Sedentary Man gets a hobby

I often josh about being hobby-free, which leads people to think I am uninteresting and lazy.

Allow me to rebut: I am not uninteresting.

But I don’t do much in the way of traditional hobbies. I don’t fish or bowl or knit or play a musical instrument or collect stuff.

I watch a lot of sports on TV. I spend way too much time on the computer. I read newspapers, magazines and books, books, books. These are all “pastimes,” in that time passes while I do them, but they’re not real hobbies.

This raises two problems. One, because I am Sedentary Man, my physique is becoming more and more like a bowling pin. Two, I don’t have a ready answer when asked, “What are your hobbies?”

Until now.

I’ve decided that watching movies can be a hobby. Yes, it’s more sedentary activity, but it keeps me fascinated and it costs money and time. I believe those are the official requirements for a “hobby.”

I love the movies. Always have. I love getting lost in the story on the screen. I love the shared experience of laughing along with my fellow viewers, thrilling to the action, secretly choking up over the weepy parts. I really, really love popcorn.

I can remember my very first big-screen movie. When I was 6 years old, my family went to see “How the West Was Won” at the Pines Drive-In in Pine Bluff, AR. (Guess what kind of tree grows in that area.) I was blown away, particularly by the moment when a fleeing pioneer catches a flying ax in the back. Nightmares for a week, but I was hooked on movies.

My mother regularly dropped me off at the Saturday matinee at the Sanger Theater, where several hundred children squealed so loud that it’s a wonder any of our eardrums survived.

I took my first date to a movie. Unfortunately, it was a horrendous horror film called “Last House on the Left” (the first one) that left us both shaken rather than stirred. That’s when I learned to check out reviews BEFORE seeing a movie.

My senior prom included a middle-of-the-night movie (that romantic classic “Young Frankenstein”), so we all had a chance to sit still for a couple of hours and sober up.

I took film classes in college, and have even taught some at the university level. Any excuse to watch movies.

Movie-going changed over the years. Drive-ins mostly vanished and indoor theaters went multi-screen. After the advent of the VCR, people started watching movies in their living rooms and many forgot how to behave in a theater.

Mostly, I watch DVDs at home like everyone else. We subscribe to one of those services that deliver DVDs by mail, and I watch the movies on the sofa with a big bowl of popcorn, or while sweating on a treadmill in the garage so I can stay in shape (“bowling pin” being a shape).

I spend many hours arranging and rearranging my “queue” of hundreds of upcoming films so I get the right blend of serious films and comedies and action movies I’ll be able to hear over the whirring treadmill. Monitoring this flow of movies has become my obsession.

I’m collecting a lifetime of movie experiences. And that qualifies as a hobby.

Pass the popcorn.

Murphy's Law only scratches surface

Timing is everything, and that's never clearer than when problems arise.

That's why one version of Murphy's Law says: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong at the worst possible time.

I was reminded of this when the smoke alarms at our home announced they needed new batteries. Wait, "announced" is too polite a term. When our smoke alarms need batteries, they emit a chirp loud enough to wake everyone in a cemetery across town. The startling chirp repeats, ever more frequent and persistent, until somebody by golly replaces those batteries. Or else.

This has occurred three times in the years we've lived in this house. Each time, it's happened in the middle of the night.

Each time, I’ve had to get up, go to an all-night market, buy batteries and replace them before anyone could get back to sleep and/or my wife killed me.

Have I mentioned that our house came with six of these smoke alarms? That they're all wired together somehow, so if only one has a low battery, the others chirp in sympathy? That two of the alarms can only be reached with a ladder? That if you furiously rip one off the wall because you can't stand the noise another second, the others will chirp more?

Anyway, there I was, at 2 a.m., teetering half-asleep on a ladder, replacing batteries and pushing buttons and praying the noise would stop. And I noted once again how things always go screwy at the worst possible time.

You could argue that we bring this problem on ourselves. Clearly, we don't change the batteries frequently enough (like, say, every week). Clearly, I need to study how the smoke alarms work, at a time when I'm not also trying to sleep. At minimum, we should always keep spare batteries on hand.

But such preparation would be tempting fate. If the smoke alarms weren’t going haywire in the middle of the night, it would be something else going wrong, maybe something worse. Like a fire.

Murphy's Law doesn’t begin to cover all the possible variations of inconvenient timing. Here are some suggestions:

Bell's Law: The more important the telephone call, the more likely you'll be unable to answer it in time.

Montezuma's Law: The longer you are on vacation, the greater the chances that one of you will get sick.

Babel's Law: The farther you are from proper health care facilities, the more serious the symptoms will be.

Gates' Law: The worse your boss' mood, the more likely he'll walk up behind you while you're playing solitaire on your computer.

Eveready's Law: Your flashlight will work fine right up to the moment a storm knocks out electrical power to your house.

Heloise's Law: Surprise guests arrive only when your home is at its messiest.

Goodyear's Law: The harder it's raining, the greater your chances of getting a flat tire.

Caterpillar's Law: If you're in a hurry to get somewhere, you will encounter street construction detours. Every time.

Macy's Law: The more you want a product, the greater the odds that the store sold the last one five minutes ago.

Ditka's Law: The more your wife wants you to take her out -- right now -- the better the chances your game will go into overtime.

Brewer's Law: The later the hour, the louder the chirp.

Fast food

If you need proof that we're all too danged busy, consider this item from USA Today: This year, the average American will eat 32 restaurant-purchased meals in a car, up from 19 such meals in 1985.

When you consider that some Americans (like me) almost never eat in vehicles and that many don't even have cars, that works out to -- let's see, 32 meals into 52 weeks a year, carry the 2, minus Big Gulps, which aren't officially "food" -- to, um, one heckuva lot of meals on wheels.

I recently saw a fellow motorist who was weaving so much that I assumed he was drunk. As I nervously hurried past, I saw he was eating a big, drippy burger while also talking on his cell phone. Steering with his knees rather than miss a bite of burger or a juicy tidbit of telephone gossip. Both activities apparently were more important than the fact he was endangering lives. Did I mention this was on the freeway?

You who spend a lot of time commuting and/or eating in your vehicle probably are thinking about now: So what? We do what we have to do to make the most of every minute of every day. If it means dripping "special sauce" into our laps at 75 mph, then so be it.

Automakers strive to equip vehicles for full-speed dining. My minivan, the Soccer Mom Special, comes equipped with (and I'm not making this up) 13 cupholders. Thirteen. Since you can only fit seven people in this vehicle, the automaker apparently assumed that each passenger needs two drinks going at any given time. In which case, shouldn't the van also be equipped with a bathroom?

Creative auto engineers could come up with more ways to outfit our wheeled restaurants. They could:

--Add lap tables that fold out of the armrests, like the ones on airlines. Probably not safe in a crash, but tables would enable drivers to keep their hands free for driving, at least part of the time.

--Replace that "new car smell" with the aroma of stale French fries. Going to happen sooner or later. Might as well cut to the chase.

--Offer upholstery in colors that would hide anticipated spills: Hot Coffee, Old Ketchup, Dried Mustard, Radioactive Red Slurpee.

Fast food purveyors could help, too. How about packaging food in "feed bags" like horses use? Drivers could keep their hands on the wheel, while munching away at the food strapped to their heads.

More roadside cafes could offer "astronaut food," pureed items in plastic tubes. We could squeeze our meals into our mouths and skip all that inconvenient chewing.

Restaurants should also offer more food items "on a stick," so each motorist might have one hand free for steering. Burger on a stick. Chicken on a stick. Fish kebabs. Condiments could be in "dipping tubs" designed to fit in our many cupholders.

I'm sure creative food packagers are searching for such innovations. But, for my money, the best service concept could be summed up in one word:

Bibs.

Plugged

We've become a nation of nerds.

The average American now spends more time using media devices -- TV, radio, iPods, cell phones, computers -- than any other waking activity, according to a new study.

Coast to coast, we're "plugged in" to music and news and text messages and Internet shopping. We still read newspapers and books and magazines, but way too much of our time is devoted to television and our beloved electronic gizmos.

"As a society, we are consumers of media," said researcher Robert Papper of Ball State University's Center for Media Design. "The average person spends about nine hours a day using some type of media."

Papper and his cohorts spent several months shadowing 400 people in Indianapolis and Muncie, IN, where Ball State is located. The researchers recorded information every 15 seconds on what media the subjects were using. All told, they studied 5,000 hours of media use.

Here are some of their findings:

--About 30 percent of the observed waking day was spent with media as the sole activity, and 39 percent was spent with media while involved in some other activity. Only 20.8 percent of the day was spent solely on something called "work."

--In any given hour, no less than 30 percent of those studied were "engaged in some way with television, and in some hours of the day that figure rose to 70 percent."

--About 30 percent of all media time is spent using more than one medium at a time.

--Women do more media multi-tasking than men. Papper told the New York Post that men seek media contact of "short duration and instant gratification" while women are interested in "longer, more thoughtful" interaction. So, it's just like sex. Proof once again that "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Calgon."

