Yesterday, while waiting in line at Walmart and catching up on RSS feeds on my PDA, I read about J Wynia’s idea for a new holiday: National Sit on your Butt and Watch Movies day. Awesome!
Seriously this is awesome. It’s amazing how little time you allow yourself just to relax and enjoy yourself. All sorts of random things prevent you from enjoying yourself simply. Shopping, family commitments, chores, computer stuff.
Last September when I travelled to Europe I remembered what it felt like to relax. It was liberating. Sometimes when I try to do so much, I find that I just can’t do anything. Instead I end up watching random TV or blogging or some royal time-waster. Since I’m single, I have more control over my schedule. I consider myself lucky. On the other hand, it’s easy to fill my days with doing things I really don’t want to be doing. For example, I’m in the middle of assembling an Ikea kitchen table. I really want the table and can’t wait to have it assembled (it will let me read and eat at the same time and reduce the spills on the carpet). On the other hand, I just don’t want to do this task at all. It has sucked up 3 hours of my time (well, that includes the time to get the hammer at Walmart).
I would rather be watching movies.
One other point. I also enjoy reading books. The immersive state it puts me in is wonderful, but it’s harder to devote a day to reading than to watching movies. There have been days where I’ve done nothing but watch old sitcom episodes, but books demand more time; when I get really excited about something, of course, I’ll drop everything and read it (and for the record, the last two books to do that have been Laughing Sutra by Mark Salzman and Three Comrades by Remarque).
I am starting to associate books with drowsiness, movies with bored alertness and web surfing with laziness (the desire to avoid doing work).
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