Hour

Think of all the things I could do with an extra sixty minutes a day.

Choose one or two of the following: write another 327-word essay; rake the lawn; finish a few more chapters of the book I’m reading (Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem—delightful and mesmerizing, but teetering on the edge of the self-indulgence that always tends to get me about his writing); take the dog for a walk; do some grocery shopping; scrub the bathroom, or at least wipe down the sink with Windex; get my passport photo for my visa to India; practice part of the primary series of Ashtanga yoga; finish digging up the vegetable garden that’s now, in the fall, turning into a moldy mess along the side of the house; fill out the recommendation form for a student who’s asked me to do so for her admission to the University of Washington; perform some routine maintenance on one or more of my bikes; clean the gutters; make a phone call to a long-lost friend; get my hair cut; sleep in a bit; do the laundry and fold some clothes; learn a foreign language; produce and direct a full-length feature movie starring Jodie Foster, Robert Di Niro, and Claire Daines that would win next year’s Academy Award, secure peace and justice in the mid-East; build a rocket and fly it to the moon; start a company that turns radioactive waste into edible grains to feed the hungry and house the homeless; provide sure-handed management to the federal economy, thus ensuring living-wage jobs for the unemployed throughout the country; rectify environmental injustice at home and abroad; and, of course, prevent a giant asteroid from striking planet earth wiping us all out just like one did to the dinosaurs all those millions of years ago.

But instead, what’s my plan? Apparently, to sit on the couch and haphazardly watch parts of a football game I don’t even really care about.

Hooray for Western Standard Time!