I Don’t Have Time for (Insert
Anything) … Oh, C’mon!
THE excuse for anything any person does not want to actually
do.
Whether it’s truly
important, like voting, or say … reading, or just about anything that takes somebody out of his or her comfort zone.
And by comfort zone,
I mean anything that requires effort,
mental exercise or simply a
teensy-eensy tiny tiny tiny bit of discomfort. Did I say teeny-weeny-itsy-bitsy
bit of discomfort?
How many of us use Netflix? Google says 29.2 million people use
Netflix. In this country there are give,
or take, 100 million people. Some 3rd
grade math tells us then that, oh, about 60% of the people in this country do not use this convenience.
So let’s do some political type math, which is math I
wrangle into my own purpose (also called cooking
the books). Add this, subtract that,
divide by the other, add back in some more, a little oregano, some mozzarella,
and on any given night of the week, estimate there are … like … 20 or 30
million adults watching television where commercials
are forced upon them.
Live sports games or contests, like American Idol,
etc.. Nobody wants to watch these when
the results are already common knowledge.
You want to see them LIVE –
as they are happening. It’s just uncool to show up at work or school and not know that the Dallas Cowboys were
beaten, in overtime, by the Des Moines Cumquats.
During any live
nationally televised 60 minutes of football, which takes about three hours to
show, you get (do the math) 120 minutes of commercials minus, say, 15 minutes
for the Halftime Show. So now using religious math, we get about 100
minutes of, “Buy this beer, soda pop, car, truck, insurance, toilet paper, some
more beer (or other beer), a different truck (this one can pull a 707 jumbo jet
– we all have one of those laying around we need to pull places, right?), I
dunno.
Commercials on enhancing
your maleness, for some reason, well
… I can see that just might be
important. For at least some of the
viewers… Hmm … I don’t really have a
call on that one.
Just imagine all the most useless crap it’s possible to
manufacture and while sitting there, in one place, not really moving anything
but your hand (plus arm) from the chip bowl, to the dip bowl, to your mouth,
you get 100 minutes of absolutely
useless visual and auditory bullshit forced upon you.
AND YOU HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!
HEY!!! I find time for getting a haircut and I’m bald!
But you DO NOT have time for – say – driving safely. Let’s be
honest, at the root of road rage is
the “I don’t have time for this shit.”
When traffic slows slightly, or somebody is … like, doing only doing the
speed limit plus five.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TIME to go to respect someone else’s life. You can’t just take a deep breath and tell
yourself, “I have time to not kill someone else by just
finding the time to not be an assehole.”
Somehow there IS
time to loll around in front of the TV with Dorito
crumbs all over your shirt, or blouse, watching middle-aged guys whine about limp biscuits. In-between five minute chunks of super-dumb
sitcom drivel. BUT, not enough time to
do any of a hundred things that would make someone else’s or your life, or even
the whole planet, a better place?
The point being that even with something that makes a non-activity like watching television
very convenient, and removes all the
commercial boloney, the vast majority of sentient beings STILL choose to waste an enormous amount of time. On doing
nothing and even wasting most of that time with something even more worthless.
sigh …
Don’t get me wrong, I love television and I DO watch a lot
on Netflix. In fact there are a number
of television shows I could not stand
with the commercials in them and really love without the commercials. I find it quite surprising how good a lot of television programs
actually are without the commercials.
There is a lot of good writing and acting out there.
I use the phrase, “I don’t have time for (insert whatever) very sparingly.
Actually I rarely use it, because I have determined, within my own value
system, what it really means.
What “I don’t have time for ???” really means is, “I don’t
wanna do that.” And, “It’s boring.” “It means I have to think about something and make a decision – a decision I will have
to live with and what if I’m wrong and everybody makes fun of me because I was wrong. I hate
that!” And, “It might make me
sweat. I don’t like to sweat.”
“I don’t have time.” also means (and this is the worst one)
I am more important, MY life is more important than anyone else’s. I am a
King/Queen/Diva/Big Shot and anyone who gets in my way or tries to slow me up
is going down.
I would much rather have somebody respond, “No, I just don’t
want to do that.” Or, “I am
uncomfortable thinking about that right now.”
It may not be what I would
like from them. What I hoped to hear. But, at least, it’s honest and we both can
move on. I’m not expecting anything and
they are not lying.
A suggestion for the one about driving; “This situation
really pisses me off, but better to deal with it, rather than make excuses and
wind with somebody getting hurt.”
Even admitting, “Nah, I’m just too depressed today.” I use that one a lot. (And it’s true –most of the time.)
If you don’t want to do something, say that. Don’t weasel around with the “I don’t have time … etc..”
******
This drawing will be the subject of a video coming out soon. Stay tuned to my video channel.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCul-hKF7pWsaLZruFwlTcdA
Your video for this week.
A masterful guitarist and personal friend of mine
******
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Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014
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