A:
Hey, you coming out this weekend?
B:
Naw, having sort of a date night in with Beth.
A:
Lame. You never go out.
B:
I'm busy dude. We are both just legitimately busy right now.
A:
That doesn't mean you can't hang out once in a while.
B:
I know it seems like it might not mean that, but for me at least, it totally does. Imagine, if you know, you had like a nine to five job, you showed up at nine, you did your good bit of work, left promptly at five, home by 5:30 say.
A:
Weekends?
B:
Totally free. Sometimes you would have to help a friend move or whatever, or some other responsibility, but no job stuff.
A:
No kids?
B:
No kids. So, if that were your life, you know, you would have let's say five hours open Monday through Thursday, and then like, I don't know, thirty hours free over Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So, like 50 hours.
A:
60.
B:
No, 50.
A:
Yeah, you're right.
B:
Yeah. Anyways, so you would break that down someway. You would have time with your spouse or significant other, say ten hours. Let's say you joined an IM team, ten hours. Ten hours with the Lions Club or something.
A:
Ten hours with your boys.
B:
Sure, and ten hours reading or playing videogames or whatever. So you split your time totally evenly.
A:
That's a lot of Lions Club.
B:
Doesn't matter. So, now, say, your job picks up, you get a new assignment, parent get sicks so you start driving to see them on the weekend, whatever. So now you're down to ten hours of free time.
A:
Sure.
B:
So, you might guess, you know, that you just do twenty percent of each hobby, yeah? So, now it's two hours of your wife, two hours with the Lion's Club and everything.
A:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying
B:
But it doesn't work like that, at least for me. You might think that I like distributing my time evenly, and that's what I'm trying to do, but that's not the case. It's, you know, first I want to spend a lot of time with my wife, so that's the ten hours. And I really like reading, so that's ten hours. And, you know, it turns out that the other thirty hours of leisure, they're great, I like my friends, I like ultimate frisbee, but you know. When time gets compressed, you make choices, and those choices aren't a proportional reduction of hobbies.
A:
Lame.
B:
It's not lame. And you know, that doesn't even get into issues, of, you know, if you're working a lot, you're tired! And so that also eliminates some possible hobbies, and makes things like kicking it on the couch with your girl, a bottle of wine and some Thai food sound pretty good.
A:
Laaaaaaaaaaaaame.
B:
No, no. Also, depending on your schedule, your off-time may be split up, or in a weird time slot or whatever. If I have a half hour off everynight, and then every now and then, sort of out of the blue, I end up having an hour, it's not like I get get a frisbee game going right then or anything. And people that work third-shift or whatever, they can have a really hard time meeting people, because their non-work time is so skewed from the norm. Even if they do have free time, no one else does then. My cousin
A:
Lay lay lay lame. Lay lay lay laaaaaame.