Putting out fires

Yesterday I slept all day while waiting for the mail. At seven in the morning, the tracking for the overnight package said it had been delivered but nothing had come! I didn't drive to Los Angeles with my dad to pick up my mom from work because I wanted to wait at home. The cds my brother sent didn't arrive until around two in the afternoon. I must have been knocked out then because I didn't hear the doorbell and the postman just left it in the mailbox. I was relieved that they repaired my system just fine and everything is back to normal. I need to start backing up my work to spare myself a lot of stress.

Is it part of human nature to slip into apathy so effortlessly? Despite having a decent workload for the break I still haven't sit down and started on anything. All feelings of urgency normally present at school have been sufficiently defused so that I now lay in bed all day with my mind landing nowhere long enough to have a substantial idea. It feels taxing enough to try to parse these thoughts into words here, much less study the failings of the Chinese republic in the 1910s and 1920s and the development of socialist thinking. Somehow I feel I've been conditioned into managing life from crisis to crisis, from one review to the next, from midterms to finals. Nothing can seem pressing enough until it has reached crisis proportions. That would explain all the last-minute cramming and all-night studio production. I'm tempted to think the lulls in between the storms of work are just periods of recovery and should be forgiven as such, but they do perpetuate an unhealthy cycle of work ethic. 

A related issue is how some people feel the need to stir up trouble, whether consciously or otherwise, to add some new excitement to their lives. Everyone knows at least one person like that, the friend who has some new drama every other week. I'd say I do prefer this mental stasis over that.

Perhaps it is a primal vestige from our human evolution. How can one plan so far into the future when one's existence is uninsured? We might not fear getting mauled by wolves in the search of our next meal but the logic persists that mental processes would be better utilized for what's at hand. What a weak excuse. How easy it is to attribute my own indolence to some innate and insurmountable cause.