The Artist's Way

At least one student always explains to me—pointedly, in
no uncertain terms—that he or she is a very important and
busy person with duties and obligations that include
reading.
This information is inevitably relayed in a withering tone
that implies I am an idiot child, an artistic flake, unable to
grasp the complexities of an adult’s life. I just listen.
When the rage has been vented, when all the assigned
reading for college courses and jobs has been mentioned, I
point out that I have had jobs and I have gone to college
and that in my experience I had many times wriggled out of
reading for a week due to procrastination. As blocked
creatives, we can be very creative at wriggling out of things.
I ask my class to turn their creativity to wriggling into not
reading.
“But what will we do?” comes next.
Here is a brief list of some things that people do when
they are not reading: