So, I'm back. Or for those of you who don't know me, hello! What have I been doing the past two years? "Nothing," I could say, or I could say I've been "so busy." Like how I once saw the great Jerry Seinfeld pontificate that everything in life can be broken down as either "great!" or "sucks!," the two are interchangeable. Jerry gave the example of walking down the street and you buy an ice cream and say "great!" Then you drop it and say "this sucks!" The two can be swapped for each other and still convey the same meaning. You can drop the ice cream and say "great" flatly. I think of this as people ask me, "what are you going to do with all of your free time now, Amy?" They mean well and people are so nice. I mean it. I swear! They're asking because my children will be starting kindergarten in the fall and, thanks to longer hours and this magical thing called the bus that will actually pick up my children and drive them places (!), this will mean some extra time on my hands. And yet, there's something about the question of what will I do with my free time that bothers me. Like, I will just be hanging out here, finally eating bonbons and having Calgon take me away. Are you implying I have free time? Don't you know that I'm writing a freakin' book here, people, and I'm raising humans? And not to mention, WHO HAS FREE TIME? That was what Facebook was invented for, to make sure nobody can ever sit with idle hands and do nothing ever again. But no, these people wouldn't know anything about what I do with the other 1426 minutes a day they don't see me at the school drop-off line, or scrutinizing blueberry tins for white fuzzies at Stop & Shop, or examining the dried piece of ham that had been on my kitchen floor since Tuesday in horror because the whole time I just thought it was a leaf that dried-up, and leaves are okay leave on a floor all week, but apparently not ham, because I never showed them anything. I realized, what bothers me about the "free time" question is that it forces me to remember... I remember being in my twenties and living in New York City and running into people from college at parties or at bars. These people would be floored to hear that I had a job. And I don't mean a "good job" or one with a brand name that had to do with interviewing celebrities, how those things equal "good" at an time when you buy your groceries at Duane Reade, but I mean any job. I could have told them I was working at Arby's and they still would've had the same reaction. They'd tease me and explain that they only knew me as a party girl, and that they couldn't possibly picture me in a professional context. "I just can't picture you...in a suit..." (As I sat on my secret that hells to the no, I thankfully didn't have to wear a suit and could never picture myself wearing one either.) I remember thinking and feeling, shame on me. Shame on me for never showing these people the side of me that is pretty quiet and nerdy, hard-working and studious. People in life only know what you show them, and apparently I only showed the side that closey resembled Animal from the Muppets. So here we have these minutes that keep coming. What are we going to do with them? Who are we going to be? Who are we going to show?
We all know, it doesn't matter. We know just the fact that we get to spend another moment is monumental enough. And yet, we take the gift of time for granted. We keep going in the blur. Maybe this is the weekend, the free time, the year, that we remember this. That as we plow through the events from great to sucks, the blur of days from nothing to busy, the many selves up and down on rotate, that wonderful things are happening somewhere in between. Today I'm a girl who wasted time by writing about time wasting, and if I dropped my ice cream while walking I would say both, "great, this sucks!" And that's fine. I mean, it has to be. Now let's go, my happy time wasters, the Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan and Shia LaBeouf are all turning thirty soon and the inter webs are blowing up with slideshows to suck us in and take us through their trials and tribulations. Do you remember when LiLo was a singer? |
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