--The average American spends four hours a day watching television and three hours a day using a computer.

As a casual observer, I would now like to say: Great Googly-moogly! Nine hours a day? We spend more time "consuming media" than we do sleeping? Are you kidding me?

Four hours a day of TV, and there's still nothing good on? Three hours a day on a computer? Does that count all the time spent waiting on reboots?

Imagine how much crap we're stuffing into our brains every day. No wonder we can't remember where we left our car keys. We're too busy processing the latest update on Britney Spears. And listening to an MP3 song we don't remember downloading. And turning away telemarketers. And waiting for the computer to finish displaying its annoying pop-up ads.

It's All Input All the Time here in America. If we're not on the phone, watching TV and surfing the 'Net, all at once, then we might miss something.

We stay indoors, filtering the wider world through a haze of electronics. When we do leave the house, we block out extraneous sounds by blasting music into our heads via "ear buds." We sort through our e-mail in coffee shops. We check our voice-mail in movie theaters. Apparently, some of us cannot drive without talking on cell phones.

Media consumption is the true "Revenge of the Nerds." The nerds didn't recruit us into their pocket-protector cult. They just designed neato gadgets, and we all willingly joined their ranks.

Read this at work

American workers are among the most productive in the world, but imagine how much we could accomplish if we didn't waste a quarter of every workday.

According to a survey, the average worker fritters away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch. Time-wasting activities cited in the survey included surfing the Internet, chatting with co-workers, conducting personal business, running errands and "spacing out."

(This survey was conducted before the current financial crisis; now most employees spend all day watching the stock market and quietly weeping.)

The survey of more than 10,000 employees was done by America Online and Salary.com on the Internet, so it's no surprise that computer use was the top time-waster. (The results did not break down how much time was spent filling out survey responses.)

"A certain amount of slacking off is already built into the salary structure," said Bill Coleman, senior vice president at Salary.com, who was running a personal errand at the time. (Kidding!)

But 2.09 hours is twice what employers expect, according to a follow-up survey of corporate human resource managers, and the time wasted adds up to an estimated $759 billion a year.

That number's deceiving, however, because some of that wasted time might be "creative waste," which Coleman defined as "time that may well have a positive impact on the company's culture, work environment, and even business results. Personal Internet use and casual office conversations often turn into new business ideas."

Some thoughts about this survey:

One, it's skewed toward white-collar workers who have access to the Internet. Nobody working on an assembly line goofs off two hours a day. Many blue-collar workers even have their bathroom breaks timed and regulated. Any sawmill worker who's "spacing out" soon will go by the nickname Stumpy.

Two, survey respondents make mistakes and tell lies. They might be overestimating their wasted time (or underestimating it, though I don't know how a man wasting more than two hours out of every eight could stay employed unless the company is owned by his father-in-law).

Three, many time-wasting activities clearly were not reported. Picture how much time per day is spent on cigarette breaks, drinking on the job, snacking, napping, doodling, putting on makeup, nostril mining, ogling secretaries, canoodling in the supply closet, planning vacations, looking for another job, squeaky chair adjustment, bathroom magazine consumption, and phone sex. And the No. 1 time-waster of all -- complaining -- isn't even mentioned.

Finally, the survey omits a growing portion of the working population -- those of us who toil in home offices. We don't have bosses looking over our shoulders. No one's timing how long we spend in the bathroom. We can "space out" to our hearts' content, at least until the bills come due.

We at-home workers waste time in many of the same ways as our corporate peers -- Internet surfing, running errands, yakking on the phone -- but the boundaries are blurred. Going to the post office, for instance, could be personal errand or top-priority business, depending on what's being mailed and how desperate we are to get out of the house.

Because nobody's watching, we can waste time in ways not available to people who work in real offices: Wandering aimlessly around the house. Random mumbling. Uninterrupted hours of computer solitaire. Toenail maintenance. Phone pranks. Counting dust bunnies. Staring out the window. Staring into the refrigerator. Staring into the depths of our tortured souls.

The only way we work-at-home types get anything done is by exercising discipline and maintaining a rigid work schedule.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my regularly scheduled "spacing out."

High-caliber time

Today we present an ode to the perfect block of time, an often-overlooked measure that has a magic all its own: 45 minutes.

Forty-five minutes is a temporal Eden, a slice of heaven, a just-right serving of our harried lives.

If you've got 45 minutes, you don't have to hurry. You can accomplish most anything in 45 minutes, if you have to. But if you must kill 45 minutes, you don't feel guilty like you would if you wasted a whole hour.

