I took the day off today, which I don’t do very often. I’m one of those people that even on Saturdays check their email every 90 minutes and leave my work phone on the charger but turn up the ring volume real loud (just in case).
I’m not playing hooky: I just put in for a vacation day. I have plenty saved up - I just thought it might be nice to be home on Halloween to…I don’t know,
take a bath,
or start a soup going
or get my costume ready
or straighten up the house while a scary film is on.
None of these things sound very vacation-y, I understand that – but these are the MOST relaxing things I have planned today. I also have to drop off the air conditioner at the storage unit, get the groceries, and take back the kitchen garbage can they sent us because it wasn’t the one that we ordered.
Who am I kidding…I’ll never have time for a bath.
Hailing from the midwest (and the 1970’s), I grew up thinking that vacations were always supposed to involve beaches and books of light fiction.
But then the AT&T company ruined that fantasy with a series of commercials titled “You Will”. These were futuristic scenarios involving how technology was going to impact our lives in a few decades.
They were amazingly accurate, predicting GPS, videophones, hand held computers, and the internet, but the one that really hit home asked the question “Have you ever sent someone a fax from the beach?” Besides the fax part, they predicted the “working from home” scenario pretty well.
I just learned that those spots were directed by a young David Fincher, who now is an award winning director of psychological thrillers… super disturbing ones like Se7en and Fight Club, which explains why those spots, voiced over by the dulcet tones of Tom Selleck, held such a steady undercurrent of uncomfortable tension. In each spot, Tom asked us if we had done any of these (at the time) impossible things, then answered, sort of ominously,
“You will…”,
which sounded a little bit more like a threat than a promise.
But when I first saw this man writing on an electronic tablet (impossible) with no wires (impossible) then sending what he wrote to an office thousands of miles away with just a touch (crazy impossible), I felt insulated from this impossibleness due to the fact that those were 3 impossible things all stacked on top of one another.
“Wow!” Young Me said, “That sounds amazing!”
“Ugh.” Me says now,
unable to get even an arm’s length away from my work since my email also shows up on my watch.
I suppose that a real day off would involve being disconnected. Off-line. Maybe in a cabin, deep within the woods, away from everything, with no cell phone service - whoa, no, that sounds terrifying. Way too Halloween-y. Wouldn’t want that. Yeesh.
A perfect day off would involve everyone at work ALSO being off, so that there was no reason for anyone to call anyone about anything, but the reality of my current surroundings does not allow for that.
So every moment, my unread emails expand, like The Blob, absorbing time not yet spent. Papers stack, unfiled. Updates aren’t updated, statuses stagnate, the world moves forward but my desk is left behind, covered in weeds and vines and moss … I will return to a ruin where nature has once again taken hold.
Oh yeah. I absolutely have no idea how to do this.
I think I’ll start with a cup of tea, then listen to “Disney’s Chilling Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House” in the car while I do my errands.
I suppose I’ll be dressing as “FOMO” this year.
Thank you for joining me for my annual series of Spookytime columns,
all six loosely tied together by a wee precious title conceit:
Creepy
Cookie
Mysterioso
Scooby
All, Together
Hooky.
Do you see it? Need a clue?
May I suggest that snapping twice, with both hands, might be just the Thing.
Happy Halloween.
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