The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas always feel like a slow slog uphill through mud, with "Jingle Bell Rock" on the soundtrack. I look at my calendar for the next month and I see way too many things: concerts and papers to grade and finals and capstone presentations and shopping and wrapping and decorating and packing for a trip, plus dealing with the prospect of a week or more without a refrigerator right in the middle of holiday baking season. (The schedules got messed up and the new fridge got put on backorder and will be delivered probably around Dec. 18 but I can't get the rebate from the power company unless they pick up the old fridge on Dec. 9, so I will lose the old fridge on my birthday and gain the new one on our anniversary and simply live without a fridge for the intervening week, unless the schedule gets screwed up again, in which case I give up.)
What I don't see when I look at the calendar is a whole lot of nothing. I'd like to scatter swaths of nothing over the coming month, minutes or hours or days when I'm not required to go anywhere in particular or respond to anyone's urgent demands. I need to make a date with nothing, make nothing enough of a priority to post it on my calendar, but then when someone asks me what I'm doing on that date and I say "Nothing," they'll say, "Then I guess you'll have time to deal with this," and they'll hand me a big nasty mess of something.
So I need to disguise my spots of nothing with a code name, the way Algernon did in The Importance of Being Earnest when he begged out of commitments by claiming the need to visit an imaginary invalid named Bunbury. I don't believe I could convincingly create a Bunbury, but imaginary meetings might work. "I have a meeting" sounds plausible and so boring that it will spark few questions, because who wants to deal with the boring details of other people's boring meetings? And even if someone feels compelled to ask what I'll be doing at my meeting, "Oh, nothing much" will work because it perfectly describes the content of so many meetings.
No one needs to know that my meetings will be with Mr. Nothing. So don't tell, okay? It's just between you and me.
2 comments:
Depending on your audience, I'd have a meeting with Mr. Earnest Bunbury, or maybe Dr. Earnest Bunbury. And see if anyone gets it.
A brilliant plan. I wouldn't try it with my colleagues in the English or Theatre departments, but it might work well elsewhere.
Post a Comment