Dogs Steal Yarn

Free Time: A How-To Guide

If you're anything like me, it's been so long since you've had a significant amount of free time that you aren't quite sure what to do with it when you finally get some. You don't quite trust it. You're sure if you look at it too directly in your schedule book that it will somehow disappear, filled with forgotten dentist appointments and the like. You're hesitant to make any plans for this free time at all, afraid that it will get used up too quickly. You also feel a bit guilty when tempted to spend the entire time planted on your ass in front of a stack of dvds, mindless knitting in hand.

Well, I have had the entire weekend, from the time my workshop ended at nine on Thursday evening through to when I go to sleep tonight (Sunday) with no work to do, no writing to do (I'm on a break while my readers read second draft), and nowhere in particular that I have to be. No family gatherings. No baby showers. None of that. In spite of my lack of practice, I think I've managed to cobble together a pretty fantastic weekend. Here's the rundown, for those of you also somewhat lacking in the free-time skills. I offer this as a guideline only. Feel free to tailor it to suit your own needs, desires, regional options. Don't have Fridays off? No problem! Change Thursday night to Friday night and skip over Friday entirely (or call in sick! I won't tell, I promise).

Thursday night:

• After the last obligation of the evening (fiction workshop, in my case) take a friend out to dinner. Invite him or her spontaneously. A method I found particularly successful was turn to a friend while we were both riding the 2 train home from class and suggest we go right past both of our stops and on to another neighborhood entirely for dinner, rather than returning to our respective caves, as we usually do. If there's something to be celebrated, this works even better. (There was something to be celebrated. I've been accepted to one of the artist colonies I applied to for the fall. Still waiting to hear from two others. I'll tell you more when I've decided for sure which one I'm going to.)
  
• Arrive home, thoroughly stuffed (vegetarian burritos work really well for this), just minutes after your charming partner, who is also thoroughly stuffed (roti also work really well). Fall chubbily side by side onto the sofa with cups of tea for both of you and knitting just for you and watch a dvd. (We opted for The Wire and I finished the first sock in a belated birthday pair for Cree.) Moan about how chubby you feel all stuffed with burrito but don't really mean it, because there's something really nice about being all full and cuddling on the couch with dogs and a boy and knowing you aren't blowing off a deadline to do it.
  
• Go to bed and keep your partner up too late by singing really silly songs you make up featuring vikings and chickens and your dogs. He has to get up early, but ignore this and keep singing. Eventually he'll join in. Really, he will.
  

Friday:

• Very important: Sleep late. Make yourself a nice hot breakfast and a big pot of coffee and drink the coffee on the deck while the dogs play "Find the cat shit the neighbor's cat left in the yard last night." Don't have a yard or dogs or a neighbor with cats? Lean out a window that looks out onto the street and pretend that each passerby has some deep dark secret they desperately don't want you to know (they probably do). Figure out what it is. Failing this, make up a secret and assign it to them.
  
• Once the coffee is gone, pick up your knitting. Finish something--like a baby sweater. You know there are a million babies you need to knit for right now. It's spring and the babies are EVERYWHERE. Oh--and then make more coffee. Pick up one of your other projects. Knit for hours--until your fingers start to cramp up because they aren't used to you having this much time to knit.
  
• Go to the gym so you can feel virtuous.
  
• Get a cookie on the way home. Something chewy and fresh from the bakery conveniently located only a block away from the gym. (Oatmeal raisin worked really well for me.)
  
• Fingers rested up? Get back to knitting, preferrably in front of another dvd. (Howard's End this time.) Try to forget how much better the book was. The book is always better.
  
• The boy is home! The boy is home! Pop in another episode of The Wire and then off to bed! More singing!
  

Saturday:

• Saturdays are especially cool because your friends with 9 to 5 jobs are now available to play with you! Call your best friend at noon and wake her up because she and her boy were out until four a.m. at some party. Feel strangely happy that you almost never stay out this late anymore. Feel strangely happy for her that she still does.
  
• Meet your best friend and her boy for brunch. This is ideally done with your boy in tow. Sadly, mine has been busy TA'ing a PT course all weekend, so I had to go for the boyless option. Go someplace that has asparagus goat cheese omelets and yuca hash browns, if possible. (Beso on Fifth and Union, for you local kids.)
  
• Walk through Park Slope with friend and friend's boy if you're in Park Slope. If not, walk through your local Park Slope equivalent. Stop off for oatmeal cookies, and then keep walking until you reach a museum. In our specific case, this meant the Brooklyn Museum for the Basquiat show.

• Walk through the Basquiat show. Feel free to not quite connect with the work. But then reach one painting in particular, Eyes and Eggs I think it was called, and see Basquiat's footprints all over it and feel his presence there, in that moment on the canvas. See the footprints of a dead man, the steps he took as he created this painting, young and brash and most likely not expecting to be dead anywhere close to as soon as he would be dead...and then view the entire show differently hinging on those footprints and that moment when you connected the work with a living, breathing, human presence now gone. Want to cry a little but resist because really what's the point? See another piece with crowded grafitti panels and one little panel of textured blue sky squeezed in and ache just a little bit more at the way this city can crowd out the sky. Sigh.
  
• Leave the museum and walk through the park to get a cup of coffee. Run into friend/mentor (Ernesto, if you're following my day to the letter) and his baby. Kiss the baby and babble to him in Spanish and make him smile that fantastic baby smile of his.
  
• Head into Manhattan. Knit a sock on the train while friend and friend's boy read. Marvel at the guy across from you on the J train with the most miraculous long, curly, white hairs growing from a mole on his cheek. Try not to stare, even though there are like six hairs and some of them two inches long or longer. Resist the urge to braid them.
  
• Eat dinner at a health food store that has a nice food counter and rickety tables in a bizarre upstairs room that's more a covered roof deck than a room. Flirt right back when the French counter guy hits on you, and somehow don't mind at all when you know he's watching your ass when you climb those stairs up to the weird roof deck room. Don't wiggle it any more than you normally would need to to climb stairs, though, because you don't really mean it. Baby, you're married. Harmless fun, though, especially if they're French.
  
• Go see another friend's band play. They will, most likely, rock.
  
• Go home and find your boy waiting for you. Watch another episode of The Wire and knit some more on that second sock.
  
• Go to sleep. Too tired for singing.
  

Sunday:

• Wake up crazy late. Drink a ton of coffee on the deck while watching the dogs play "Find the cat shit the neighbor's cat left in the yard last night." See Friday for more options.
  
• Organize all your loose knitting patterns into a binder after sticking them into those clear plastic protector sleeves. Feel super productive and organized.
  
• More coffee.
  
• Worry that you're drinking too much coffee for someone who's supposed to be relaxing.
  
• Cast on for another baby gift.
  
• I haven't figured out the rest of Sunday yet. How about we call Sunday afternoon and evening Freestyle Free Time? You're on your own for this part. Good luck!
  

And don't forget:
Fiction Reading Series at Junno's Bar
Tuesday, April 19
7:30 pm

Philip Kadish
Cari Luna
Emily Mitchell

Junno's
64 Downing Street, Manhattan,
Near Seventh Avenue and West Houston Street, near the Film Forum