Recidivism

Noun. Repeated or habitual relapse, as into crime.

I am not completely clear as to why this word has been rattling around my brain for the last few days. The best I can guess is that they used the word in one of the many episodes of The West Wing I have been watching over the last few weeks, and it has gotten stuck.

Why have I been watching The West Wing, (aside from the fact that it is one of my favorite television shows, ever, and that I feel the need, about once a year, to re-watch the entirety of the 7 season in a short span of time)? Well, in the transition from full-time employee and part-time college student to full-time college student has left me with time on my hands. Closing out my classes for this semester went from something I did in my spare time to something that I could do before lunch, leaving me with no pressing matters to which I must attend. I have enjoyed doing weekly grocery shopping, and cooking more, and baking bread. All of the fun tools that had been merely occupying space in the kitchen have been drafted into more active use. I think I am going to try making pasta from scratch this week. But I am the type of person that needs to have something else going on while doing domestic things, so I run a season of The West Wing while I am measuring ingredients or waiting for dough to rise.

I finished season 6 this morning. I will start season 7 very likely once I finish lunch.

But I shouldn't. What I should do is buckle down and write the 10-page paper that is due at the end of next week. It is, in fact, the last thing I need to do for the semester, other than attend my last two nights of class this week. Going from working 40 hours, with a couple hours of commuting, plus six hours of class each week, to only having six hours of class each week has allowed me to backslide into that favorite of collegiate pass times: procrastination. (Noun. The act of putting of until another day or time; defer; delay.)

I should clarify: I have not been sitting around baking bread and watching The West Wing to the exclusion of productive work. I wrote another paper last week (8 pages on invocation in the poetry of Hilda Doolittle.) I just have another one to go (10 pages on the use of poetry in the works of classical Jewish philosophers, a topic that I thought would be a nice bridge tying my major and my minor, but is now just making me want to drink.) I'm not having as much fun with it as I would have thought.

I could just watch season 7, and be done with the entire series, having no other episodes to distract me. But there is always watching the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or all of the Harry Potter movies. And I haven't watch all of the BBC's "A History of Britain", hosted by Simon Schama, in a while...