Wednesday Factoid: Too Much Time

Today's Wednesday Factoid is: What takes up too much of your time?

I guess I could answer this two ways. 

I definitely feel like traveling to and from work takes up too much of my time. It's more than an hour there and more than an hour back, plus it's a twenty-minute walk from and to the bus stop. When you already work eight hours a day (which I can't really say takes up "too much" of my time since that's what enables me to support myself), adding another three hours in TRAVEL feels like a lot. 

However, it is nice to have that time because it's not really time I can use for anything incredibly intense or productive, so I use it to read! That's when I get almost all of my reading done. So in a way, even though I don't like HAVING to do it, it's providing a window for me to do something I know I otherwise wouldn't make time for.

That said, the travel is necessary, and I could also make other choices about my time which would give more of it back to me for creative pursuits.

I think arguing with online bozos takes up too much of my time.

I do way way way way less of it than I used to. But because I do value interactions that turn out positively, I have to engage in interactions that turn out negatively. You really never know sometimes. I've learned to understand earlier in the process when a conversation is likely to be productive, but I still sometimes have those conversations if I think I can turn them into learning tools (i.e., I can use them for an essay or a Letters to an Asexual video). But sometimes? It's honestly just completely petty.

This week I had someone leave a nice comment on one of my old song recordings. It seemed complimentary but they also left a puzzling sentence: "Alas, I found YOU." The song I had recorded was a man's song, and the rest of the comment discussed how they'd been looking for someone who actually sang the man's part right, so I was a little confused by the "alas"--thinking maybe they were happy to find someone to sing it right but disappointed that I was not a man. Then I realized it was probably just someone who doesn't know what "alas" means, or someone who thinks the phrase "at last" is "alas."

When I replied to the commenter I thanked them for what they said but also mentioned the misunderstanding I'd gone through with alas. Instead of being understanding about it, they chose to message me privately about how I'm a huge awful disgusting person for "correcting" what I SHOULD have understood was just a typo, how shameful it is that I'm such a pedant (they pasted the definition for "pedant" into the message for me), and blocked me on the website. 

This was someone who was initially very nice to me. There was no warning that they would react so inappropriately. Similarly, sometimes someone comes out of the gate snarling and acting like a jerk, and then they respond with surprising civility if I just patiently entertain their questions.

Sometimes a conversation is worthwhile and sometimes it isn't. While I am frustrated that pointless conversations take up too much of my time, I think it's very difficult to pinpoint which conversations are worth having until you're having them, and the only answer is to be very conservative about having any conversations at all. (Obviously, that's not my style. Heh.)