No diners for the feast of words

It's not so much the immense waste of time I resent. I mean, I've mastered so  many different ways of wasting time that this new one is just a drop in the time-wasting bucket, so to speak. No, what I resent is that from the start of this project a little voice in a distant corner of my brain kept telling me that it was all a big boondoggle unlikely to come to fruition--and yet I still allowed myself to get sucked into the vortex and devote hours of work to making it happen. 

Which it won't. Happen. As I should have known all along. And this is why people don't volunteer to do things, said one of my colleagues, and I concur.

But is all that time spent in preparing for an event that will not now occur really wasted? 

Years ago (and I know I've told this story before) when I was an adjunct at another institution, I spent some time on campus photocopying syllabi a few days before classes started and several colleagues asked why I was there. "I didn't think you were teaching this semester," they said, but I insisted that I'd been hired to teach a British Literature Survey class. Someone must have alerted the Dean because I arrived home to find a message on my answering machine saying oops, sorry, forgot to tell you we're not allowing adjuncts to teach literature classes anymore. I called at once and pointed out the injustice of failing to inform me that I wouldn't be teaching the class until I'd already done all the preparation, and the Dean told me, "Don't worry, you'll be able to use that work in some other class."

My time hadn't been wasted, she insisted, but in fact I never did use that work in another class because the topic was outside my area of expertise. Still, perhaps the exercise in assembling a syllabus and lesson plans for the course served me well elsewhere. All I knew was that I was out of a job and stuck with a pile of photocopies representing a mass of wasted time.

Nothing we do for children is ever wasted, insists Garrison Keillor, and I'm happy to substitute students for children. But what about non-students? What about the course (or program or, I don't know, summer creative writing day camp for high school students, if such a thing might exist) that gets cancelled at the last minute due to lack of enrollment? It's hard to feel good about preparing a hearty and delicious feast and then having no one show up to devour it.

But on the other hand, I now have a bunch of unexpected free time next week. I ought to find someone meaningful to do with that time, but somehow it would seem more appropriate to simply let it go to waste.