Medium Writing Hour
02/24 | Prompt #2
The prompt asks me to consider any activity I enjoyed as a child but tend not to do any more –– to think about why I stopped and what it would take to start again.
There are several answers to the first question, variable to the second, but the answers to the last are all the same.
Maybe that’s worth writing about.
I would need time.
Not just minutes on the clock: We have all heard, probably, the dubious aphorism that Everybody gets the same 24 hours in the day.
Most of us also know, intuitively, that this is both true and untrue: If you have a chronic illness to manage whose treatments take up any significant amount of time (I do), then those hours are functionally not available to you; if the treatments take up, say, four hours per day, then you actually have 20 hours to an able-bodied person’s 24. If you have a child young enough to need care (I don’t), or an aging relative who needs the same … I guess theoretically you could ignore their needs, leave them to die, and get those hours back … but HHS might have some questions for you as a result. If you have to work 16hrs/day (I feel that), then you don’t have those 16 hours in the same way that someone who is independently wealthy does.
At this point, some smartass is probably going to say, “Get a better job” –– guess what? Searching for jobs, completing and turning in applications, getting retraining if you need it –– those things all take time, some of which will never “pay off” in any meaningful sense, and none of which you would have needed to spend on those tasks if you had been independently wealthy to begin with.
Of course, most people are not born wealthy, so if you cry foul and say, “That’s an unfair comparison!” –– well, yeah, I take your point, but it’s also no more unfair a comparison than assuming everybody is physically well and responsible for no one else’s welfare and not bound to the necessity of selling their time for the means of survival (all three assumptions which are patently absurd).
My point is: Sure, the clock ticks the same way no matter who you are. But some people get quite a lot more freedom in how they spend those ticks and tocks than others.
So I would need time –– and I would need it to be time without an impending emergency in need of my attention.
Right now, for example, there is a message waiting in my Upwork inbox; it came through after the Writing Hour had already started, asking me if I had time to talk –– an unpromising start (just ask your question about the project, or ask me when would be a good time to talk; don’t buzz in and ask if I’m sitting at my desk in the desperate hope that somebody wanting to pay me half the market rate to take on their most tedious and thankless tasks will feel like having a tête-à-tête), but I am nonetheless conscious, right now, that I am letting the minutes tick by without a response, and that “Ted B” may get tired of waiting and go with an instant hire in the international market (a big part of why Upwork rates are so low) who is sitting at her desk waiting for his message or another dozen like it (honestly, more power to that girl, whoever she is).
I am conscious of the set of quizzes for my college students that need grading and the essay drafts that I’ve been putting off responding to because I am all out of encouraging ways to say “Read the damn instructions next time.”
I’m aware that I need to clean my kitchen and add this video to my website and calculate an invoice for the nonprofit people who will definitely be late in paying me and figure out a better way to package the social media training services I’m getting ready to offer alongside the homeschool writing tutorials I want to sell as subscriptions and figure out whether I can afford to pick up some bread tomorrow to eat my peanut butter on this weekend.
And if I’m not doing any of those things, then I should definitely be working on turning one of my dissertation chapters (probably all of my dissertation chapters) into an article (hopefully several articles) I can submit to an academic journal (so many journals) so I can put the publications on my C.V. and maybe (but probably not) get a TT job that may or may not actually reduce the total number of tasks I am supposed to be working on at any given moment but will maybe corral them somewhat so that they are easier to keep track of and will definitely pay me better for doing them, and maybe with the money I would hypothetically make I could buy some extra time, somehow, so that I could do other things that matter to me, like calling my daddy, whom I have not seen since before I was a Ph.D. and who goes to bed so early in the evenings that he is rarely awake to talk to me at any time when I am awake myself and neither dealing with medical issues nor frantically working on any of the several impending emergencies that frame my days.
They say we make time for the things that matter to us.
They lie.
We never make the time: We steal it, and sometimes the rest of the claimants to our hours and minutes and seconds and days notice, and demand an accounting, with interest.
So I need what we all need: Time, but time that is my own and not already owed somewhere, time in which I am not always-already somehow late –– for everything, all the time.
I just called Daddy to tell him how much he’d love this week’s Writing Hour soundtrack –– I didn’t get through, but I’ll try again.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe today.
