I used to be friends with a personal trainer. I always thought that would be a great job; you do something you love, something physical, and you make someone’s life noticeably better. He would always say, though, that his chief frustration was his clients’ inability to match his contribution to their own wellbeing.

Any two people will inevitably find the point where their motivations diverge, especially if money is involved. The music executive will push a band for a more commercial single, the student will beg for a passing grade in the class she has never bothered to attend, the physical trainer will shout for one more push-up from the client who doesn’t see why he has to do all this work to fit back into his skinny jeans.

There’s something to be said for the force of laziness as well, although I think what we see as laziness is often the unwillingness to accept that someone else has a profoundly different set of priorities.

I’m not sure why I’m chewing all this over, other than I’m sitting in a computer lab with my class right now, watching a student at the back of the room as she shuffles through the songs on her iPod. She is failing the class. I want her to finish her paper. She wants class to be over so she can go back to her life, which is absolutely cluttered with sick babies and housing problems and other concerns that, to any impartial observer, far outweigh a properly formatted Works Cited page.