Way too much time on your hands....

I want to start this post by saying that although comments made by Hannah (my partner in my massage office) were the motivation for this post, I do not believe that she is an uncreative person or wastes large portions of her time with some of the things that I will make reference to later.

The other day I told Hannah that I was making a nativity scene out of sculpey. For anyone who does not know what sculpey is, it is craft clay that you can bake in the oven. You can get it in bright colors or plain clay that you can sand and paint after it is baked. I was explaining that I have had a bunch of sculpey for some time and have not done anything with it and that I used to make little animals and stuff out of it for fun and give them to friends. She found this all very amusing and was laughing at me about it.

Anyway, while her laughing at me about it was not at all mean-spirited, it made me think about a little while ago when she told me about the Harry Potter Puppet Pals on YouTube, which I am sure many of you have watched as I sent out an e-mail with a link. She was the one who told me about them. She obviously found them to be very funny, but one of the comments she made was something along the lines of “How bored do you have to be to do something like that?” My reply to this was, that’s just how some people have fun…

…It is actually how me and my friend Elisabeth often had fun in our high school/early college days. Because they were the days before people had digital video recorders and easy video editing on computers, not to mention that there really wasn’t anywhere to post such video on the internet, these videos remain safely on miniature video cassette, probably somewhere in her parent’s house. These small films featured titles such as “When beanie-babies attack,” and me in characters such as “Captain Anna Boat”

So, one of the final things we did along these lines was a song for the answering machine in my dorm room my sophomore year (I had a single). It went like this – I’m sure you can figure out what tune it is sung to:

Why do you call my up
Buttercup baby
When I’m not at home
And can’t answer the phone?
And then worst of all
I can’t return your call babe,
Cause you don’t leave your name.
Oh what a shame!
I need you
To leave your name and number darling
So that I can call you back.
Or you can try again
Maybe I’ll be in
Eating a snack.

I had this message on my machine all year. Sometimes people would get a wrong number….always a student trying to call another student (as all the on campus numbers are similar). I would get random messages telling me things like, “Dude, you have way too much time on your hands…”

So here is my beef: That doing creative, totally silly, I admit, but creative, things is seen as “having too much time on your hands” or as something that could only be the product of being totally bored, while people waste SO MUCH TIME doing things like getting drunk, or spending hours upon hours watching TV. Anyway, it just occurred to me as really sad that in our society, using your own brain to entertain yourself is a last resort, something you would only do if there is no entertainment to consume or brain altering chemicals to be had. That’s all I have to say.