It's funny how those stairs would have been a deal breaker for me a few years ago--there was no way I was going to be able to haul myself up and down every single day. If I did take a walk-up, I would have made any excuse in the whole world to just stay in my apartment and slowly sink into the couch until I become one with the spare change and melting m&ms that had fallen behind the cushions. In fact, that is exactly what happened, the last time I lived on the top floor of a three-story building. I thought I remembered what air and grass and trees and sidewalks were like, but was content to leave them as happy memories, rather than daily experiences. Part of that was laziness--I will never deny that I am a lazy person, no matter what size I am.
The fat and lazy cliché has always made me angry. Just because I'm fat doesn't mean I am a lazy sack of good for nothing, ----- . And just because I am a lazy sack of good-for-nothing, on occasion, that is not the reason I am fat. You can just put that out of your mind right now. I am no longer fat; I am still as lazy as the day is long. I should hire myself out on a cliché-busting tour, a mind-broadening circus that will teach the ignorant public a thing or too about lazy (ha!) generalizations. Will it open their minds? Will it change attitudes and adjust opinions? Can I be carried around on the back of a pony or will I have to walk in this parade? These are important questions.
My laziness is not something I am happy with, though. It is not something I revel in and enjoy. I dislike the fact that it is so hard to get motivated, like pushing through a wall of congealing gravy, like fighting my way up from the murky bottom of a swamp full of jelly, like trying to heave out from under a granite block that is pinning me to an earth on which the gravity has been turned to 11. It sometimes feels impossible, daunting, impossibly daunting to force myself to take care of things, when it is so much easier to just click on links and blink slowly at the television or nap. It sounds like depression--and it's much worse, when I'm depressed--but it's pretty much with me all the time, a wretched character flaw, a moral failing.
God, just do what you have to do and shut up, you say, and I try, and sometimes I do, and then I find myself sliding back into ennui and it is an effort to get myself moving again, crank up the engine and get to getting. It makes me tired. I hate it.
Being lazy almost meant that I didn't take this apartment--it seemed difficult and wretched, the idea of writing out my budget and making sure I could afford the increase in rent and still keep saving and putting aside cash for taxes. Which is very tragic of me. And yet, somehow, I survived the task. Now I have to figure out how to survive packing up all my crap and moving it again. I am not sure if it is laziness or practicality, this overwhelming urge I have to toss absolutely everything except my books and start totally fresh. Clean slate! Carefully-chosen furniture not from IKEA! Not having to drag a seven hundred pound dresser up the stairs! It all sounds good and lazy to me.
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