Sloth: The Sin of Indifference

[exhilaration]

Sloth, sloth, sloth... sloth is a sin because it's wasteful. God gives us gifts and we ignore them. I remember my aunt talking to a young relative of mine, telling him solemnly (after praising his wonderful talents) that if he didn't use his gifts, God would take them away. I remember being astounded that she could find ANYTHING she thought it was even remotely appropriate to be negative about on his special day (it was a concert or something I think) and twice as astounded that anyone could believe that. There's nothing in the bible that says that if we don't use our gifts, God will take them away.

Even if we do use our gifts, they might get taken away. Even if we ignore them our entire lives, they might remain. Bad things don't happen to punish people. Sometimes people do bad things, and sometimes bad things happen. One is not necessarily a direct consequence of the other. Of course that's not a vey Christian mentality, that would be more like saying "God never gives us more than we can handle" or maybe a story about Job or etc. But it's MY mentality.

A sloth is someone who lazes around apathetically, ignoring all their potential and preferring not to extend the effort - it's seen as refusing to take joy in the life God has given us. I have never forgotten the quote from Anne of Green Gables, where Anne is sobbing about how she is in the depths of despair, and Marilla says "to despair is to turn your back on God!" As a sickness, I think Christians do recognize depression. But as an emotional state, well, I know there are many who see it as a sin. If you are feeling depressed, you have allowed yourself to feel that way, and it is wrong, because you are misusing the life God meant for joy.

I'm not a fighter. I don't fight to be the best at anything, or disprove anything, or be recognized for anything... and I don't fight myself. I can't. To believe that there is One Great Scorecard in the sky that's keeping track of all my deeds and intentions, right down to whether or not I'm fulfilling my full potential on this earth - I just can't operate that way. I have a hard enough time with a totally manufactured situation like SCHOOL where we're scored on all these things that, in the end, only tell us how well we've followed the system, not how much we actually know or what skills or abilities we're taking away. I can't even begin to describe that a clash that is with my natural way of approaching things - it's weird to liken Christianity with school, but, it's the end of my semester, and I'm feeling that great "ah, now I can relax!" feeling cause I know I don't constantly have the opportunity to fuck everything up, and it's very, very like the moment (or the gradual process) in which I realized that there might actually be LESS to all this God stuff than I had initially been taught.

Of all of the seven sins, Sloth is the most innocent and carries the least consequences (according to Dante, anyway) and on the one hand, I can see why it's a sin just as much as pride and wrath and lust and everything else - cause it hurts you. It hurts you inside not to care for yourself or your surroundings, just like pride can hurt you, just like wrath can hurt you, etc etc. But on the other hand, I have a hard time seeing it as a sin at all. Maybe I'm too much of a control freak. Maybe in my head, my word is LAW. If I don't want to do something, then I WONT, even if I SHOULD, even if it would be better. If a sloth is someone who lazes around... I laze around all the time, damnit, and I LOVE it, because I CAN. I LOVE not being bothered, not being told to get up and go do something, not having busy work shoved at me just so I can't just sit around and relax, not because anything particularly needs to be accomplished... I'm a lot of things, but the distinction here is that I don't love being angry. I don't love being disorganized. I don't love being mean, I don't love being antisocial, I don't love being vain, but MAN do I love being LAZY!

Day Four: Seven Things I Don't Do That I Know I Should

1. Stretch. Okay, so, I think I mention now and again how very UN-stretchy I am. I think I'm just made this way - I've always been on the absurd side of the inflexibility scale. In elementary school we had these fitness tests we had to do, and, while I was never even remotely athletic, I was always right around average. I climbed the rope, did the pull ups, ran the laps, all that, but when it came to the flexibility part, there'd be my classmates who could sit on the floor with their legs out in front of them and just lay down on their knees and be like, what, this is easy! And then there would be the ones who would make the face like it was not easy at all, but they would touch their toes. And then there would be me, who couldn't even get her fingertips to her ankles, let alone her toes. And I was kind of like haha whatever about it at the time, but see, NOW, if I don't stretch my muscles out every day, move my joints around, etc etc, well, they get very tight. And there comes a point where if I'm THAT inflexible, well, then I have a hard time doing certain things. Either it takes longer and is more effort, or I just can't do it at all. Right now... I can't sit on the floor with my legs out in front of me unless I'm leaning back on my hands (or something else.) I CANT lean forward because my muscles are so tight it's like I'm being pushed back. THIS IS BAD.

If I would stretch every day this wouldn't happen, or wouldn't be as bad. I don't want to stretch every fucking day. Sometimes when I wake up I don't want to get out of bed HOURS before I have to leave the house. I don't want to do the same shit day after day after day. I get sick of it, the routine drives me crazy, and it feels so futile because I never actually get MORE flexible, I just don't get LESS flexible. So I very often just don't do it. For no other reason than that I'm LAZY. I CAN do it. I am totally capable of stretching every day. I don't, and it's not too good for me.

2. Eat. I don't like to eat. I do like food, but, I don't really like to eat a meal. I'm hardly ever hungry, and sometimes even if I'm hungry, I STILL don't want to eat. It feels pretty gross to try to eat stuff with no appetite - it's not enjoyable and satisfying, it's like a chore, and I don't like it. So I often find myself thinking, okay, what DO I like to eat? What DOESNT sound disgusting right now? It usually ends up being something with absolutely no nutritional content whatsoever, like... candy that's made entirely of sugar and food coloring. Because I'm well aware that I can't survive on a diet of JELLY BEANS, I do eat other stuff, and I try to find small high-calorie high-flavor things to eat, like an english muffin with almond butter, honey, sliced bananas and avocados and maybe even a sliced egg inside. That's like a tiny sandwich, like smaller than the palm of my hand, but if I ate that, I'd consider myself good for at least half the day, if not the whole day.

Unless I'm feeling lazy. Do I seriously want to slice a banana and an avocado and an egg? And wrap up the other half of the avocado? Not to mention cook an egg? Wash the knife and cutting board? NO, I do not want to do all that! Do I seriously want to leave the house and go pick up something already prepared and eat that? If I can even come up with somethign I want to eat? NO, I do not want to do that either. And I most likely won't. Cause I'm lazy. The way you stay way too skinny is to be too lazy eat. The only way you can be so lazy you don't eat is if you don't get hungry. (and maybe I should have put "people who tell me they're jealous of how skinny I am and tell me they wish THEY could just not eat" on my WRATH list, cause this is not really a good thing here)

3. Call people back. If you call me... I MIGHT call you back. But most likely I won't. If you're inviting me somewhere I don't want to go, or wanting to talk about something I don't want to talk about, or if I'm just plain sick of you and don't want to even think about you... no, I'm not calling you back. Thing is, I know I SHOULD. I know if I called YOU, I'd want YOU to call me back, even if it's just acknowledging that I got the message. So I'll plan to do it for a few days, think about how I should be doing it, plan on doing it when I want to or when I have a chance to, and then after those few days pass... I probably won't call you at all. I'll decide it's just not happening, because I just don't want to do it.

4. Put things away. I never do this. Like, ever. I leave my stuff ALL OVER the place. I know it's not that hard to just put things away - I'm just too lazy to do it. My boyfriend will sometimes go around and pick up after me... or eventually I will get frustrated and spend like half a day putting everything back where it goes. But as for just putting things in their place as soon as I'm done with them... YEAH RIGHT.

5. Laundry. I send my laundry away to be washed for me simply because I'm so lazy I KNOW I will not do it and it will just pile up. I have a lot of clothes, so the problem is not that I will run out of clean clothes, it is that every space I occupy will fill up with dirty clothes. I am well aware that this is unacceptable behavior for a room mate, because no one wants to share a room with someone else's laundry, so, while I was living at school, I just collected all my dirty clothes every few days and sent them to a laundry service (it costs about as much as paying to do your laundry at a coin-op place, so don't get any ideas about me having a lot of money!) and they would come back neatly folded and wrapped in plastic. So you know what sat around my room all year? Yeah. Bags of neatly folded clean clothes. Seriously. Not in the closet. Not in the dresser. Just piled up against the wall, or beside the bed, or wherever. No room mate said anything to me about that being unacceptable, but honestly, I'm a little disgusted with myself that I couldn't even be assed to put my stuff away even when someone else has washed and folded it for me.

Now we have a washer and dryer here, and I don't live anywhere near a laundry service, so... I mean I have done wash once. Since I don't actually have to leave the house to do it, I expect that I might do laundry sometimes but the whole part about putting away the clean clothes and not leaving the dirty clothes all over the place... yeah. Prob not.

6. Honor commitments. For example, I started this meme... quite a while ago, and I'm really slacking on finishing it, aren't I? But I don't really mean that. I was trying to concentrate on school, and trying to spend time with people I care about and doing things I enjoy and sitting around in the computer extending all my mental energy towards thoughtful posts doesn't really fit in with that. But what I DO do is say I will go somewhere or do something and then totally NOT do it. People who have really bad anxiety pull this kind of stuff all the time - they go to do whatever it was and then have like a panic attack or something. I have a lazy attack. I'm not SCARED to go meet so and so at such and such a place. Sometimes I even actually WANT to. It's just that that requires getting up, getting dressed, getting out of the house and sometimes... I am quite honestly just too lazy to do all that. How pathetic is that? And then I wonder why it feels like I don't have any friends

7. Write 'Nuff said on that one I think. I mean it's not like I've been writing much anyway.

Day 1 - Pride. Seven great things about yourself.
Day 2 - Envy. Seven things you lack and covet.
Day 3 - Wrath. Seven things that piss you off.
Day 4 - Sloth. Seven things you neglect to do.
Day 5 - Greed. Seven worldly material desires.
Day 6 - Gluttony. Seven guilty pleasures.
Day 7 - Lust. Seven love secrets.