Laziness is a disability. In many ways, it is more debilitating than any mental or physical handicap. Whereas a mentally disabled person is limited in their mental faculties, and a physically disabled person is limited in their mobility, a lazy person is limited to the couch and the images blaring on the television. A truly languorous individual is incapacitated in both mind and body, and for them, thoughts come as hard as footsteps.

With final exams impending, the consequences of procrastination are coming to a head and lazy individuals are suffering unjustly. All quarter long, they’ve been digging their own academic graves with missed lectures and neglected assignments, but they never had a choice. Laziness is a disability, not a decision. Their chronic idleness is as permanent and unalterable as the missing fingers of a man with no fingers or the missing head of a man with no head, assuming that no medical technology has been developed which can fully regenerate fingers or heads.

However, UCSB doesn’t recognize laziness as a handicap, and thus holds lazy people to the same standards as everybody else. Its schedules, deadlines and monomania with learning have created a glass ceiling that is nearly impossible to break through for the shiftless and slothful. Final exams require a level of preparedness that can only be achieved through diligence and focus, of which they have none. Yet the lazy receive no special consideration, as their transcripts indicate.

Most people agree with the university, wrongly believing that laziness is a simple matter of will power and a condition that can easily be reformed. Their wrongness stems from an inability to empathize with lazy people. They work hard, bleed and sweat for their dreams and falsely assume that everybody has the potential to do the same. Laziness, however, is a disability.

It appears that no amount of sound reasoning and incontestable evidence could ever persuade these dyed-in-the-wool toilers to recognize this truth, but there are other ways to convert dissidents. Here I have invoked the device of repetition often used by television evangelists, in which a point is proven by simply repeating it over and over again. With each reiteration of the phrase “Laziness is a disability,” I am hacking away at parochialism and oppression.

I am a lazy person, and I am proud of my condition. Why should I or anyone else be ashamed of it? Laziness is a disability. My prejudiced editors would have me expend more energy than I possibly could to meet the 650-word quota with coherent, relevant writing, a task that my stupor prohibits. Instead, as an act of protest against my editors and the oppressive University of California, I am taking a lazier route. I will aimlessly wander through the rest of this column, allowing my random and inconsequential thoughts the rare fortune of publication.

If I were a woman, what size breasts would I want? A, B, C, D or double D? Would I play with my breasts? Would I name them? Yes, of course I would. Laziness is a disability. I would call my right breast “Israel,” and my left one the “West Bank,” and whenever I squeezed them together I would say they were fighting over Jerusalem.

Lately I’ve been blaming my farts on my friend that lives a thousand miles away in Boston. Whenever I fart too loudly, and people are wondering who the perpetrator was, I say, “It was Daniel.” Laziness is a disability. Little do they know that Daniel lives on the other side of the country, and studies German literature at Tufts University. I haven’t told him yet that I’ve been blaming my farts on him, but I doubt he would be very angry. However, I have to wonder if my false accusations are sinful. Will I go to hell for blaming my farts on Daniel? In hell, will I be incarnated as a woman, and have breasts? Would I still name them “Israel” and “Palestine”? Laziness is a disability.

Is any of this funny? Nope. I wish I would revise it. Whatever.