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The Importance of Keeping Busy
Like several of the other contributors to this fine Web magazine, the University of Southern California has just granted me three new letters to go after my name. Now, whether or not my graduation brings with it any new knowledge, it has unquestionably brought me something tremendously useful: ninety new free hours every week.
For the last two years, I've spent those ninety hours being a gigantic nerd, learning about statistics and valuation and scenario modeling and, worst of all, feasibility analysis. But what do I do now? Ninety hours–that's a lot! Still, even with all of this new free time, my friends aren't calling, probably because I’ve been a academic hermit for the past two years and they’ve forgotten that I might be able to, say, go and get a drink. So, what should I do with all these hours? I’ve developed a plan that answers that specific question.
1. Fix up my backyard – 24 hours a week
First, we’ll start with the most personally embarrassing part of this plan: my backyard. Now, back before school started, I had an okay backyard. I kept a few plants alive out there, I trimmed back the grass and weeds that wanted to overgrow the place, but I never really did anything with it. I wanted to tear up the weedy lawn, put down some bricks to make a terrace on which I could dine, and plant some shrubs, groundcover, and cactus that had low water demands and tolerated direct sunlight well. So, I got out there, I poked around some, and I discovered that my soil was filled with good-sized rocks; I needed to dig them out, then get a tiller and turn it all over and try to smother the weeds, then grade an area for the terrace, and then lay in a drip irrigation system to keep my xeriscaping alive.
And that’s when the major problem came to the fore: I’m not handy. I really should be, after three years of high school shop class, two years of ceramics classes, and an entire junior high spent mixing household chemicals in decidedly dangerous ways in my basement, but the fact is, you ask me to do much more than hang a picture and I’m in over my head. For years, I’ve dated handy women who can put up curtains, patch holes in the wall, and clear clogs in the sink, but I don’t think that I’m a desirable enough partner that somebody will quit her job to work full-time on my backyard.
That leaves just me, but the good part is, since I have no perceptible skills or abilities, I’m likely to be able to work on my backyard for the better part of a year before making any real progress. So this is a project without end. I’ve provisionally given it three full days a week of work, but it doesn’t matter if it’s one or five–I’ll still get just as far...which is to say, nowhere.
2. Learn Thai – 7 hours a week
I’m actually writing this article on a plane halfway to Thailand, which is the site of my summer vacation this year. The last time I went to a country whose language I didn’t speak was about 19 years ago, so I’m a bit unnerved at the prospect. I’ve been doing some Thai on a CD, and I’m now good enough to order iced tea or ask if something is “over here” or “over there.” (Hopefully, nobody will be more specific in their directions, because I don’t know the words for right, left, or straight.)
Anyway, Thai has these things called “tones,” which means that the same word can mean different things if you say it with a high pitch or with a low pitch or, worse, with a medium, rising, or falling pitch. That’s a total of five tones, which is one more than Mandarin but, fortunately, four less than Vietnamese.
(Several women I knew encouraged me to learn Vietnamese instead, because then I’d be able to communicate with their manicurists or waxers. Now, this would have been a good way to get my revenge on said several women, but, with nine tones it seemed to me that “yes, take the entire left eyebrow off!” was more likely to come out “seven orange juices please!” and ineffective revenge is worse than none at all.)
3. Actually get into amateur photography – 12 hours a week
One of my friends refers to me as a “photo tease” because I talk a good game about getting out there and shooting an interesting event or location, but I never seem to follow through. I have no idea how many trips to velodromes I’ve missed because I lack the determination to turn my dreams into reality; however, I do have a pretty good idea how long it would take to be a real fake photographer. See, I’d need to get out there for four to six hours a week, and then I’d be lucky if the ratio of hours shooting to hours editing was just one-to-one–every image has to be reviewed, the missteps discarded, the best chosen from each group of similar shots, wrong exposures corrected, color adjusted to bring out desirable tones. All in all, twelve hours a week is optimistic. But that’s okay, if I need more time I can always do more photography and less hopeless backyard construction. And, hey, it’s been weeks now, Babblog needs a new photo of a squirrel to grace the front page.
4. Attempt to get through security at the international terminal at LAX – 5 hours a week
As I said earlier, I’m writing this from halfway to Thailand–and just getting on the plane was an adventure. I showed up about three hours early for my flight, and spent that time doing the following:
So I guess this should really be six hours.
5. Recap a TV Show – 4.5 hours a week
I’m not surprised that Babblog’s own Survivor recapper has thrown in the towel, because I somehow suckered my own self into recapping American Inventor on one of my several blogs (more on that below). Now, several people actually told me they read my recaps and watched the show just because of them, and a couple of complete strangers actually bothered to e-mail me about said recaps, but they were still a ridiculous amount of work for the end product.
Each recap was made up of:
6. Watch as many episodes of Law and Order as possible – 21 hours a week
Now that I’m not spending all of my time at the lovely University of Southern California campus, I’m actually caught up on Tivo. Tivo, being the good sidekick that it is, has graciously discovered that, not only are there three versions of Law and Order being shown by the networks, there are also four stations showing reruns of those three versions (nobody seems to be rerunning the short-lived Law and Order: Trial by Jury, which lasted about four episodes). Currently I’m two years behind in Law and Order episodes, so I’m mostly catching up on reruns, but that still means that I can see three episodes a day, five days a week (or at least I think I can; I don’t know when anything is on since Tivo takes care of everything for me–but there appear to be twenty-some episodes in my Now Playing every week). This is a great country we live in.
7. Blog – 7 hours a week
Well, let’s not leave out Babblog, here–plus my own two blogs. If I want to keep readership for the latter sites, I’d better be updating them about daily, because I’m not sufficiently A-list for people to come back every day for a week waiting for a new post. Now, one of these blogs is strictly personal, so I just whip up a quick entry and post it–say, in about an hour. The other one, however, is supposed to make me look moderately competent as a professional, so I’d better edit what I write. Either way, it adds up to about an hour a day, every day of the week, and that’s just if I keep my content standards middling. Which, based on this article, I clearly do.
Total: 81.5 hours a week. Thank goodness! All of this seeing movies, enjoying long lunches, and not rushing around was really getting to me! It's about time I got busy again.Wade can be reached at wade@juniorbird.com.
