Busy Work

There are ants crawling on my feet as I write this.

Today is Easter Sunday. Ipso facto yesterday was Saturday (often is), day two of the four day weekend. Yes. A four day weekend. The kind of thing I am constantly wishing was happening to me, begging the universe for etc. The kind of thing I scrounge around in bed about on a regular work day or a regular Sunday, before I am forced to get up, thinking: the fact that it isn’t day two of a four day weekend right now is seriously fucking fucked up.

And yet! And yet! Whenever long weekends come around, I do tend to feel a bit listless. That is unless I have ten separate plans all squished up against each other so that I’m sufficiently honouring the free time I’ve been lavishly granted, drinking it up, slurping it up, as one should, because it’s not often you get this much time to yourself.

In a random and glorious turn of events, this long weekend rolled around and I had about three plans total and most of them were on Thursday night and so when yesterday began, I found myself in the apartment sort of going from room to room, sitting down on the couch then standing up, fighting the urge to message friends or give myself a task outside of the house (go down the street, go to the Op Shop, take things to the dry cleaner) – just trying to not feel like a loser with zero going on.

You may do this same thing. It’s the thing where, if ever there’s the possibility of a full day of nothing (again, the kind of thing I am constantly apparently asking for), I really struggle to allow myself to do nothing. Which, by the way, is not exactly nothing, even though a day of actual nothing would be a wonderful thing to experience and I should actually be in pursuit of it. But no, yesterday I did the average modern person’s version of ‘nothing’, which means I caught up on an important TV show episode, had a very long shower, trimmed my pubic hair, gave myself a bit of a facial, washed the dishes, read some terrible news, watered the plants, and played online billiards. In 1620 that would’ve been a certified jamboree. Probably would have sent the day-haver to their bed for a week.

Anyway. I flopped around the apartment all day. Which was initially met with quite a lot of resistance. In the morning I had a lingering sort of anxious energy, and throughout the day, continued catching myself trying to scold me about how little I was doing with the day. I didn’t stop doing it until after the facial, around maybe 4pm, when I’d settled into the reality that I wasn’t going to make anything happen – not even take some coats down the dry cleaner, or change the bed sheets, or call someone and accidentally end up being wildly, spontaneously social.

Those of you with kids likely want to throttle me right now. And rightfully so. I do apologise. I imagine your version of this is having one hour to yourself, and for that I salute you in solidarity but also in horror and awe.

I am not like this naturally; resistant to doing nothing. My mother – who turned 70 this week, by the way, happy birthday, Mim – would be the first to testify on the stand, if it comes to such things which it may well do, that I am one of the laziest people that has ever walked this Earth. Happier than most living things to roll around on the couch or bed or lay in the grass doing next to nothing and that has been true for most of my life. In my twenties, I’d do just two things with my days off from uni and working at the pub around the corner from my house: order a pizza and watch between two and four movies. I’m not even suggesting this is a bad quality. It’s probably quite annoying in a teenager you’re trying to drag along with you to various events and routine commitments, but all in all I think it’s kind of vintage and chic to be so laissez-faire about doing things. I think back to that bedroom I had in Collingwood, where I could spend a whole day laying on the bed getting up only to pee and shower, and I think: that’s pretty much what life is about sometimes. And it doesn’t need to be about anything more than that.

Something has unfortunately happened to me (maybe all of us?) in recent years. Poor friends and family members of mine get no shortage of dull messages like sorry, work has been pummelling me and work is crazy this week. My use of the word ‘busy’ has skyrocketed about 5,000% (great for Busy stocks). It’s such an annoying modern affliction, being busy, or perhaps insisting that you are, or perhaps enjoying that you are, enjoying saying that you are while loudly bemoaning it, even though you could easily do something about it, or at the very least you could shut up about it so not everyone had to be involved.

The real, actual matter at hand is that I have never been this busy (sorry). Even when I worked at [redacted Canadian punk rock media outlet] and worked ten, twelve hour days, I wasn’t ever actually concerned about the volume of tasks at hand. I wasn’t ever fully drinking the Kool Aid about having to get things done. In fact, I mostly filed my stories and gossiped at my desk, and, once or twice, stayed late at the office with the girlies, drinking the promotional light-up magnum bottle of Belvedere and soon after acquiring a concussion.

I have never been this busy (sorry) and whether it’s because I’m dumber now or because I really am being asked to do a lot in order to earn a paycheck, it’s done something to my understanding of my own time. And what my time’s worth. And what I’m allowed to do with it. And what is productive. It doesn’t help that I have an unfinished novel and an unfinished script sitting on the proverbial shelf begging to be picked up and toiled with.

This is all annoying stuff to say, too, especially with innumerable crises at the door, and innumerable reasons to fuck all of this rhetoric and thinking off for good. I won’t go into it all now because that’s a different post (which is nearly finished), but this idea I’ve succumbed to lately about being productive and too-busy-to-[any word here], is inextricably linked to patriarchy and imperialism and conversations about AI (the promise of being unburdened by some new capitalistic invention, only to have it free up more of your time which then get taken up by some other, more menial, less human tasks). All of this reminds me of Jenny Odell’s second book, about time, which talked so persuasively about time having, over centuries, become talked about more and more as a luxury, something we are ‘allowed’ by others, and about how time poverty is so closely linked to money poverty (time is money), because the richer you are, the more able you are to buy your time back (hire nannies, cleaners, go on holidays, take time off).

And also this quote from it:

“Who buys whose time? Whose time is worth how much? Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose, and whose time is considered disposable? These are not individual questions, but cultural, historical ones, and there are few ways to liberate your time or anyone else's without considering them.”

Which also reminds me that I, although I am busier (sorry), I am not so busy that I can’t celebrate my mum’s birthday, spend a weekend in Fairhaven, go to my niece’s dance thingy, cook a green curry, watch Housewives with Sunni, know exactly what’s going on with West and Amanda, go to a comedy show, wander down to the bookstore in my lunch break, play pool with Todd, do some gardening, watch Funny Girl and eat Vietnamese food with Chessy. You get the idea. I’m fine. We’re fine. The work is internal and it’s about carving out my own life. Or anyone and everyone doing that. Because one day I’ll be two minutes away from carking it and I’ll think “wish I had five more minutes to watch birds”.

So today I did nothing again. Well, I drove to Baker’s Delight for some hot cross buns. Which I don’t recommend, by the way. Too porous so that they dry out in the toaster, and not enough fruit inside. Anyway, I drove to fetch them and some coffee and since then have done next to nothing and it’s now feeling really not bad.

I am sitting in Dylan’s backyard in Northcote and he’s learning ‘Waters of March’ inside on the piano and there are lorikeets pecking at the fruit on the apple tree next door, they’re fighting (I’m pretending a group of them are forcing one of them to come out), and there are wattlebirds jumping around the bush growing on the fence, licking whatever sweet nectar it is that they’re into from its bright orange flowers. And the sun is going behind a tree once and for all today – which is a relief, because I’ve been shifting my garden chair every thirty minutes chasing the shade. And there are clovers all around my feet. And there are children squealing in backyards up and down the street, probably beserk from too much chocolate. And all I’m saying is that doing nothing is a sublime and vital skill.

Going to try and get better at it.

PS. As I typed that last sentence, one of the wattlebirds started doing in loops into the gorgeous afternoon sun in front of me, catching little bugs in mid air. It was fantastic.