There's something intrinsically comforting about that three-quarters wedge of the clock face. No matter what odious task might await, you'll feel better when you look up at the clock and see you have 45 minutes to do it. Oh, you'll think, I've still got 45 minutes. I can take my time. (Or, conversely, if I hustle like hell, I can make it.) But it'll be okay. After all, I've got 45 minutes.

Most of us don't work more than 45 minutes straight. We take coffee breaks or potty breaks or gossip breaks. You put in a good 45 minutes' work, you feel like you've earned a trip to the water cooler.

You can get most anywhere in 45 minutes, unless you live in one of the really congested big cities. Somebody calls and says, "Can you meet me in 45 minutes," the answer almost always is "yes."

This makes 45 minutes the perfect social cushion. In 45 minutes, you can usually change clothes and still show up on time, more or less. If you're 45 minutes late to a social function, it's still "fashionably late." If you're 45 minutes early, you can always wait in the car. And, 45 minutes is the shortest amount of time you can stay at a dull party before gracefully making your escape.

Forty-five minutes is the absolute longest a speech should ever be. If you're the banquet speaker and you go past 45 minutes, you can rest assured that your audience has gone on to thinking about something else, such as fly-fishing. They need antacids and they need bathrooms and they need more drinks. Wrap your speech up quickly and sit down.

Forty-five minutes' notice is the minimum if you're showing up to someone's house without an advance invitation. Call us first. Tell us you'll be there in 45 minutes. In most households, that's enough time to frantically race about, picking up dirty socks and stray shoes and half-chewed doggie treats. We can get the house presentable in 45 minutes, if forced. Just don't look in the closets or under the beds.

You can do a load of laundry, start to finish, in 45 minutes, with the proper machine settings. This means you can wear the same jeans every day of your life, if you want.

You can read the whole newspaper in 45 minutes, and probably do the crossword puzzle. Leaf through a whole magazine. Pay all your bills.

Given 45 minutes, you'll tackle something you know will be time-consuming, such as ordering airline tickets on-line or cleaning the bathrooms. Less than that, and you'll likely put off the chore until later.

In 45 minutes, you can squeeze in a meal at a restaurant as long as you don't order anything too elaborate. It's always plenty of time for a snack, at least. You can pick up the phone right now and, in 45 minutes, a hot pizza will arrive at your door. Is this a great country or what?

Busy working parents know that 45 minutes is just enough time to catch our breaths. If an empty 45 minutes shows up unexpectedly in the middle of the day, it's a blessing. Enough time to take a real break. Thirty minutes never feels like enough -- we spend the whole time thinking about what we've got to do next. But, with 45 minutes, we can get a coffee, sit still for a little while, catch some quiet. Have a thought beyond the usual hurry, hurry, hurry.

And that 45 minutes might save your whole day.

Deal 'em, HAL

We were having the carpets cleaned at our house, and I was sitting at my desk in my home office. No chance of doing anything productive with carpet-cleaning machinery roaring all around, so I was plunking away at computer Solitaire.

The carpet guy noticed and said, "Solitaire, huh? It's funny, with all the high-tech games out there, the one I see people playing most is good old Solitaire."

"It's my downfall," I said without looking away from the screen, too busy losing another game. "Keeps me from getting any work done."

"You're in good company," he said. "Everywhere I go, doctors and lawyers, everyone's playing Solitaire."

That brought me up short. Here's a guy who spends all day in other folks' offices and homes and, everywhere he goes, people are wasting time playing cards with their computers? Don't they have anything better to do?

I recently saw a good movie called "The Man from Elysian Fields." In the film, Andy Garcia plays an unsuccessful novelist (a role for which I felt a special empathy). During one tough period in the novelist's life, he's suffering from writer's block. How did the filmmakers illustrate this? They zoomed in close to his computer to show he was playing Solitaire instead of working.

A guilty titter arose from the audience, one that said, "Been there. Done that."

And all this time I thought I was the only one who wasted hours of every workday playing computer Solitaire and its evil cousin, Free Cell. Apparently, the problem is more widespread.

You might expect that people like me, those without regular jobs, would be especially susceptible to this addiction. We're in our home offices all day with no bosses looking over our shoulders.
But "doctors and lawyers?" Are attorneys spending their billable hours diddling their keyboards rather than seeking truth and justice and headline-grabbing tobacco settlements? Are doctors taking time away from patients to have "consultations" with their computers?

These days, most American workers have computers on their desks. Are they all squeezing in a few hands of Solitaire between clients? Is this why you can never get anyone to answer a business phone?

