My Weekend, Part I

What I did this Weekend and why I haven’t had Time to Blog.

By Michael “Wunderkind” Pape

As you may have guessed from my many mentions of this the past week, I am borderline obsessed with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. I have to specify Men’s, because I don’t want you to be confused and think that I also like the Women’s Tournament, which I don’t. Nobody does. Ok, that’s not true, but let me put it to you this way: like the rest of male sports-loving America, I view women’s basketball as a totally different sport from men’s due to the relative lack of athleticism and ability on display by the women. Major women’s college basketball looks a lot like NAIA Div. II Men’s basketball to us. Note how high the ratings are for NAIA Div. II. They don’t exist.

(side rant: Why are ESPN, ESPN.com, etc., all trying to sell us on the fact that Pat Summit of Tennesee is the “greatest college basketball coach of all time”? They’re two different levels of sport. I’m sure she’s just as talented a coach as Kryzewski and Dick Bennett – but it’s like comparing apples and smaller, better looking apples that can’t dunk. She belongs in a different discussion entirely.)

Having sufficiently alienated my female audience (not really, since the only female I can say for sure reads this blog is my wife, and she’s way less patient with women’s b-ball than even I am), I will now address the topic at hand – why have I not updated this blog for real since early last week. You see, my obsession with the tournament led me to do something that I virtually never do: fricking relax*. I just sat in front of the TV and watched games. Sure, Jill and I went to breastaurants and watched games (and other things) there too, but the point is, I wasn’t doing anything productive and I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking about: either job and how insane the bosses are; blogging some entertaining crap; Terry Schaivo (and I still can’t bring myself to really get emotionally involved in this issue, for reasons I may or may not get into); making the most of my time; shoehorning loved ones into the remaining time we had free; starting a new business involving computers; book distribution methods. I was just thinking about the next play, and maybe what I wanted to eat next. It was great.

The preceding paragraph may seem a little narcissistic, but I’m telling this to you, to help you. You know the saying, “You just need to chill”? Well, turns out it’s true. Our chilly friends are on to something. There is no substitute for having nothing to do. It’s like in Office Space, when the question is asked, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” Peter, the main character, answers “nothing”, which reveals him to be a type of person much reviled in the business world today: one whose heart is ultimately committed to the idea that he or she is working not for the company but to be free of the company. Part of the reason that movie is so funny is it exposes the truth that so many people (probably the majority of people) feel trapped by their jobs and lifestyles. I am, totally. Let me take a second to explain this to you.

My wife and I have a certain quality of life we lead right now. With me working two jobs and my wife working one job, at least when we have money troubles they are usually caused by us trying to pay down our debt, and not because we just have no money. We live pretty well, actually, in a nice apartment in an ok area of town. We have expenses, though, and they add up. Cable TV, cell phones, a water cooler, washer/dryer rental, DSL internet, Sunday Brunches with Cheese Eggs, Starbucks, soda, and other unmentionables are things that we don’t need, but we somehow can’t live without. The thing is, if we gave all that up, it seems to me that life would almost be too annoying to take, and it wouldn’t really make that much of a dent in our relative monthly bills anyway. So we stay in this luxurious life and alternately feel powerfully blessed and powerfully trapped.

The real problem is our debt, which makes us the same as everybody else. With all the good jobs in other countries now, it makes it hard to just work one job and pay the debt down. Now, we got ourselves into this mess for the most part (although credit card companies/consumer culture share some of the blame as well – just don’t suggest that to them, because they will totally freak out), but it doesn’t change the fact that we are paying huge amounts of interest to these scum with no end in sight. If I would say, quit Papa John’s, these companies would have even more of a grip on us than we do now. My wife wouldn’t allow it, and I couldn’t do it. So I continue working for these lunatics, having very little time to look for any better jobs. How is this good? I’m wasting my life here to pay down my debt, little by little. It’s depressing.

Also depressing is the fact that everyone around me seems to want to scam me in some way to get money from me for doing as little as possible. You may call that economics, I call it declaring war on your fellow citizens. Companies of all shapes and sizes are hiring salesmen right now to separate me from as much of my hard-earned money as possible. I hate salesmen, which I why when I had to opportunity to sell even something as ultimately helpful as insurance and financial packages I turned it down. Even government agencies are trying to get my money to use on whatever crap they choose, as the City of Richardson proved when it charged me $170 for going over the speed limit in a tunnel with no cars around me and no intersections within a quarter mile in either direction. It’s just evil.

And don’t get me started on identity theft...the FBI is wasting valuable resources on finding out who is providing copyrighted songs to people on peer-to-peer networks (songs that the downloaders either will purchase in the future or would not have purchased anyway), meanwhile thousands (millions?) of people are having their lives ruined by scam scum. Ok, I got started on this subject, I’m sorry. Moving on…

So this weekend I realized that once a week I need to take a day to do nothing, especially since I don’t have kids to muck that whole plan up. Is it selfish? Maybe. Is it going to create friction with people? Probably. Is it necessary? Only in the same sense that DSL internet is necessary. If I’m going to be trapped in this life and these jobs, I might as well enjoy them at least once a week.

*This seems like a good place to mention the fact that my only other annual time of real relaxation besides the NCAA Tournament is my video-game-intensive trip to St. Louis. Yeah, work prevented me from attending that last year for scummy reasons (that if I think about them now I will scream), so I had been would very tightly for a very long time. Perhaps that’s why this year’s Tournament weekend seemed so refreshing.

Next: Part II – The NCAA Tournament Games and You