I just realized that I've been out of town three of the last five weekends and that I have committments (some local, some out of town) for eight of the next nine weekends. Seeing as how work has also been rather insane lately, I suppose I shouldn't find it so surprising that I've been exhausted.
What strikes me the most is that this both does and doesn't match up with my notions of how people spend their time. When I was growing up, I had the usual round of suburban activities. I went to Hebrew school on Tuesday and Thursday after school and on Sunday mornings. Monday was piano lessons and Wednesday was ballet class. No wonder my mother refused when I said that I wanted to be a Girl Scout.
I dropped piano in 4th grade, but then I took viola in school. I seem to remember string quartet meeting before school one or two mornings a week. And I was also in the chorus (which seems horribly unlikely, given my lack of singing ability, but I was) and that was also a before school thing. I guess it's good that I got homework done quickly, because I don't really remember any shortage of time for just playing.
In junior high, I was free of most of lessons. But I had the school newspaper (which I was even editor of in 8th grade) and math club. At some point - 8th grade, I think - I started taking piano lessons again. But, thinking back to those years, I remember spending most of my time hanging out with other kids who lived on the block. There was a trick involving playing music downstairs just loudly enough that my folks could hear it, but not so loudly that they'd complain, enabling me to sneak out the back door.
High school wasn't much different - just a different round of activities. I still took piano lessons for a while, until my teacher ran off to Brazil with her boyfriend. There were school plays, and non-school plays, too, come to think of it. I was in the local theatre group, run by one of our neighbors. I had a tremendous crush on one of the actors, a guy who was at least 10 to 12 years older than me. And I vaguely remember cast parties involving sing-alongs and people dancing on tables and the like. I also did more normal extracurricular activities - various intramural sports (tennis, badminton, archery), modern dance club, student government, science club. The main point is that I almost never came home right from school. And I went to a science program in the city (at Columbia University) on Saturday mornings for three years, and often hung out in the city in the afternoons with other kids from that program.
The thing that strikes me about all this is that I never thought I was particularly busy. True, my brother was less involved in things, but he still played the piano and played soccer. My parents were active in our synagogue. Dad went to the gym a couple of nights a week and Mom had her standing mah jongg game and they went to the theatre fairly regularly. Even in college, I kept up with going folk dancing a couple of times a week (and taking other dance classes) and being active in Hillel. I was less involved in organized things in grad school, though I still took dance classes off and on.
It's obvious that I've never gotten past the extracurricular activities approach to life. The problem now is that it's harder and harder to find time for the "have to do" stuff like housework, so I end up sleep-deprived over annoying things, instead of fun ones. That didn't stop me from going to a story swap last night or planning to go to a concert tomorrow night, however. I am seriously looking forward to retirement.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel