For Those Of You Who Call Me Lazy

For the last two weeks, I've been wearing a pair of cargo pants with the important button missing. Actually, the button isn't even missing, it's sitting right in front of me, next to my laptop; I can just reach it if I slide my left pinkie off the keyboard. The fly zipper is fine so I don't have to devote one hand to a full-time task of preventing indecent exposure, but a zipper can only do so much and every thirty seconds of walking results in a need for readjustment. You would think it'd be tempting to just go and sew the button back on, an enterprise that would take all of two minutes, but then you'd be forgetting how manly, patient and just plain hardworking I am. I am so uncompromisingly hardworking and NOT lazy that I am willing to lift my pants up and rezip the zipper ninety-six times a day just to avoid those easy cop-out two minutes of sewing. This little piggy takes the hard road.

I have strong precedents in this direction. When I still had my previous laptop, an ancient pre-Internet dinosaur that ran on ant and squirrel power and majored in freezing, there was one time when the keyboard really tested my patience. A bunch of keys didn't work no matter what gauge finger you hit them with. The offenders included four letters, among them 's' and 't,' the left Shift key, Backspace, and most irritatingly - the Esc key. The problem was obviously the nuts and bagel bites and milk and cereal that slowly accumulated under the keys after weeks of use. The most popular solution is to do some cleaning, but instead of being the typical lazybones and buying a can of air and a straw and a slave to press the button and two more slaves to aim the nozzle, I put in some extra effort. I held the four letters in the clipboard - pasting and deleting the ones I didn't need, I slowly taught my right pinkie to use the right Shift key, I highlighted and used the Del key instead of Backspace, and God knows what I did for the Esc key. Probably just restarted my computer. When you're in that kind of situation and you're in dire need of the Esc key, it's like living in that silly quote from Windows hell "Press any key to quit or any other key to continue." Except none of my keys worked.

Anyway, this went on for two months. Finally, when I felt I had mastered patience, I ordered my dad to clean the keyboard for me. He did (instantly, of course), and I was back to appearing normal.

This strategy applies to most situations in life. People love saying "Why put off till tomorrow what you can do today?" or sometimes the exact opposite, but they never think "Why don't I just suck it up, and stop making things easy for myself? Why don't I not pay these taxes, and see what happens?" When I see a button missing on my pants, I don't think "eh, I'll fix it later," nor do I think "I better go fix this right now." I don't try to save myself work either way. I think "hey, a button's missing. Let me just pull the old pants up a bit and zip up...there we go, that'll hold for another ten seconds."

If we always do things the easy way, by doing them at the right time, we miss out so much invaluable suffering. And the density of life lessons in suffering exceeds that of in joy by far. If I go and fix my pants right now, I'll learn absolutely nothing from this incident, and I'm not one to waste opportunities to learn.

More examples from my wonderful dictionary:

邮件 - mail

警方一直截查我的邮件。
The police had been intercepting my mails.

我打开了邮件，惊讶地发现了一个打碎的花瓶。
I opened my mail and was surprised to see a broken vase.

一起 - together

那个妓女和逃犯一起被杀死了。
The harlot was killed together with the fugitive.

擅长 - to be good at

他擅长绘画。
He excels in painting.

她擅长绘画。
She is clever at painting.