watch the whole of season seven in about two days.  But with the end of that particular endeavor, there now seems to be a hole in my life and procrastination. What will be my next television obsession? What will I now spend hours upon hours watching as I delay reading Virginia Woolf and Sir Edmund Spenser? Should I attempt a great challenge with 11 seasons of “Frasier?” Or something less ambitious, a television show with merely four seasons to fly through?  I’m pretty sure at this rate, I’ll burn myself out — it’s a delicate cycle of movie to TV ratio. You can only handle hearing the same intro and theme song over and over for so long. And, I guess, I probably do need to read my books and write my essays for class.