The battle against Oblovmism!

I returned from my tumultous solo trip to California on March 2 with a full agenda in front of me:
1. finish my barely disguised autobiographical short story
2. write a political manifesto advocating the formation of a regional Northern California nationalist politcal party (25 years in the making)
3. work on a business plan for producing and marketing minature SubGenius action figures
4. prepare class plans for another term
5. write a gob of letters
6. and contribute to this blog often

The return of my wife and 1 year and three month old son two days later from Shanghai eclipsed those plans, at least on the surface. "If you have kids, they get all of your Slack," these words from the scriptures of the Church of the SubGenius, certainly ring true. However I discovered that when I did have free time, usually at 6 am or after everyone else was asleep at 11 p.m. the dreaded scourge of OBLOMOVISM had struck again.

Ilya Oblomov was a 19th century Russian nobleman in a novel by Ivan Goncharov. Basically, this guy had lots of plans and good intensions; he was going to educate the serfs on his estates and inplement reforms and go to Western Europe with his friend Schultz but he just couldn't get off his sofa [see picture]. If you look at my sofa you can see a big rut on the left armrest where my head has been. Lenin even complained about the Oblovism of the Russian intelligentsia which I'm sure delayed the revolution for at east 20 years.

And after 17 years here in Japan, at times I am inclined to refer to myself as the Oblomov of Osaka. Oblovism does resemble a kind of lethargic pre-slack - one half of the following equation "A sub-genius has only two kinds of energy, lethargic and hysterical." So, by getting off my couch and writing this entry, I can feel myself shaking off the cobwebs and I can now run around tearing out my hair in sheer panic that I have to go back to work next week.
There's also Lingling to remind me that Dario's diaper needs to be changed. I recommend the actual book, in classic sections everywhere, and I promise to shoot some excerpts into furture log-entries. Cheers!