October 27th, 2010 / 3:17 pm
Random

We Are All Very Busy Being Busy

We are all very busy. We are busy being busy. We worship at the altar and suckle at the teat of busy. When I say we, I mean you, me, us. We are a cult of busy busy people. If you are busy, we will follow you and drink your Kool-Aid. We love to talk about how busy we are. We say I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy—an exultation. We say we are busy and feel flushed.  We are busy, therefore we are. To be busy is to be important and to be important is everything. We will Twitter and Facebook and blog our busyness and we will do so with the conviction of martyrs. We will bear our busy burden. The burden of busy must be borne because to be busy is to be important and to be important is to matter. We matter and are made of matter which is meta.  We have work and school and work and school. We study, we teach, we grade  and grade and grade. We live below the poverty line but revel in that poverty because we have a second and third job that keep us busy. We go to mind numbing office jobs where we are busy with boredom. We hold cushy corporate positions we love to talk about because we make so much money being busy we don’t have the time to spend it. We have meetings and sometimes we have meetings within our meetings because we are that damn busy. In our limited free time we edit three magazines and run a small press and we may never respond to you or actually publish anything but we’re on the masthead and we have many official sounding titles so we have proof we are that busy. We get so many emails each day demanding our attention and our time and we try to keep up but we cannot so we are busy stemming the tide of electronic correspondence, sending messages but never reading the responses. We have online presences so we have to visit several sites every few seconds to remind ourselves and everyone we know and love and loathe how busy we are. We write 3,500 words a day and then exhaustively edit those 3,500 words once twice three times and we make sure to mention on Facebook that we’ve done those things, oh yes, we will tell you what we’ve written for the day and how important we are for taking that care with our words despite how busy we are. We will tell you what we are going to write while you idle people are sleeping because we do not sleep, we do not need sleep, we have not the time for sleep. We will go places and meet people while we are there though we won’t spend too long because we are so busy. We’re in four writing groups where we critique the work of our friends and enemies and later talk shit about that writing to other friends and enemies. We read obscure literary texts and think deep thoughts about those obscure  literary texts and write things about those obscure literary texts so everyone knows we are reading obscure literary texts despite the fact we are so busy. We curate two reading series and boast about all the Internet Famous writers who will be reading with us. We pretend we don’t watch television but really we do, oh how we do and we spend moments of our precious time thinking about the unbelievable fact that Vanilla Ice has a reality show on DIY and how none of the new TV shows this fall are any good even though we can’t stop watching them. We have kids and those kids never leave us alone when we are busy working on our laptops but the kids are so damn cute so we’ll bitch about  how busy they keep us and how much we love them even though they get in the way. We’re married or in relationships and once in a while we have to have sex with our significant others and otherwise give them some attention. We look at our lovers day in and day out and acknowledge that yes, this is really it for the rest of our lives and while we’re so busy, we ignore the nagging feeling we are doing everything yet nothing at all because we are far too busy to do anything well and doing all of that each and every day keeps us extraordinarily busy—it is a vicious cycle.

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38 Comments

  1. Sean

      I’m way too busy to read this horse shit

  2. annalisababbles

      Thinking about Vanilla Ice actually makes me waste more time than anything else. I’m about to tweet that

  3. Rebekah

      I would probably agree with this if I could read it.

      IT IS ILLEGIBLE PUT IN SOME FUCKING PARAGRAPH BREAKS THIS ISN’T SOME EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL IT IS THE INTERNET AND WE NEED SOME SPACES IN BETWEEN OUR TEXT SO OUR BRAINS CAN PARSE IT.

  4. jesusangelgarcia

      busybusybusybusybusybusybusybusybusy…

      N O T H I N G N O T H I N G N O T H I N G

      busybusybusybusybusybusybusybusybusy…

      so on, so on, so on and so on, so on and so on and so on and so on

  5. Justin RM

      Easy there Bernhard . . . ah, forget it.

  6. Guest.

      Isn’t it being hypocritical to bitch about these things when you do most of it in your own blog?

  7. Sean

      I just can’t believe you people comment on this site. I’m way too busy for that.

      Roxane is utilizing form=function here, donut-slusher. It’s all mashed together like our daily lives. Pay attention.

      Ice has his own show?

  8. Ani Smith

      what does this even MEAN?

  9. Roxane

      You’ll note the use of the we here and I’m not sure you’ve actually read my blog because that’s not… what I do.

  10. Roxane

      Yes, he’s a house flipper now and a general contractor and that’s what his show is about–renovating a big house in FL. It’s terrible.

  11. Sean

      Damn that sounds so bad i might watch it.

