A few days ago, a friend and I were discussing 'priorities'. Of course, it was a political discussion, spanning such issues as the deep American dependancy on Middle East oil and our attempts at conservation projects on a national and international level. Oh, I could just rant on and on. . .
Later in the day, I happened to be rifling through the refrigerator, when I chanced upon a bottle of Catalina dressing with some, er, seniority. Of course, by 'seniority', I mean it had an expiration date of May 1999. Everyone has a 'junk drawer', or 'catch all shelf', or some other form of black hole that just tends to accumulate the things we think are too usefull to throw away, but not important enough to organize or find a proper place for. Like a junk drawer, this particular shelf on my 'fridge door just happened to contain a bottle of salad dressing that was four months older than my daughter, and well on the way to developing some rather intricate language skills as it establishes its territorial boundries with the other condiments.
We all prioritize, whether consciously or not, every day. We decide to hit the snooze button rather than getting up early, we decide to take a shower and cram a cereal bar rather than waste the time on waffles and eggs, and we decide which route is the best to get to work after all that procrastination. Perhaps, then, we can truly say that prioritization is synonymous with procrastination. We can't be bothered to sort out our junk drawers, and I can't spare the ten seconds it would take me to pick up that bottle and toss it into the garbage can right next to the refrigerator. Of course, that doesn't explain why it moved across two states with us, but let's deal with one mental illness at a time. We'll call this one 'procrastiprioritizing'.
In recent news, President Bush met with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia concerning the problem of supply issues for American oil consumption. The United States consumes somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 billion gallons (~500 billion liters) of gasoline a year. One would think that all eyes would be on methods of conservation and technological developments to reduce our dependancy. Rather, the President is reviewing Saudi plans to increase the production of oil by 1.5 million barrels a day. Why? It's simply easier, and lower oil prices improve his approval rating.
As a nation, we are rather wasteful, and procrastiprioritizing is at the very heart of the matter. The average american produces 3.5 pounds of garbage a day and we consume about 25% of the world's petrolium, though we only total about 4% of the world's population. We throw things away rather than sorting and recycling because it takes less time. We burn gasoline because we absolutely have to race to work at twice the speed of sense, when we could have simply left a bit earlier and driven slower and safer. No, that would mean not using the snooze alarm. Who cares if we careen off the road while shaving with one hand and talking on our cel phone with the other? We got to sleep in and the state's budget doesn't allow for enough police to patrol the roads.
Humans are creatures of habit, falling into patterns as hard to break as any diamond. Until time's end, we continue putting off until whenever that which we should have done six years ago. I could go on, but I have to break up a border skirmish between the salad dressing and the mayonaise.
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