I will stop procrastinating...tomorrow

I like to consider myself a responsible person. However, I am about as irresponsible as possible while still managing to turn my work in on time. Why is that, you may ask? The answer is simple; I am a victim of the "student's curse," the art of procrastination.

I call it an art because there are several ways one can procrastinate, if you don’t believe me ask Hamlet! Apart from incessant rants and endless tirades thinking about the task he has to carry out, he also manages to set up a play in order to confirm his suspicions, show his somewhat mixed feelings to the woman he loves, kill her father, enrage her brother and kill his mother. All for the sake of procrastination. Ingenious.

However, as I write this mere hours before it is due, I cannot help but wonder whether all procrastinators leave things until the last minute because maybe, in some level of our subconscious, we enjoy the rush of knowing time is running out and there is still work to be done. Or maybe we are masochists who enjoy doing other things while thinking about what we should be doing, yet continue to do whatever it is that is somehow impeding us from completing our task.  

The question we must ask ourselves is what do we get from procrastination? Is there a reason we do it time and time again? Doesn't it often result in increasing levels of stress, lack of sleep, and self chastising for not having finished it before? It does, yet we decide to change our ways some other day, we have more important things to do at the moment. Or do we?

To be or not to be...a murderer

Our society is shaped in such a way that kids grow up hearing about violence on a pretty regular basis, and there is always the question of whether this de-sensitizes us from the reality of things. In this same way, Hamlet is living in an extremely violent world. Those were times where dying in battle was heroic, and murdering for revenge heroic.

As I listened to the podcast of the inmates acting Hamlet and interpreting the characters and the plot of the play, one of them caught my attention. Danny Waller, who played the ghost, talked about how interpreting that character had somehow brought him closer to the man he had murdered. "I took a man's life. And I felt he was talking to me through that. That he wanted me to know what I put him through."

Hearing this made me think about a documentary we watched in Macroeconomics class a couple of weeks ago, where they interviewed "Popeye", Pablo Escobar's main hitman and right hand. This man admitted to participating in the murder of over 250 people and stated that when they killed Pablo Escobar, who he followed for years and for whom he even killed his own girlfriend, he "did not cry because [his] soul is dead." Does this de-sensitization reach the point of ridding us of conscience? Of morals?

Can reading and performing Hamlet have that big an effect on people who have already done so much wrong? Do these people really change? Is there really anything to change or was it simply a one-time thing, a momentary slip up that changed their lives? Do they really repent or is that part of them that momentarily took over still looming somewhere in the back of their mind, waiting to attack again?

Between Action and Inaction

Despite claiming that he was not meant to be prince Hamlet, J. Alfred Prufrock demonstrates, throughout his so called "love song", that he is, in fact, much worse.

Both characters start out with the same uncertain and dubious state of mind. They both have things they have to do, yet are afraid to do them, just as Prufrock demonstrates when he says "And indeed there will be time to wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” "(Line 38). Prufrock has to take his relationship with the girl he fancies to the next level, yet he does not have the courage to do so. Meanwhile, Hamlet is presented with proof that his uncle murdered his father and is asked to seek revenge, yet he decides to look for more evidence before deciding to do anything. They are both avoiding the task they have to complete, and are choosing to over-analyze every aspect of their mission instead. They are both cowards.

Although there is a shift in both Hamlet and Prufrock as their stories continue, the difference between them is that Hamlet finally decided to take action, while Prufrock is stuck wallowing in self pity. Hamlet decides to "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action" (Act III Scene II Line 17) and actually start to do something about the precarious situation he finds himself in. Even though he wavers at first, he ends up setting out to do as he originally planned, throwing all thoughts regarding consequences away. On the other hand, Prufrock ends his song contemplating death and the imminent failure of the plan he always thought of but never carried out. Hamlet dies having accomplished his objective, and all Prufrock does is think.

Prufrock denies that he is like Hamlet, but what he does not realize is that his prolonged thoughts on action lead to inaction, which is exactly what he wants to avoid. Indecision makes away with him and leaves him thinking about what could have been.  Hamlet ends up finding himself, while Prufrock only gets lost in his own vast universe.