Take Back Your Time, Parte Due

In October, we had a little "Dolce Vita" party here on Salem Street to celebrate National "Take Back Your Time Day." The idea is that work and bustle and pointless busy-ness dominate Americans' lives to the detriment of . . . well, our lives. I agree with that premise. Lots of people get two weeks (10 days) of vacation each year, but - get this - workers on average give back four of those days (probably because their jobs are so overwhelming that coming back from a two-week vacation would be more stressful than never going in the first place.) In fact, one day at my Favorite Place I was talking about saving up my vacation and taking a big four-week vacation the following year. One of the cubicle hedgehogs in the next row popped up and, in a tsk-tsk tone, admonished me with the venerable wisdom of a Succesful Career Woman: "Leah, if the company can do without you for a month, it can do without you forever." And so it can!

In any case, the reason I write about this now is that I just learned today why National "Take Back Your Time Day" falls on October 24th. It's because the average EU worker works nine weeks fewer than the average American worker. Nine weeks! Part of that is because, per EU regulations, member countries must offer workers a minimum of four full weeks of paid vacation. Some member countries require more. They also have more holidays and work fewer hours per week. Right. So October 24th? It's nine weeks before the end of the year.

Just imagine if you didn't have to work between Halloween and Christmas.

Spelling Bees and Simple Living

Worth thinking about #1: This year’s national spelling bee champ, Evan O’Dorney, spent two or three hours every night drilling spelling words. Yet he doesn’t actually seem to like spelling all that much. In fact, he told NPR, “I’m not gonna do words anymore, just numbers and notes.” (Listen to the entire interview by clicking “listen” on the NPR story page.)

Now, I’m all for excellence and intellectualism, but at what cost? That sounds like a sort of intellectual post-traumatic stress disorder. To have already overdosed on words at age thirteen?! Bummer.

Worth thinking about #2: I found Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea in my mom’s “special things” box. Lindbergh wrote in the 1950s about being a woman in “modern America,” contemplating the need to find “space” (and one’s space) amidst the pace and obligation and noise of “modern life.” Someone named “Kathy” gave the book to my mom in 1969, and here I am reading it in 2007. It makes me wonder how far back this frustration with over-stimulated, over-obligated, and under-meaning existence goes. Forever? I’d better stop there; Lindbergh, not I, is the one with “interesting things to say” tonight . . .

“For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.”

And, for champion spellers (and their high-achieving adult counterparts): “We had indeed almost drowned in the sea of intellectual work and welcomed the firm ground of physical action under our feet.”