So the reporter asked. There's no simple answer, although parts of the complex answer are obvious. Ego. Extroversion. Frustrated careers as a journalist, comedian, disc jockey, politician. Suppressed creative urges. Anger, I'll have to admit to lots of that.

And around this time of year, there's another big reason to add to the mix. Yes, I'm talking about the age-old practice of work avoidance.

I make my living in higher education, and twice a year, we encounter the part of our job that most of us like the least: giving and grading exams. Once our exams are taken by the students and presented to us by the expert pain administrators in the Registrar's Office, most of us take them home and try to deal with them there.

We sit and look at them in the box they came in. (One year, in an attempt to integrate various facets of my life, I put the box under the Christmas tree for a few days.) After a while, we take the exams out of the box and put them in a pile. The students at our school (like most law schools) take their tests anonymously, and identify themselves only by a number, and so we can always put them in numerical order. We can check them to see if they're all there. My exams come back in manila envelopes, so there's always the task of taking them out of the envelopes.

The pile sits there. We stare at it. We think about opening the first one and reading just a little. But it's too painful a thought.

There's got to be something else that needs doing. Clean out the closet. Rearrange the sock drawer. There's that article I've been meaning to work on.

Anything but grade those exams.

Take the cat to the vet for a checkup. Trip to Costco, we're down to our last 18 rolls of toilet paper. Wash the car. Trim the rose bushes. Heck, wax the car. Feed the rose bushes. How about that inventory of household goods that the insurance agent has been after us to make?

Now's the perfect time. Anything but grade those exams.

And when everything around the house is in total ship-shape? Just when it appears that there is no further excuse to postpone grading?

Now that's where blogging comes in mighty handy.