My uncle posed this question to me during dinner a couple days ago. I asked him whether he was keeping up with his drawing, a hobby he took up a few years back. He hadn’t done anything for a while, but I imagine that after I mentioned it, he started thinking about which drawer he might have left his pencil in. Of course, after I mentioned it, he asked what I was doing with my free time. I’m still not sure how much I could have told him.
I have the occasional get-together with people: weekly Scout Troop meetings, WaZoo! script readings, Mensa gatherings (usually just Generation-X twice a month), IOGT monthly meetings and its Youth Group that meets… whenever someone sets something up. So basically, I’ve got plans for Monday nights plus five others out of every month. Where does that leave the others?
Dammit, I hate it when this happens. One of the things I do most frequently is sit in front of the computer, listen to music, play games like Solitaire and Minesweeper and just think. Sometimes it’s about life in general, sometimes it’s about stuff that’s happened recently, sometimes it’s this—playing “What if…?'”
What if I was doing something more productive? What if I had a good job, a nice girlfriend and a self-sufficient existence? (Better than being lonely and trapped in my parents’ basement while trying to study for the bar exam… sniff sniff…) What if I was extending myself outside of my little world down here where the sun don’t shine? Technically, I suppose it does shine, but there isn’t much that gets through the glass door here under the patio, even when it’s not so frigid outside that I have to close the curtains. (I could leave the curtains open, but there’s that whole “seeing my breath when I get out of bed in the morning” stuff that I try to avoid.)
Now that I think about it, drawing probably doesn’t affect too many people outside of those who get to see the results and I imagine very few people who wield the Good Ol’ No. 2 will ever have their own art show. Maybe it’s the self-satisfaction that really matters. It’s the knowledge that you created something. In some way, I get that feeling while sitting in front of the computer. Thoughts go flying through my mind, imagination runs rampant, inspiration bursts through the pornographic pictures on the monitor before me, pushing them aside to reach greater heights. Okay, that last one is a stretch—I’m very rarely daydreaming while looking at porn on the Internet.
But in a way, that’s not enough. Afterwards, I’ll look at the clock, see that two hours has past and nothing’s become of that time. Even though sitting there and thinking bears some semblance to productivity, I’ll still feel like it was two hours put to waste. Perhaps it’s the lack of concrete evidence that I did something. I can spend days thinking about various stuff, but if all I did was sit back and play Solitaire and Minesweeper that entire time, I could just as easily be at Square One when it’s over. I may overcome some emotional or intellectual quandary during that time, but if I haven’t figured anything out, if it was just playing “What if…?”, I could have not bothered to do it at all and I’d have those two hours to use for something else. Like looking for porn on the Internet.
Or maybe that’s not the best way to use my spare time, either. Damn, I need to change around my lifestyle completely, don’t I? I should get up early instead of sleeping more than my body needs; I ought to find some way of thinking and doing at the same time so I’ll always have something to show for it; I need to limit my time, uh, appreciating various electronic images depicting the proportions of a section of the female culture in its natural state. Or sometimes in its silicone-enhanced state…
*Sigh* Man, it took way too much effort to find appropriate terms for the politically-correct description of Internet pornography—I fucking hate political correctness (ah… a non-politically correct statement… feels as good as banging some major slut like her back was a bass drum…). But with all that effort, I decided to throw that shit out the window and come to the final conclusion I’d thought about earlier. After all, the question wasn’t “What happens during your free time?” It was “What do you do with your free time?”
It’s not so much a question of spending versus wasting time as a question of how I use it. Imagination can only do so much—after all, I could have spent all this time imagining what I would have written down and posted in this blog entry. Hell, I probably would have thought of more to write, but my fingers can only move so fast. Plus I would have just skipped past that politically correct bullshit and moved on to something more fun, like [INSERT your own dirty image of what Shawn might want to be doing right now HERE]. (Wouldn’t want my imagination to have all the fun, after all…)
So now that I’m wrapping up, I’m feeling pretty good about the last two hours or so. I sat in front of the computer while listening to music; even though I didn’t lose any pretend electronic money playing cards by myself, I still flowed with the “imagination running rampant” state and look what came of it. Yeah, that’s right, you can see what I was thinking about. I’d probably wet myself if someone put my writing together into a book of “Assorted Selections by A Real Fruitcake Who Had More Hypothetical Questions Than Answers”—this kind of stuff doesn’t seem to fit in an “Impressive” or “Admirable” category worthy of fame and/or fortune. But maybe you’ll get a giggle out of it anyway.
So perhaps that’s my contribution to the world (or at least a contribution that’ll help fill up the lack of space I have here in the basement). I can write, you can chuckle, the world will be a better place. Maybe it’s not A + B = C, but it’ll have to do for now. In the meantime, if I want to feel better about life, I’ll have to do a couple things. First, write stuff more often just to get that feeling of creation, the feeling of doing more than stagnating while little bursts of electricity fly around inside my skull by themselves. Second, post this entry so I can go to bed and not oversleep too much in the morning. Finally (at least for the time being), pose this question to you:
“What do you do with your free time?”
