Celebrating One Year of Leisure

I've decided to start the celebration of my one year anniversary of leisure. I think my last day of full-time work was May 4, 2007. One week after that, Matt and I went on vacation. I've been meaning to write about that vacation for a year now. So in honor of the anniversary I'm going to write about it now. Well, not literally now, maybe later today. I'll leave this picture with you as a little teaser. Gotta get outside now, too nice a day to spend in the house in front of a screen. 

Leisure Quote of the Week

"One of the symptoms of the approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster."

                                     - Bertrand Russell

This Week's Leisure Activities

• Planning a trip to Greece
• Sitting on the couch drinking my morning coffee listening to music
• Researching inspiration for Leisure Society
• Walking around Williamsburg looking in shops
• Enjoying the warm weather at McCarren Park with a good book
• Making paint-by-number notecards
• Sharing long lunches with friends
• Taking a scalding hot bath every other night with Lush bath bombs
• Checking out the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum
• Cooking dinners with Matt
• Shopping for spring dresses and shoes
• Getting a massage at Greenhouse Holistic?

Get Ready For The Leisure Economy

Is it coming? Click this link for an interesting article I just read in the NY Times small business blogs. This is a new book by Linda Nazareth, a Toronto economist, who is predicting that Americans may soon find themselves with more leisure time. Some people may even start demanding it. Don't get stuck with leisure envy. 

The Leisure Economy

Leisure Quote of the Week

"We don't have a lot of time on this Earth. We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms, listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements."

                                               - Peter Gibbons, Office Space

Call In Sick

On a day like today, how can one be expected to work? I ask you. The good news is that you could actually be suffering from neurasthenia, a disease invented in the late 1800s by George M. Beard, M.D. This disease is caused by overwork, the pace of modern life, its noisiness and information overload. The cure? According to other learned men of the time, it was rest. The overworked were instructed to spend weeks or even months doing absolutely nothing. So next time you feel like you're going to have a breakdown, simply tell your boss you are suffering from a bad case of neurasthenia and go to the park.  

The Roots of My Idleness

I wanted to share with you, dear reader, the origins of my idleness. This is The Academy of Our Lady of Mercy, Lauralton Hall. I attended high school in this very building in Milford, CT some years ago, never mind how many. Needless to say, it was an all-girls Catholic school. I have been thinking a lot about where my love of leisure comes from, and I realized that it all started here. Just look at the place. Can't you imagine me reclining on cushions in the turret reading Oscar Wilde?

The emphasis here was definitely on study. And as much as I love school and books, it was really hard for me to stay awake for the whole school day. So I spent many hours in the nurse's room. Please don't think less of me, but I pretended to be sick so I could take naps. Sometimes, I would even go so far as to say I needed to go home. Then my mother would have to come pick me up and take me home to my bed. I had to get up so early every morning, how could they expect me to keep going for the whole day? Luckily, I never played any sports. 

But it was here that my love of books, art, music, and languages started to blossom. And without those things, what would I do now?

Maybe I'll go for a walk

Well, I guess I better go outside soon. It's a beautiful day, and I would like to go for a walk. I have been doing nothing all week, consisting mostly of looking at stuff online and reading actual books. I ordered a stitching kit from Sublime Stitching the other day. I want to learn to embroider. That should be fun. I'd like to include stitching projects as part of Leisure Society. Imagine embroidering a tea towel or an apron? It's very Jane Austen. 

I wish I had a yard or a garden to tend to. That would be the perfect thing to do today. Oh, how I dream of a yard of my own! Then I would never leave the property. I could lay there all day in a little patch of sun like a cat. I would plant a little garden of herbs and veggies to use in our cooking. I've always believed that I have a green thumb. I just haven't ever tried to grow anything. 

I have to tell you about the dog next door. Please forgive me if you are a dog-lover. It's not really a secret that I have little love for dogs. If your dog is smart and doesn't jump all over me as soon as it enters the room, I may grow to like it, but probably not. Anyway, both of my next door neighbors have dogs. And of course, they both have yards, those lucky bastards. So one of the dogs is out in the yard barking literally non-stop at least 10 times a day. It begins at 7:30am and continues on and off all day long until about 11:30pm. I am at home all day now, doing nothing as it were, and it. is. driving. me. crazy! Have you seen the movie Son of Sam? Doesn't the guy go crazy and become a serial killer from a dog barking in his neighborhood?? 

OK, I just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for listening. You are a true friend. 

The Importance of Being Idle

Click me! The Importance of Being Idle

Check this video out to get the feeling of Leisure Society. Rhys Ifans plays the role of The Idler perfectly. And as my friend Kelly can attest, I've always wanted to dance with a top hat and cane. I am even more inspired!! Thanks to Oasis for the Leisure Society theme song! 

Guitar Heroine

I thought I would tell you about one of my new leisure activities. It's called Guitar Hero, maybe you've heard of it? Now, I know this thing has been around for quite a while but I am finally getting into it. I was never that into video games, even though I did have my 8th or 9th birthday party at Arnie's Place, a totally awesome arcade I went to when I was a kid. But being the contrarian I am, since everyone was playing them, I couldn't embrace them. The more people talked about them and how great they were, the less I wanted to even look at them. I also must mention that I sucked at most of them as well. I just didn't get it. Until now....

Most of my life has revolved around music. My first favorite band was the Rolling Stones when I was 4 or 5 years old. I also liked Kiss and ACDC at that time. I never studied a musical instrument, I know this is a total crime! But as I grew up, most of my friends were in bands or shared the same obsession with music. I even bought a bass guitar when I was about 23 years old and taught myself to play a few songs. I still really want to learn how to play the lap steel because I love Hawaiian music and old country, both which use this instrument. I have always wanted to be in a band, but I don't really play anything well enough. Anyway, when I first heard of this game, I thought it was an awesome idea. 

I first tried it at my friends' Christmas party. I was awful!! I was mortified. Then, my boyfriend's brother got it about a year ago, and brought it over to our place. Matt and his friends were psyched! They were all instantly good at it! I was too shy to try it in front of all the guys, because I can't do anything in front of people unless I'm really good at it. Some neurosis, that's a whole other blog. After all the guys left I'd ask Matt to show me how to play it. I sat there for 3 hours one night trying to get it, and I still sucked. It made me hate the game. 

But Matt really wanted to get it. So maybe two weeks ago, he brought Guitar Hero III home. It has amazing songs on it!! Watching him play, I couldn't deny my interest any more. I said "All right, I'm gonna try it again." I almost played Barracuda by Heart, quite possibly the most bad-ass guitar riff ever!!!! It was of course, at the slowest practice speed. But the seeds were planted. 

One day Matt came home with a second guitar. For me!! So we could play together! I then found out that you can play the bass or the guitar when you play with two people. Hey, I've played the bass before! Let me tell you, this completely changed the game for me. No longer was I booed off the stage. I was now Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, I was Flea. I played the Strokes, Guns 'N Roses, I even played Sabotage from the Beastie Boys with that sick bass line in the beginning! It really feels like you're playing. And I'm not all stiff and nervous anymore. I can actually rock out now. 

Gosh, just writing about it is making me wish I knew how to turn it on!! I'll have to wait for Matt to get home from work.

I still have a lot to learn about being lazy

"I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like."  Emile Henry Gauvreay

I'm reading this book called Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz. He mentioned this group called CLAWS, an acronym for Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery, and a website called WhyWork.org. These are my people! However I am finding out that the founders of these amazing movements have moved on to other things. They were onto this quite a few years before me! I want to get in touch with them! And I also found out how much more research and reading I need/want to do on the history and evolution of the leisure lifestyle. On the whywork.org site, they have a ton of interesting-looking books that I will be reading soon. 

How do I put all this together into something I can design to help you take more leisure time? I struggle with the continuity between the line I quoted above and wanting to make things for people to buy. It's tricky. I'm well aware that there may be a conflict there. I am very open to feedback on this. 

Here is a paint-by-number project I did the other afternoon. I got it at MOMA. I'm thinking of making paint-by-number projects as part of Leisure Society's products. 

How I came to be idle

Where was I? Oh yeah, my life of leisure. I took the entire summer off last year. I hadn't done that since freshman year of college. Even in high school I worked all weekend at Brooks Pharmacy. I needed to detox from work, from fashion, from the L train, from the constant bombardment of noise and people. I wanted to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life. I realize now that I should've started this blog back then to chronicle my adventures real-time, but oh well. 

I started doing things that I wanted to do, for no other reason than my own enjoyment. I went to the beach a few times a week, taking the LIRR from Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn. I read tons of books, a few a week. I started cooking more. I spent a lot of time in my own company, which I felt I desperately needed to do in order to locate Christina again. I know that sounds really hokey, "I needed to find myself, dude", but it's sort of true. I felt I had lost my SELF in that world of go, go, go and do more, sell more, make more $$. The way I believed I could find my way back to myself was to literally do nothing. One of my old therapists taught me a great slogan or mantra, "When in doubt, do nothing." I knew I needed to be still and quiet, and listen for my own tiny little inner voice to make herself known again. I really tried to keep an open mind, and not have any preconceived notions of what I should do next.

Now this was not easy by any means. I suffered from guilt almost every day. Guilt about not working, fear that everyone thought I was a "slacker". I always hated slackers, mostly because I was envious I think. I was playing every day, going to the beach with my boogie board in the morning when everyone else was going off to work. Ha ha. Suckers! But after a while I felt a new pride when people asked me what I had been doing. "Nothing, " I would answer. It made more than a few people angry and confused. 

But doing nothing, to me, doesn't always mean staring into space dreaming. Although that is a big part of it. I was doing lots of things, I just wasn't working at a job or career. I started studying Italian, which I had always wanted to do because my great-grandparents were from Italy. I never would've been able to commit to taking a class when I was working! Leaving at 6:00 (the supposed quittin' time) was impossible with all the work and meetings. It was also frowned upon. If you left at 6:00, or Heaven forbid before that, your good-byes would be met with "Must be nice." The people would talk about you and say that you did nothing and left early all the time. 

Anyway, back to happier times....part of my doing nothing is studying, learning, attending classes, thinking. So I made a new commitment to keep taking classes. I'll leave you with a list of other things I enjoy under the umbrella of doing nothing. 

Paint by numbers, crossword puzzles, cooking, dinner parties, board games, listening to music, taking baths, playing guitar hero, knitting, reading, volunteering, croquet, gardening, puzzles, sleeping.....

I'll try to explain more about Leisure Society, the company, next time. Im figuring it out as I go along.

Lady of Leisure

Welcome! What is Leisure Society? Well, it's the company I started a few months ago. I want to design products that help people to spend more of their time at leisure. I have been designing clothing and accessories for the past 12 years in New York, for corporate companies. It was really fun and glamorous for a good many of those years, don't get me wrong. I travelled around the world, and shopped all the time, every girl's dream, right? Well, I got tired of it after a while. All I did was work. I had no hobbies, no time to take classes. In short, I felt like I had no life. And believe it or not, my job wasn't particularly creative. I was devoting all my time and energy to this thing I didn't even believe in. Worst of all, I was stressed out all the time and all I did was complain about my job. So I saved up some money and quit. 

I'm not interested in climbing the corporate ladder. I don't want to have a "career" if it means that I have no life other than my job. There's so much more I want to do with my time! I work as a freelancer in the fashion industry as a way to make money. But what I really want is to do my own thing. I want to make my own job. 

At first, I didn't know which way was up. I thought I wanted to go back to school to become a teacher because I wanted to do something with more meaning. But truthfully, that was only one of a million things I could do. I decided to volunteer with kids at my local library, the Leonard branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, helping them with their homework to see if I really wanted to become a teacher. 

I found a book there that changed my life: How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. It validated everything I felt. I was sick of working! I was going to be a lady of leisure for as long as possible.