Busy, Busy

I have a philosophical riddle for you to ponder. I would ponder it myself but I’m far too busy with more important things. The riddle is this: if everyone is busy – very, very busy -- doesn’t that really mean no one is busy? After all, we can’t all be busier than everyone else, can we? And yet everyone I know, everyone I read about or hear about, claims to be frantically busy. We’re a society bustling with busyness, agitated by all our activities. No one has time to do anything because we’re all so darn busy. Busy is the new black.

The problem is that a lot of you are busyness bamboozlers. You’re just pretending to be busy. You’re like those all-circuits-are-busy multinational corporations that have an unending supply of sales people to take our money and exactly one very “busy” employee, who is frequently either out to lunch or clipping his toenails, to take our calls when we need service.

I, on the other hand, am truly busy. In poker terms, I could see your busyness bet and raise you a bundle. Even my dog is busy. Even the fleas on my dog are busy. If I had the time, I’d tell you what I’m doing to make me so busy but it’s not really any of your business anyway.

However, I do want credit for my superior state of busyness, so I’m proposing a national rating system to separate the truly busy from the bogusly busy. We live, after all, in an age in which everything is measurable. We have numerical tables to tell us if we’re thin or not-so-thin, rich or not-so-rich, tall or height-challenged. We have cholesterol levels and credit scores, but when it comes to determining who is a bona fide busy person, we’re on our own. And that’s dangerous. You’ve got people running around all over the place claiming to be busier than everyone else, and most of them are lying. This must be stopped.

I suggest we appoint the members of Congress, who frequently seem to have too much time on their hands, to serve on a committee which would establish busyness benchmarks. Of course, we’d have to engage in a national debate about what exactly counts as being busy. A single mom (or dad) working two jobs to make ends meet? Busy. Britney Spears hitting every Starbucks in a 10-mile radius? Not so much.

Does exercise merit a mark on the busy meter? Oh, yeah. Unless you are – like my daughter – only working out your thumbs through too much text-messaging. What about shopping? If, like me, you have to go from store to store trying to find something that makes you look slim, you are definitely busy. If you are a size 2 and everything automatically looks great, you are definitely not busy. (And, by the way, I hate you.)

There would, of course, have to be safeguards in place to prevent corruption of the high standards of the Busy Brigade -- as our new committee should be called -- by a host of special interest groups, including the very powerful Bureau of Unmotivated Men (BUM) to which several members of my own family belong. Being labeled as officially busy must mean something, and it must be a difficult rank to achieve. Constant complaining or channel surfing – regular activities in my household – would not count.

I anticipate years of lobbying and litigation over this issue from the lazy. But I honestly believe it would be worth it. Those of us who exemplify the best of busyness must be set aside from those who give it a bad name.

~ Jackie Papandrew ~
© 2008, All Rights Reserved

Jackie Papandrew is an award-winning writer, syndicated humor columnist, coffee addict and mom to a motley crew of children and pets who provide a steady stream of column ideas and dirt. She's also wife to a very patient man who had no idea, years ago when he still had time to escape, what he was getting himself into. Visit her website at:  JackiePapandrew.com

[ by Jackie Papandrew Copyright © 2008, (me@jackiepapandrew.com) -- submitted by: Jackie Papandrew ]