by Justin Morton
Design Editor
There was once a man named Hank Toms who lived on an empty, desolate island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He was a very lonely individual. So lonely, in fact, that he had become friends with the most uninteresting of objects— Seashell and Rock.
One day, while studying the almanac left to him by his father, he read that the moon would soon be positioned in such a way that the sea’s currents would shift in a direction that would take him far from the island to a place where he could find companionship.
This was a big day for Hank, one that he had assumed would never come for him, so he was unprepared. He had only days to build a raft out of materials not readily at hand.
It is at this point in the story that we can sympathize with our friend, the protagonist, Hank. Whether it be the cliché five-paragraph essay or the 12-page exegetical paper that requires a million sources (thanks, Matt Benson), we, as college students, know what it feels like to have something important to do within a several-day span.
Hank began to diligently work on the raft that would carry him to his destination with ease and a marginal amount of safety. To begin, he fashioned a rock and log into a massive axe of sorts. With this Thor-like axe, he then cut down coconut trees for the base of his raft. While chopping at one tree in particular, a coconut fell from the top and landed right beside Hank.
Hank looked down at it and continued to chop at the tree before him when he heard a voice from beside him say, “Hey.” Hank looked around, saw that no person was around and kept chopping at the tree.
He was almost all the way through the tree when he heard the same voice chime in, “Hey, look down here.” Hank’s eyes shot immediately down, and he realized that the voice was coming from the coconut. After an introductory conversation where Hank learned that the coconut’s name was, oddly enough, Coconut, he picked up Coconut and hurried home to introduce him to Seashell and Rock.
Once again, we can relate to the hero of our story. Hopefully, we can only relate to him in way of being distracted from his important task at hand and not the fact that he is crazy enough to talk to inanimate objects.
Procrastination. We all do it and almost no one benefits from it. Sure, it’s fun for all of like three seconds, but then you realize that you have something almost life-threateningly important to do and the fun dies in an instant. Now, for some of us, procrastinating is something we can control to a point where we become super-productive afterward, but that’s a rare few of us.
As Hank watched the sun rise in place of the moon that caused the currents to shift in his favor, his eyes moved to the unfinished raft that he had tried to finish in a rush before the currents shifted back, and said to rock, seashell and coconut, “Guys, it looks like I’m going to be here for a while.”
Fortunately, we aren’t in the same boat as Hank, but we can still benefit from the moral of the story, procrastinating is bad. The End.