goals

Her name is Marisol. She is 29, on the cusp of turning 30. She has a  picture-perfect life with an annoyingly hot fiancé—à la Fleabag’s “Arsehole Guy”—and a fabulous New York City apartment straight out of a HBO series. Yes, she graduated from Harvard Law, is a regular at Equinox, and radiates “it-girl” energy. She is so perfect that it is slightly irritating—almost too good to be true.

Right now, I’m supposed to be writing 50 pages on the Cold War, the CIA, and the KGB for my senior thesis in history. These are all things that I am interested in, and I literally need to finish my thesis to graduate. But for whatever reason, as I sit in the dingy stacks of Avery—a place that is beginning to feel like Dante’s depiction of limbo—I can’t bring myself to write this thesis. Instead, I’m writing this column. I’ve been waiting for the start of every half-hour hoping that it will motivate me to get moving. (It hasn’t.) I have 12 hours to send in a completed draft, and now I’m on a Wikipedia binge that began with Barack Obama’s dogs and has evolved into the highest-profile unsolved murders in the U.S.

I, like many others, love satirical comedy. It’s much easier to cope with personal and national failures by laughing at them. Mixed forms of media have taken note of this trend: Late night talk shows are thriving, and Saturday Night Live has more viewers than ever. But isn’t the extent to which our current events are mocked mildly concerning? The humorously horrible headlines, bylines, and tweets can only be smirked at for so long. The constant parodies of our problems, along with inadequate action in attempting to solve them, reveals our heightened feelings of powerlessness. Comic relief for global issues is not a sufficient form of aid—we must begin to take the subjects of our jokes seriously.

It's late. You're up. If you're like me, maybe in your gallery of procrastinatory windows open on your computer, you have a goals list. Here are four goals you should carefully consider, write in your planner with a Mr. Sketch marker, and then totally abandon. 1. Go running. Today I put on sneakers, left my dorm, went to Riverside Drive, and decided the entrance to the park was too far. But you know what? That was way more exercise than I was going to do anyway.more 2. Cook healthy meals. I'm not super religious, but I do believe in God. Particularly a god who put Annie's mac & cheese on the planet. 3. Go to the package center. Seriously, unless you know for a fact that you're expecting a shipment of homemade cookies, just stay home. It's probably just your course books from Amazon. 4. Do all the reading. Why listen to Socrates pretend to be brilliant when this video exists?