  12. Tim Horvath

      Felt more Stephen Dixon…I don’t feel like Bernhard and busy go together.

  13. Brandon Scott Gorrell

      i like this

  14. Adam Robinson

      I gotta say I’m not that busy. I used to think I was busy, and I used to talk about myself as a busy person — but that’s embarrassing to me now. Let the record show that I see now that I’m not busy. But — when I’m out having a beer and suddenly remember someone I have to email, I FEEL busy.

  15. jesusangelgarcia

      Let’s look at it as a ratio:

      busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy : N O T H I N G N O T H I N G N O T H I N G :: busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy : so on, so on, so on and so on, so on and so on and so on and so on

      Or as a mathematics equation:

      busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy = N O T H I N G N O T H I N G N O T H I N G > < so on, so on, so on + so on, so on + so on + so on + so on = N O T H I N G N O T H I N G N O T H I N G > < busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy+busy = so on, so on, so on + so on, so on + so on + so on + so on

  16. Roxane

      I’m not that busy either. I’ll complain about being busy then watch Survivor and six episodes of Law & Order and hang out with my man friend so I’m trying to get less attached to thinking I am busy. I have lots of free time. I love it.

  17. Donald

      YOUR PARSING ABILITIES SEEM TO BE LOW-LEVEL. PERHAPS YOU ARE TOO BUSY TO KEEP TO YOUR PARSING PRACTICE SCHEDULE (?)

      OR MAYBE TOO BUSY EVEN TO PARSE THE SCHEDULE AND THEREFORE FILLED WITH A TERRIBLE UNCERTAINTY WHICH, IN TURN, BREEDS IN YOUR SOUL A BLANK AND DESPAIRING ANXIETY TO WHICH YOU MUST DEVOTE EVEN MORE OF YOUR BUSY BUSY UNPARSABLE SCHEDULE

      DAMN

  18. Rebekah

      I do not feel ‘burned.’

  19. Rebekah

      LIKE.

  20. Jimmy Chen

      and the self-defacing meta humor award goes to Justin RM, good job!

  21. Amber

      Hooray! Also, Vanilla Ice hit on me once at the Mall of America. I feel now that I will have to watch his show out of some kind of strange…compassion? Sadness? Also, did you know Tony Danza has a reality show where he’s a teacher?

      I’m not that busy, either. I spent my whole twenties being busy. My thirties is all about doing nothing except what I want to do, which is basically sit around and watch movies and read and play video games. And sometimes write. I have no goals. It’s pretty sweet.

  22. Adam Robinson

      Right on, exactly. I watched season 7 of 24 last week. I felt terrible while doing it, and I had to wake up at 4am to do it, but I did it. (Btw, having done it, let me tell anyone who wants to watch that show the trick is just to watch the first 5 and last 5 minutes of each episode.)

  23. Ani Smith

      nope, sorry, still not doing it for me. ;-)

  24. Donald

      I wish I could say the same, Rebekah.

  25. unreliable narrator

      TL;DR;TB*.

      * TB = too busy.

  26. jesusangelgarcia

      You’re so mean, Ani. I’ll see you after school.

  27. Molly Gaudry

      I’m fucking busy. So go fuck yourselves.

  28. Molly Gaudry

      How’s that for mean?

      Fuck Mean Week, too!

  29. Mcmfs

      I think this might be the most right on post I’ve ever seen on HTMLgiant.

  30. Jim W

      Awesome.

  31. Guest

      burnt, y’all

  32. Richard Thomas

      beat me to it :-)

  33. Richard Thomas

      …jesus roxane, you just made me kill myself

  34. Joseph Young

      makes me wish someone would write a long contemplative essay on the pleasure of being busy. you know? we’ve had like 250 years of the contemplative essays on the bad of busy–since like hazlit and lamb and them bofos–how about the ups of it? the ups of texting and facebook, all in luxuriently lucid and limpid prose. and as an counterpoint a frenetic saxophone improvisation that celebrates staring at a rock for 5 hours.

  35. SCS

      And then there is the whole paying rent thing.

  36. deadgod

      motion does not = busy

      the difference?

  37. MM

      why are we so schizo? do the writers and workers of culturally-distant nations too endure this ridiculous race against ‘ourselves’? i’m reading reading (a locked-groove inattentivity while parsing a slender paragraph) a Buddhist because I can’t manage my own mania, can’t quite get my cock in my mouth, tail in my teeth, and those silly mahnks say so much of our mental anguish is modern.

      glad to hear some of you use your leisure with no illusions. i myself am much too sleepy, stay up all night under Houdini, then crash and can’t wake up even if i drug myself, these days, these sick and flashy days.

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