The United States has the most productive workforce on the planet. Could we be even more productive if we weren't wasting huge amounts of time playing cards? If everyone stopped playing Solitaire, maybe we could pull the economy out of its slump.

Then again, perhaps Solitaire is the cause of the slump. Maybe, after 9/11 and Enron and Iraq and the deluge of other bad news, American workers said to themselves, "Whew, I can't take it anymore. Maybe a few quiet games of Solitaire will lift my spirits . . . "

Next thing you know, the economy's in the toilet.

You don't have to be completely paranoid to take this even further, though it helps. Computer Solitaire could be a terrorist plot to wreck our productivity. Or, it could be Bill Gates' secret plan to take over the world economy.

That "irrational exuberance" Alan Greenspan's always going on about? That's when someone wins a game.

Because what could be more irrational than devoting large blocks of time to a game that's so hard to win? No matter how much you practice (and, believe me, I've tested this theory), Solitaire remains very difficult. Lots of luck involved. Make one wrong move and -- pfft! -- it's time to start over.

And you will start a new game. You might plan to just dip in, play one little game, and get out again before anyone notices that you're wasting company time. But you're an American; you want to win. Next thing you know, the only people left in the office are you and the janitors.

How can we stop this evil influence? By swearing off Solitaire. We can become more productive workers and stop wasting our lives.

Follow my lead, America. No more Solitaire. Find a better way to use your workday.

I, personally, intend to spend more time playing Tetris.

Clock watcher

As I write this, the computer tells me it's 9:29 a.m. The clock on the wall says it's 9:32. In the kitchen, it's 9:31. The bedroom alarm clocks say 9:41 and 9:27. The VCR says it's 12:00, over and over.

Time, as every working parent knows, is at a premium. But at my house we can't even agree on what time it is.

I point to the wall clock as I'm herding my two sons out the door every morning, and they both consult their watches and inform me that we really have minutes to spare. We get to the car, only to find that the dashboard clock has made liars of us all.

It's not that we want all these variations on time. I periodically go around the house, setting all the clocks to the same time. But they gain a minute here or lose a minute there, and pretty soon confusion reigns. Fresh batteries seem to make no difference. The clocks all have minds of their own. They are, in that respect, just like people, and we know how danged unpredictable people can be.

The measurement of time is an arbitrary device anyway. The only trustworthy measure is light and dark, day and night. Our ancestors invented time so we'd know when to go to work and when our favorite shows are on TV.

We all have an internal clock, telling us when to hurry and when to slow down (if ever), but immense variations exist. Most people go at their own pace, and you can bet their pace will differ from yours. This is why people in management positions gradually pull out all their hair. You can insist that people speed up, yell and sputter and get ulcers, but most folks will go faster only when you're watching. Then it's right back to their own tempo.

We all think we know the correct speed for everyday living. This is why, as some comedian said, everybody driving slower than you is an idiot and everybody driving faster than you is a maniac. He could've added that we're also irritated by people going the exact same speed as us, especially if they're hitting the green lights and we're not.

Family members all seem to have their own timetables, based on temperament and time pressures and how much has to get done before bedtime arrives again. Spouses who work outside the home usually are in the biggest hurry, by necessity. They have too much to do and too little time to do it, plus they lose minutes or hours every day to commuting. Those of us who work at home can move along at a steadier rate, plugging away at our projects and our housework, sure in the knowledge that it'll all get done eventually. Unless we're facing a deadline, then we're the ones who are all harried and weird.

Then there's kid time. Children live at a different speed than us so-called adults. It's not a parallel universe. In their world, EVERYTHING can wait until the last minute. Procrastination is their byword, even if they can't pronounce it. No matter how well you plan and how much you urge and prod, they will move at their own speed (which is to say at a snail's pace) until even all the mismatched clocks in the house will agree that you're late.

At my house, we have to leave for school at 8 a.m. I start nagging at 7:15, saying "we're gonna be late" so many times that even I get sick of hearing it. At 7:59, as I'm ready to walk out the door, one son will discover that -- oops! -- he's still not wearing shoes. The other needs lunch money or can't find his homework. Or, they're both missing their wristwatches and we have to scramble around madly in search of them. Then it's up to Dad to race through traffic -- weaving between the idiots and the maniacs -- to make up that lost time. The fact that we reach school before the bell is a daily miracle.

I'd like to fix this situation. I'd like to teach my sons to plan ahead, to set a schedule, to make certain they can meet life's deadlines. But frankly, I can't find the time.