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.)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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??

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


AMEN

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.

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

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

I'm with you on everything but Disney.

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)

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

kolacky has too much spare time and never gets laid

"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.

Oh, s./ you are SO wrong.

Go to any small place--neighborhood in a big city, small town, especially a hamlet of some kind--and you'll see a creative paradise. There are:
-- people making walls of their beer can collections,
-- women who have spent a good-sized portion of their productive years in the exacting and time-consuming work of tatting pillow case edgings
-- people who have recorded and transcribed the minutes of the historical society of some tiny, unimportant hamlet
-- studs who have lovingly collected the ticket stubs of each performance of their favorite band
-- reporters who have done multi-day interviews of obscure old women who were once members of the Italian nobility, then spent their adulthood as recluces until they learned to paint....

-- parrot rescuers

Point is, some of this stuff is irreplacable and precious, some will be forgotten, but it is all the purpose of humanity. We grow by being IN life, of it, involved in it. passionate about it.

Then, there are the critics. They show us ourselves, but often they aren't DOING anything. They can't even invent their own invective.

Feh.

Sounds like you've got a little too much time on your hands.

Nice rant, and it's all true - but if you're talking to the sort of people who read weblogs you're pretty sure to be preaching to the converted. All praise to quirky borderline obsessive hobbies! (except for the ones I don't personally like, of course. Those ones are just a sign that someone has too much time on their hands.)

RATED PG-13. Guess I owe Dan in college an apology. He collected his belly button lint in a jar.

Gee, Cory, the SUPERBOWL was on, and you spent the time writing instead of eating Buffalo Wings and slammin' down beer? Man, what kind of a geek RU? :-)

Me, I drove to Portland's funky Eastern reaches to do Dead Media research. I went to a tiny movie theater that's so marginal that it can't afford to rent mainstream indie releases. They show things like Rocky Horror, and Troma's horror flicks and . . . "Scopitone a-Go-Go!"

That's why I went. Scopitone is a Dead Media; short pre-video-Music Videos shown on coin-operated film-jukeboxes found in bars and cocktail lounges. You dropped in a quarter and selected a movie, which was shown on a screen atop the device.

A film archivist had collected a few dozen of the 16mm reels and spliced them together to show to other People With Too Much Time On Their Hands. There was no framing material; he explained the Scopitone and its strange fate (killed by bad publicity; the coin-op industry was owned by the Mafia, and the films featured scantily clad women jumping up and down and doing sumersaults) in person, to the two people who showed up.

Way cooler than watching overpaid stooges butt each other on the head.

In my experience the phrase is used, at least in my walks of life, in two ways - both justified. The first is derogatory, referring to someone who has laboured for months implementing a really poor solution to a not very hard problem. It's easy to blame management in this case - someone should have said "What the hell are you doing?" after the first week.

The second use is a cross between praise and self-criticism - the subtext being "Why do I waste all my free time bumming around - look what this guy has done!".

Cory, you have too much time on your hands (second sense).

Very nice rant.