These slouches are getting worse by the day.

I keep forgetting halfway through class to keep counting. I had to trash the results from several days since they were incomplete.

I do want to make clear though that I don't exactly object to the idea of slacking off in class on any ethical grounds; what I object to is the blatant scorn for the teacher and minority of students who are actively trying to enjoy the class that slacking off in so blatant a fashion as using a PSP, DS, or mobile phone reveals. It's like regifting. We all regift, but we don't tell the recipient when we do it.

Having said that, I, of course, am not one of those people actively trying to enjoy the lesson. I let my mind wander from academic matters all the time in class. But in any given class there’s bound to be at least one person who enrolled, not because he or she thought it would require a minimum of effort (the primary criterion by which I determine which classes to join), but because he or she actually thought it seemed interesting. Those are the people I feel bad for. Not myself.

Nonetheless, I slack off just as much as the next guy. What makes me better and more ethical than the rest of you louses, however, is that you can’t tell when I’m slacking off. I play mental games during class like counting backwards from 1000 by threes, counting how many people are using mobile phones, doing rough estimates of how much SP I’d need to fully farm a pure STR glaive character with maximum grasswalk, fire imbue, and heuksal skills, imagining Christina Hendricks as a catgirl chambermaid with glasses, smirking while thinking about the fact that I have a symmetrical 35Mbps connection, picking at my cuticles, trying to write kanji I’m on the verge of forgetting over and over using my finger on the desk, cracking my neck, thinking about rDNS, trying to mentally paint pictures of various national flags, trying to remember all the U.S. presidents, trying to name all 50 U.S. states, trying to name every province of China and its capital, trying to hide my bleeding cuticles, naming every Japanese prefecture from north to south, trying to name every country in a continent of my choosing, drawing a mental map of the trade winds or tectonic plates, thinking about what’s on TV tonight, and looking at my digital watch, Benoit Garibaldi, exactly when the minute changes and then attempting to count precisely 60 seconds before looking at him again. I can do all of these things relatively discretely. You cannot play with a mobile phone without it being visible. The key to slacking off while still appearing like an earnest sort of person is to enjoy yourself primarily by using the vivid imagination you’ve developed by playing Magic: The Gathering, Angband, and reading R.L. Stine books when you were a kid.

Abstract here.