My labor has primarily consisted of the periodic guilt feelings that result from procrastination.
Guilt is hard fucking work, and, as far as I can tell, it is the work of the college professor (which might explain why so many Jews and Catholics are in the academy, and people with Puritan lineage, too).
In other news, it’s hard to dislike a dude (The Dude) who will drive 40 minutes to spend 10 minutes helping you move your old sofa from the house to the tree lawn on the last day of his three-day-weekend away from the job he hates and when he actually has other fun plans going on, either for the Garbage Men tomorrow, or for scavengers the day before (Yay scavengers! Good job!).
[Note: I’d have donated the sofa, but I have some experience with Salvation Army and St. Vincent DePaul, and the sofa had some stains and a rip, and they’d have come, looked at it, and refused it. But I still needed to get it out of my house prior to the new sectional arriving, for unlike with appliances, the delivery dudes don’t take the old stuff away. But so I’m glad somebody spirited it away as useful to them, because it was, indeed, a decent sofa. Also worth noting that while I could have asked other more convenient people to help me, when I asked the dude I promised him dinner in exchange, and I asked him in the first place because, well, you have “friends” but you don’t ask “friends” for shit like this, and I helped him carry his old couch out to the tree lawn in the spring…. I didn’t design this to be him driving 40 minutes and then moving a sofa and then driving 40 minutes back – that was his design.]
Was that 10 minutes with the dude also a labor of sorts? Surely. He interrogated me about my date (to which I responded, “Dude, I am not talking to you about this: it is none of your business) and then when we said goodbye he declared his love. (A declaration that cost him nothing, but again, this is a guy who drove 40 minutes to move furniture for me for no reward, so indeed, he does love me, even if he’s impossible, and incapable of committing to an adult relationship, which makes his gestures and feelings less than meaningless, in practical terms.)
So my final labor of the labor day weekend is just that I need to get all my work done – get grant applications done, and prep for teaching and stuff related to research – WORK SHALL BE DONE!!!!
Reassigned Time 2.0 
Wut the fugge is a “tree lawn”?
Tree lawn = the strip between the sidewalk and the street, where in Dr. Crazy’s part of the country it’s usually the city or county that plants trees.
I’ve always maintained that Protestants do guilt better than anyone else. We don’t even need mothers or priests to remind us where we’re screwing up–we’re self-actualized, self-loathing machines. It’s very Foucaultian.
Cool word! I always call it the berm.
Totally agree that it’s an adult person’s responsibility to make his own choices about things like this, BUT it’s always tricky bringing in exes to do boyfriend-type work. I advise against it, based on personal experience. Ask friends or neighbors (strong people, male or female; my girlfriends often volunteer their husbands for such things).
H’Ann, but Foucault was raised Catholic, and he’s all about the Catholicism 🙂 Maybe nobody does guilt better than a non-practicing Catholic 🙂 Ha!