I'm Busy Doing Nothing

From Tom Gauld's, Physics for Cats.

For reasons unknown to modern science, I dawdle. It might be one of the great mysteries of life, why we, as a species, enjoy looking at clouds, watching fog roll in, or the effects of the wind in the trees. In fact, I genuinely enjoy a good dawdle. I muck about. I futz. Sure you could say I mess about and procrastinate, but procrastination is more about putting off a difficult task you aren't keen on. That's not what I mean, though to be clear, I put the "pro" in procrastination and sometimes I also put the "crass" in procrastination, but I do not put the "nation" in procrastination, that is entirely up to the ministry of foreign affairs, which when you think about does sound like you're up to a bit of naughty fun with a visiting dignitary. See what I mean? It's like I actually procrastinate from procrastinating. When I futz about, I am talking about all the time I waste doing nothing in between other times when I'm doing nothing, and I do so industriously.

I've heard a story that Steve Jobs was so infuriated by how long it took a computer to start up, he calculated how much of his year was wasted sitting unproductively in front of a machine. He challenged his engineers to improve the start-up time. They couldn't, so instead they created "sleep mode" which put the computer into a low-energy mode that could be "awakened" almost instantaneously, giving the appearance of a fast start-up time. The lesson is that even very smart people can't complete an assigned task and will be forced instead to trick their boss into thinking they've done it. Unfortunately, that innovation led us to never shutting our machines off. I used to be like Steve Jobs and hated wasting precious minutes of my day until I heard Douglas Copeland's term, "Time Snack", which he coined to refer to the small moments when a device reboots to relax and take a micro-break from work. I now embrace the slowdown in our work day that slow machines give us. I'm still weirdly impatient, but I'm also weirdly good at wasting my own time. In a sense, I wonder if I dawdle/futz/muck about so that my body feels busy, but my mind is at rest. Let me relate an example of this.

One of the reasons I go to bed so late is that betwixt the time when I brush my teeth, floss, and rinse, I also do a fair amount of busy nothingness (previously referred to as "futzing"). On one particular evening, I noticed a very large beetle of dark origins about the size of a human thumb on the moulding of my bathroom door. I decided to take decisive action and flick it to the floor where I thought it could be more easily squashed or wrestled Jiu-Jitsu style into submission. I did this, for unknown reasons, with the strap of the watch I was holding in my hand. I swiped at the giant creature which fell quickly to the floor and bounced into my bedroom where it inexplicably disappeared. I don’t mean I lost sight of it but that I was looking at it when in between bounces it disappeared. Good, I thought. I just pushed a magical and evil insect Kaju the size of Kafka's Gregor Samsa, into my bedroom which is the room where I sleep. Now I started imagining I could hear its exoskeletal legs scuttling across the wooden floor like an unseen monster in a Guillermo del Toro film. Sleep comes easy to the unworried mind so I should have no problems staying up all night imagining just where this thing was going to lay its eggs. Then something odd happened.

Rather than be consumed by the thought of an angry and aggressive insect lying in wait, I wished I had a flashlight to look for it, but my mind went further off route. The reason I don't keep a flashlight in the bedroom is that the batteries always die before I have a chance to use it. I had just read about a technology that charges small sensors by using radio waves and wi-fi signals nearby meaning they never need to be charged (some surprisingly old spy listening devices work this way). Why couldn't I have a flashlight that is charged by essentially "ambient" radiation or energy? Then I thought about the billions (or whatever) of neutrinos that bombard us all the time. Why can't our bedspread be made of some material, some kind of nanotech capacitive mesh, that is charged by the bombardment of neutrinos? Ooo, I thought, that's good! Then I stopped what I was doing and made a note of it on my phone. Then I thought, that's rubbish, because the reason neutrinos pass through everything so easily is they are so small and have no effect, therefore what kind of magic blanket would be so affected by such tiny particles that it could create and store a charge enough to create light?

By this time, I realized it was almost 1AM and I still hadn't flossed my teeth or rinsed my mouth and would probably give up on the idea of doing a plank and stretching before bed. Then I thought when are we going to have some decent nano-tech to clean my teeth while I sleep? Then I realized how sleepy I was and wondered how I had managed to flippantly futz away over 40 minutes when I so badly needed to be in bed? Then I got miffed at myself for being so easily distracted by nothing, doing nothing, that I had wasted so much time not sleeping when all I wanted to do was sleep. I suppose that's what happens when you let your thoughts get away from you. You waste a lot of time, accomplish nothing, and get less sleep. Often if there is some spacey event happening when some sciency people suggest we should look skyward at night, I'll follow along and make time for a wee bit of star gazing. Usually, I stand on my deck, squinting at our celestial ceiling and even with the few dots we can see in Toronto, I wonder how our ancestors did it. How much time did they spend so much time looking into space to recognize the same stars, give them nifty mnemonic names and see enough of a pattern to figure out where they would be up in the night sky? Did one of their neighbours say, "Hoo boy, Old Abe is out there looking up at the stars again, wasting time." More than likely, Old Abe was a clever insomniac with a great memory, and like many great futzers, dawdlers and time wasters, spent his time deep in thought in between other important things like flossing and brushing, or waiting for his teeth to fall out or whatever the ancients did with their teeth. Here's to us and to them.