Time Management or What Do You Mean You Don't Work?

In the Hugh Grant movie, “About a Boy,” Grant plays a 30-something guy who is independently wealthy (courtesy of a father whose one successful song turned out to be a Christmas song, ensuring annual royalties until the end of time). He is single, doesn’t work, and basically just dates women and breaks up with them (a similar plot line for another favorite show of mine, “Two and Half Men” – “Mon oncle Charlie” here in France). What made me think of the movie today was remembering the voice-over the character gives about how he spends his days: he measures activities in 15 minute time increments, as a way to keep the 24 hours in a day from becoming totally overwhelming. I thought of that as I went through my day in carefully orchestrated increments (but not quite of the 15 minute variety): cookie baking in the morning, swimming and sunning in the middle of the day, a visit to the bank in the afternoon. I bought two newspapers today; I plan to read them sometime in the late afternoon and early evening, before the television news comes on. Oops, forgot to schedule in my Internet time; perhaps I will do that before the TV news.

I watched a Poirot movie on the television yesterday. (Those of you who know that my television set sat unplugged in my condo in Virginia most of the time may find it amusing that I am becoming a television watcher of sorts here in France.) I’ve always loved M. Hercule Poirot; I think I read every single mystery that Agatha Christie wrote with him as the lead investigator. I remember pleading for my dad to get me the final in the Poirot series, “Curtain,” in which Poirot is killed, but identifies his killer. It was 1975; it was a momentous Christmas for me. Anyway, the movie I saw the other day was yet another typical setting of British upper crust society spending a week (or who knows how long) on some estate in the Cotswolds (or someplace like that), where of course someone is killed, and Poirot happens to be a guest for the weekend. Watching the movie (dubbed in French, of course), I thought, what do those people do all day? Clearly they were rich enough not to work; it seemed (in the story, anyway) their days were measured by meals, served like clockwork by attentive servants, in the main dining room. And their evenings were always cocktails, followed by dinner, followed by games in the drawing room and after dinner drinks, or some such civilized thing.

Now that I am unemployed, I have a whole new perspective on what it means to not work. My perspective comes from the fact that I am voluntarily unemployed, an important distinction from those made so involuntarily. My days are basically without the stress of searching for a job. Not that I don’t think about it, but no part of my day is planned with activities like writing a resume, or contacting a former colleague about possible job openings, or reading newspapers for help wanted notices, or scanning the Internet for possible other things to do with my life other than the job I just left. My life at the moment is filled with the mundane activities that come with building a new life in a new place just for the fun of it.

I have devised a schedule for my days, but I remain fairly flexible and laid back about it; if I want to sleep late in the morning, I do. It is such a lovely departure from the past two years, in which I went to bed each night planning whether or not I would get up at 5 a.m. so that I could do a run or a workout in the gym before leaving for work at 6:30 a.m., or deciding I would let myself sleep until 5:50, and to leave by 6:30 for the metro so I could be at work not later than 7:15, for the daily 8 a.m. meeting for which I was responsible. In a weird “can’t let that early morning habit go” reaction, however, I am letting myself wake up early, as the local Riviera Radio station out of Monaco plays an hour of BBC News at 6 a.m., and I’ve wanted to hear the latest out of Washington and Wall Street to see if “how low can we go” is still the recurring theme of this crisis. But if I want to go back to sleep after that, I do.

Unlike the achingly proper British, I do not keep posted meal times each day, but certainly planning and preparing for meals has become an important and time-filling activity in my new life. After my initial awkward experience with a pain au chocolat my first day in France (see August postings, Wednesday Morning in Nice, and Anxiety Produces Nothing Good II), I decided I would ease into my new country’s culinary habits. Meaning that I have been trying to replicate my American eating habits here at first, and slowly add in the components of a true French meal. Some of the meal components have needed no transition at all; I have been a cheese and yogurt eater forever, and I love wine with dinner. It’s the baked goods that I’ve been taking my time with; several years ago I stopped buying yeast breads, so that the only grains in my home kitchen were crackers, Trader Joes being my favorite location for new and exotic varieties. Between boulangeries and patisseries here on every corner of Nice, it is hard to avoid the lure of the yeasty loaves and butter-filled pastries that cram shop windows and whose smells waft through open doors on the streets. My niece, with her one year experience living in Italy, said to me, “Don’t worry, you’ll lose all the weight you gain in France when you get back to the States.” Yeah, well, I’m pretty happy with my weight right now, so I’m not in a mood to tinker with it. I have decided to make bread purchases an occasional event (but there is nothing like brie on a soft olive loaf, yummm), which my workouts and my body will deal with accordingly.

Shopping for food is practically a daily activity for me; the shops here sell things in small sizes, and there isn’t that much room in my kitchen to store anything in bulk, or much of anything at all, really. I lucked out with a fairly good-sized refridgerator in my apartment, but many people here manage with a refridgerator the size of which you would remember from your college dorm room. Even while shopping at Carrefour, the Wal-Mart-sized super store, I found the food packages were remarkably small; I spotted no Costco-sized mega-rolls of toilet paper or super-sized bags of rice or cereal. (They do sell awfully large bottles of soda, however.) But honestly, given my life of leisure, having time to stroll down aisles and look at all the unfamiliar products and packaging, and new words (these are words you don’t learn in a foreign language classroom) is a delight for me (and a good time suck).

Exercise is the other planned activity during my days. Although I take pride, as a runner, that I can do my sport pretty much anywhere, in any type of weather, and in any type of attire; as an aging runner, I have shifted from being a running snob (“Who needs cross-training?”) to a gym-rat of sorts. When I moved to my Lexington Square condo four years ago, I looked at the small gym available to residents and said to myself, Lifting weights – I want to do that. In the next four years, I became a pretty regular user of the small but serviceable workout room (in addition to my regular, if infrequent, runs on the C&O bike trail), eventually using just about every piece of machinery in there: the bike, the elliptical machine, the treadmill and the weights and weight machine. When I arrived in Nice, I decided I was going to find a gym to continue my exercise habit (and also thought it would be a good way to meet people). So I engaged in a search through the yellow pages, and visited each of the gyms listed within walking distance of my apartment. I was looking for a gym with a pool too; the pool at Lexington Square, even though it was open only during the summer, had become an important post-exercise activity for me. Never one to spend more than 10 or 15 minutes swimming, I just felt that doing some laps post-biking or running made my legs feel that much better the next day. The gyms in Nice ranged from a Gold’s Gym (one large room with a sweaty, dank smell, lots of weight machines, one treadmill), to FitnessLand (huge, with pool, exercise class rooms, weights, many machines, sauna and whirlpool). The young lady at FitnessLand figured out my French wasn’t that great, but it turned out her English wasn’t that great either, but she won me over, especially when I learned that I’d get two gyms for the price of one, FitnessLand, a 15 minute walk west and Espace Wellness, a 5 minute walk several blocks south of me. I paid for the pools (they both have them, but you can’t really swim laps in the Wellness pool – Aqua aerobics is really big here in France!) and the space, but the locations are great, and there are tons of classes to choose from at each gym.

I am busy now trying to figure out my schedule for what days I will go to the gym and what days I will run. Oh, yes, and I plan to buy a bike somewhere along the way, and so will have to fit bike rides into the schedule too. But coming up with a plan is just to make me feel like I know what I’m doing; if I wake up one morning and decide I don’t want to work out, I won’t. No hard feelings.

That’s the beauty of my new life. I can do what I want when I want. Eating, sleeping, working out, writing emails, writing generally, can all be done on whatever whim I have at the moment. There’s no time pressure. It’s such a change for me from the requirements of being at work at a certain time, or at a meeting at a certain time, or at rehearsal at a certain time. And I no longer have the pressure of having a list of things to do, that NEED TO GET DONE, and having that unsettling feeling of not knowing when I will get them done because of all the other time pressures. Such freedom!

But there remains an insidious voice inside me asking questions : What makes you think you can just chuck all of your life aside as you know it and lie on a beach by the Mediterranean sea wearing only your bikini bottoms while you work on a getting a tan in the fading autumn sunlight? When did you think you could just stop being a contributing member of society? What kind of ego lets you just escape from the world that everyone else is toiling in (and believe me, as the far as this goes, I know some people are REALLY toiling right now, given the current financial environment, that’s MY industry) and kick back and do nothing?

I have stock answers for all those questions, but the voice is persistent. I’m trying to ignore it for now.

The time to look for a job will come soon enough.