The art of maximizing lounge time is a finely-tuned one. It has taken me years of naps, a low quality YouTube video that sounds vaguely like the ocean, many little cups of sweet potato fries, and the password to my parent’s Netflix account to perfect. The first step is acceptance and understanding. You are committing yourself to a serious human-bed relationship, one that is even more deep and legitimate than the one that you started in the Mug last night. You have to understand that in order to be really, seriously relaxed, all the time, you are going to miss out on some things. For example, those classes that you are paying around the price of a huge, working light-saber for? You’re going to have to miss some, because you can’t be in class and be in bed. Yet. Scientists are working on it. You also need to accept that your brain function will probably go down to that of a freshman who has just taken four shots of Crystal Palace in a row and is now being asked to find a classroom in the basement of Blodgett. Actually, your muscles will probably experience similar degeneration, if you’re doing it right and really commiting. If you look like a plate of mashed potatoes after a few days, that’s ideal.
The second thing you need to do is find friends who are going to enable the heck out of you. For example, it’s difficult to stay in bed for over 24 hours at a time without food. You think sports practice makes you hungry? Try watching an entire season of Cake Boss in one afternoon. You need to prepare yourself for how hungry doing absolutely nothing will make you—by the end of a long, relaxing day, you will be ready to eat all of the brownies, a burger, your roommate’s hamster, leaves off of the tree that float into your room because closing the window would involve standing, and the population of Raymond House. If you relax hard enough, even the walk to the Deece from Noyes is going to be too much work, especially for the reward. You know, opportunity cost, and other concepts. Therefore, the more enabling your friends are, the more easily you will be able to achieve your lounging goals. For example, a friend who is at the Retreat that you can text and ask to bring you a sandwich=good. A friend who peeks into your room, sees you “asleep”, and goes downstairs to hand-craft an elaborate and preferably multi-cultural feast in the dorm’s kitchen=much better.
The third, and final, thing you will need to do is to find a serious task that you can commit yourself to while in bed. This way, when people ask you to go to “meetings” or “practice” or “class”, you can tell them about your incredibly important work that can only be done from bed. For example, hypothetically, not like I’ve ever thought about this in the slightest, you could say you are doing a comparative study of Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, in which you categorize the different races of Middle Earth into their corresponding present day country. If you were wondering, Hobbits are like England and Dwarves are like their drunken cousins, also known as Scotland and Ireland. Hypothetically. Obviously, in order to provide a satisfactory result to this research, you will need to watch all four movies multiple times, with and without subtitles, and doing this means that you need to lounge aggressively in bed. To convince people of your commitment to the project, start yelling loudly from your room. Phrases such as “SHOOT FOR THE STARS,” “THIS PROJECT IS GOING MILDLY ACCEPTABLY,” and “ELVES ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT WELL REPRESENTED BY CANADA, YOU IDIOT” are all ideal. Find a volume that rests neatly between intensely engaged in research and unbelievably calm and relaxed. From now on, your voice should sound exactly like President Obama’s. The man has it down.
The rewards you will reap from your extreme relaxing will be immediate, and grand in scale. You will become more fun at parties because of your encyclopedic knowledge of viral videos, you will stop falling asleep in class, and you will have the pale and milky complexion that Victorian-era women only dreamed of. Of course, in order to reap these benefits you are going to violate the steps on my program. Actually, just reading this article is a little more brain-activity than I like to see. Go take a very heavy nap, and think about what you’ve done.