JAPAN (Koka) - The Art of Procrastinating and Memories

18 days left in my contract as Coordinator of International Relations for this town. 18 days left in which I have an apartment to live in. You would think that at this point, I would have my packing completed, plane tickets to Thailand reserved and fundamental itinerary through Asia sketched out to a fair degree of detail, right?

That is, of course, unless you actually know me.

Back in my college days, I raised the art of procrastination to a high art form. I was legendary. To this day, a plaque still hangs in the dean's office commerating my achievements in not completing my assignments on time.

One of my fondest memories from my college days is of heading to Dean Lieber's office one beautiful spring day during the last couple of weeks of my senior year (Heading to the dean's office to ask for extensions on my papers was a finals period ritual that I put myself through every semester after my freshman year).

I walked into the office with my best apologetic face on, feeling genuinely ashamed of myself and dreading Dean Lieber's look of "Not again."

Instead, Dean Lieber appeared at the door of his office with a big friendly smile on his face and said, "Hey Tatsu, I've been expecting you. Come in, have a seat." He then called out to his secretary in the reception area and said, "Go ahead and bring it on in."

The secretary entered the office a moment later with a big tray of cookies and two cups of juice.

"This is the last time you're ever going to come to my office asking for extensions...and you've been my best customer," explained Dean Lieber, "We've got to celebrate!"

I was thoroughly confused as to how to react -- on the one hand, happy for Dean Lieber's thoughtfulness and on other, wanting desperately to find a rock to crawl under and die. But good ole Dean Lieber was in a celebrating mood. Handing me a cup of juice and raising his own cup in the air, he proposed a toast:

"To the real world...where there are no extensions."

Anyway, I've got some boxes here to fill up with my crap. But before I do, here are some blast from the past links to some of the fruits of my procrastinating energies in college, compliments of the Wayback Machine (a cool site that takes periodic snapshots of the internet to preserve what would otherwise be lost to the wacky and ever changing nature of the world wide web).

* An essay on my hair I wrote when I should have been working on a paper analyzing the roots of the war in the Pacific during World War II.

* Quite possibly the funniest joke I have ever heard in my life. Oddly, I believe I may be the only person to have ever taken the time to sit down and write it all out (when I was supposed to be writing a paper on gender issues during the Civil War). It's best to actually hear it told, but if you take the time to read it carefully to the end, the punchline has close to the same impact. Be careful -- you may wet your pants.