{"id":1666,"date":"2004-09-07T12:42:53","date_gmt":"2004-09-07T16:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1666"},"modified":"2010-07-10T18:52:12","modified_gmt":"2010-07-10T22:52:12","slug":"exactly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1666","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Leisure Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love James Lileks’ mellow Bleat today <\/a>– especially the part where he describes one of his hobbies as: “Sitting at the kitchen table with no radio or music playing, quietly photoshopping scans of old soft-drink ads.”<\/p>\n

But it\u0092s true. It makes me calm. I enjoy it because it doesn\u0092t matter. The bane of any life is a lack of things that matter, but the other bane of modern life is an excess of things that matter too much. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

God! Yes! Exactly! I do not want a life filled with stuff that doesn’t matter – that’s when everything looks cold and grey, and you wonder “what the hell is the POINT??” – but to ONLY have a life filled with stuff that matters? In a ponderous life-changing challenging way? Sheesh. No thanks.<\/p>\n

I have a friend who never gives herself leisure time. It never occurs to her to just do something randomly because she loves to do it. She never ever just sits around, doing nothing, or “quietly photoshopping scans of old soft-drink ads” – or whatever meaningless thing it is that floats her boat. She would never “waste” an hour like that. She is always worried she is not doing enough to further her career, to become physically fit, etc. etc. She’s always revising her cover letters, reading the classifieds, going for a run … She never does nothing<\/i>. She’s a great friend, and we’ve talked about this a lot. Her hard-task-master attitude gives a certain grim humorlessness to her work, it doesn’t look like she’s having all that much FUN. Her eye is TOO on the ball, if that makes sense.<\/p>\n

My first boyfriend was like that, too. Always working on stuff, building stuff, racing around … our vacations were frenetic nightmares. I just want to read, and go for swims, and drink ice coffee and get pedicures … He couldn’t really get that. Which is fine – no need for him to change to MY way … I think all of that constant-activity was, for him, the equivalent of Lileks’ photoshopping old soda-pop ads. It was calming for him. But it drove me absolutely insane. We should have taken separate vacations.<\/p>\n

I have a lot of stuff in my life that matters, that I feel I have to pay attention to. There are big questions to ask, big issues to consider …<\/p>\n

But there’s also nothing like a grey and rainy afternoon, sitting around my dimly lit apartment, doing things that might not really matter, but that fill me with great joy and yes, like Lileks says, help me stay “calm”.<\/p>\n

I remember when I first moved into my apartment, the one I live in now, I had these reveling moments of weird freedom – I had just come from living with someone for 8 years. Now she was a great friend, and we gave each other mucho space … never any problems … but there were certain things I probably would have held back from doing, in her presence … because … well. It is a little bit crazy. Like watching Bringing Up Baby<\/i> all the way through, then rewinding it, and watching it all the way through again. With printed-out reviews of the film, and essays about the film and about the screwball-comedy-genre spread about the couch. That kind of stuff.<\/p>\n

I really realized that I was living ALONE when I found myself, at 1:30 in the morning one night, sitting in a chair, watching Some Like It Hot<\/i>, remote-control in hand, with Cameron Crowe’s book Conversations with Billy Wilder<\/i> open on my lap … reading about the filming of all the scenes in the movie – then watching each scene … rewinding to notice certain things Wilder had pointed out … sometimes rewinding the scene 4 times …<\/p>\n

I probably would keep a lid on that stuff if I lived with someone.<\/p>\n

Who knows. Perhaps true intimacy is letting somebody in to your crazy little world where you do stuff like that.<\/p>\n

Writing extensive essays here about Cary Grant makes me feel so damn CALM, you have No. Idea. Because it doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters about it is that I love to do it. And sometimes that’s enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love James Lileks’ mellow Bleat today – especially the part where he describes one of his hobbies as: “Sitting at the kitchen table with no radio or music playing, quietly photoshopping scans of old soft-drink ads.” But it\u0092s true. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1666"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16128,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666\/revisions\/16128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}