Losing Track
Technorati Tag(s): Opinion
You lose track of time.
When you're doing something you like, you lose track of everything else.
Three days of getting wet in the rain gives you a splendid cold. Runny nose, watery eyes, sore throat, the works. You can't sit at the computer for more than five minutes before you start crying alligator tears and rubbing the snot off your upper lip.
And yet, and yet when you load up Propellerheads' Reason to edit the song you finally managed to somehow add a final ending minute to yesterday, your eyes stop watering. And then the next time you look at the clock, an hour has passed.
This is what doing the thing you love does: it takes away everything else. When it's just you and that thing, it's just you and that thing. And nothing else.
The cure to misery, heartache, and pretty much everything is this: find an obsession.
posted by sutrix @ 8:36 PM
2 Comments:
Like, um, reading EVERY SINGLE THREAD at the House of Leaves forum? I guess that felt like, oh, a couple of hours' work, if that much.
But you are right: Yesterday my wife and I went to the library--I to do some research for my other book project and she to do some prepping for the coming school year--and 4 hours went by before I thought to look at the time.
On a related topic: I recently said to a friend of mine that 100 years ago, at least in this country, boredom was strictly an upper-class phenomenon. Everyone else simply had so much to do regarding the maintaining of the household that there just wasn't much free time. But now, though, boredom afflicts all but the most desperately poor here; and, as Hannah Arendt observes in The Human Condition, we've not taught people how to use productively all this new freed-up time.
Anyway. No real point here, except that you seem to use yours well, even when sick. When I'm ailing, I prefer the lying-around-feeling-miserable option.
Ah, but there's the irony, you see. If this cold had come on during college days I would've done the exact same thing you would (lying-around-feeling-miserable). Perhaps with a good book to keep me company.
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