Failure of the Day: Time

I spend a lot of my workday rushing. I have things to do and places to be, and there is almost always a deadline. This is a fairly new phenomenon in my life; for most of the last 40 years, I’ve had more time than things to do, or at least that’s how it seemed. Now that I have a fancy job and commute, though, my Monday – Friday is more like everyone else’s, and I am actually quite happy about that. It turns out that I like being busy and productive. Who knew?

As a result of this realization, I am finding myself less and less interested in frittering away the weekends not doing anything. I still want some frittering of course, but I don’t want to fritter them away completely. It was with this in mind that I said to Chris on Sunday morning, “Do you know what we need?” He looked at me, petrified, and rightly so—who knows what kind of shit I’ll throw at him at any given moment?

We spend most weekends in bed until well after noon, and then we do a little shopping or go to a movie, and this is a perfectly lovely time. But sometimes, there aren’t any movies we want to see, and we’re in the south bay after all, so how much time can a person really spend in a mall watching people coo over gaspingly tacky moving-waterfall pictures? It seemed to me that we need a thing that we do on weekends besides those things, a standard fall-back activity. “We need a hobby,” I said.

I began pitching ideas. Do we ski? Do we square dance? Do we make pottery? Do we go to classic car shows? Do we make amateur porn? Do we travel from city to city solving crimes? What exactly do we do?

After some discussion we decided that seeing as how we have a brand new car and everything, what we do is explore. We drive to things we’ve heard about and we look at them. The Mystery Spot. The Charles Shultz Museum. The Jelly Belly factory. All are within a few hours of here and all are kind of interesting. Nothing too nature-y—I’m sure the ancient redwoods are awesome and everything, but standing in dirt and looking at trees is not really my kind of thing. But if you know of other kinds of interesting Bay Area things—roadside attractions, weird people building things in their yards, what have you—leave a comment or send me an e-mail. And I'll report back on our exploits at a later date.