A great deal of my time these days is spent meditating on the question “Am I Busy”? That, of course, might be why the answer is probably yes, since I could be spending that time working but that’s just how meta I am.
(Meta, by the way, like goth or emo kid should be an aesthetic choice. I’ not sure what it would look like. Maybe you’d just walk around with pictures of yourself as a child safety pinned to your clothes. Stay tuned for updates).
I mean, here’s the basic deal. My time is literally consumed with what I have to do. To the point where the fact that I’m on campus in classes from around 11-3 daily (on wednesdays 10:30-8, but I digress), is a significant barrier to actually getting done all I need to get done to be there. However, and let’s be honest here, 11-3 is TECHNICALLY the only time constraint I have. That’s the only time I really have to, no questions asked, be somewhere doing something. My Medical School friends and my Drama School friends (some of you are my unofficial Drama school friends, but that’s neither here nor there, you whiny crybabies) are literally at places from sunup to sundown. So if I want to, say, grab a beer with a friend, I might say to myself, I suppose I can stay up working till 1 rather than 11 tonight and go do it. Whereas, say, Dr. Friend will have to say “Actually, I’m elbow deep in a dead person right now, I’m sorry.”
And my 9 to 5 friends, who have certain luxuries that I don’t, such as, at 5:15, being able to say fuck this I am now an alcoholic for the next four hours (or whatever), may spend a good deal of their time doing things that don’t particularly thrill them at all, even if it’s in a job that they actually quite like. Whereas all that I do, if not directly applicable, is at least ultimately a building block for my own, personal passion (no, not that one. That’s the dark, terrible one. This is the one I can tell adults about).
None of this means I wasn’t, for example, studying Hebrew until 1 am, wednesday, after going to class from 10:30 to 8, nor until 12 on thursday, alternating between Greek and Akkadian (what the hell is Akkadian? You say.) Or that I ever feel on top of what I have to do.
But I don’t know, I guess when you’re just doing something for you, and it can’t matter to anyone else how you do at it—my doctor friends, for example, in their position of saving lives, should probably be good at what they do. Although don’t get me wrong, I’d run out of the operating room if I heard a name I recognized. Also, an airplane, for my pilot friends. I would run out of an airplane. I would do that Wiley E. Coyote thing where you’re like peddling the air for a minute, and then I would fall and make a nice mushroom cloud of dust. Or whatever.
I guess—when you’re just doing something for you, when it can matter to no one else what you achieve–It’s just not the same. I don’t have words for how it’s different, but every single aspect of every thing I do is my fault and my choice. That’s cool, man.