"That guy has too much spare time" is usually followed up by "I bet that guy never gets laid."

Blah on the insulting bastards.

BTW, this has *never* been said of me. heh.

kolacky has too much spare time and never gets laid

Story of my life, d00d... too little time to have too much time on my hands......

The other classic is, after you've told someone something geeky and cool you discovered/did: "Huh. So how's your dissertation coming along?"

Basically, the only people I feel I can talk to about the stuff that really interests me are online.

How many *billion* dollar companies were started by people avoiding their dissertations? Yahoo, definitely.

(I am still going to write it btw)

I'm with you on everything but Disney.

I have noticed that mostly assholes use that term, when they're feeling uneasy and uncomfortable and don't know what else to say.

Great rant, but please note an even more vicious, and more common, phrasing of the same thing: "Get a life!"

Well said, Cory. The one thing I've noticed about people who say "get a life" or "you have too much time on your hands" or my personal favorite, "you think too much" are all identically dull. Obsessed people are much more interesting.

Amen Brother Cory, Amen. Can we get a group Amen for our brother?


AMEN

You mean, if somebody spends all of his time composing ego enhancing opinion rants and posting them on an obscure web sit, we should give him some slack?....right??

Reclaim this vocabulary: focus.

I have yet to meet anyone whose eyes didn't glaze over when I shared a look through my collection. And then one friend, no more interested in my subject that any one else, listened to my embarrassed and short description of "what I'd been up to lately" (collecting) and exclaimed with delight: "See what happens when you focus!" She shared my pleasure in my little obsession without sharing my interest. What a joy to know friends like her.

Everything that is art has started out with someone doing something humans always do in the most elaborate way possible. People draw things to communicate; taken to the next level, it becomes art. We move; do it in a stylized manner, and it's dance. We use words to communicate information and history; formalize it and you're a novelist.

The difference between wasting time and creating art is usually just a hundred years or so...

Well said, Cory! People's compulsions and fasincations are interesting -- if not interesting to me in and of themselves, still interesting in terms of what they bring out in the other person.

Mr. Kindall's elegant thought was once explained to me with a minor spin. That painting and dance, specifically, were once necessary ways of communicating. And that once speech and writing were developed, these prior means were no longer vital for basic communication and so, as he said, were made into more elaborate, purely artful, forms of expression.

All this puts me in mind of Christopher Guest's "Waiting for Guffman" and "Best in Show," films which satirize their subjects' obsessions and dreams only a very little through exaggeration, and very much through simply too close a focus. Watching them makes me squirm in my seat a little, 'cause it's all too clear how easily the same could be done to writing science fiction, or any of a number of my passions (which I believe is Guest's explicit intent.)

Cory, I think this is probably the best thing you've ever written (and you've written a lot of good stuff). Bravo!