. . . or, at least, so I have heard. I’m so busy, I don’t actually have time to test this theory out.

I have a friend who, one night while we were talking, was trying to get me to play some silly online game with him. I informed him that I could not for, though I was online and chatting I was actually also working at the same time. He grew annoyed with me for working since it was evening and he was off from work and, thus, so should I be. I apologized (which is sort of dumb, now that I think of it) but I was really busy and I had a lot of stuff to get done but that I would be happy to chat on and off with him still if he wanted. He then went off into a rant about how everyone says that they are busy as an excuse and then changed his AIM profile to read "Being busy is not a badge of honor."

Regardless of any other issues my friend may have, I think this is a fair point, though I am not sure it applied specifically to me not wanting to stop working to play some online game when I had stuff to do. Everyone in our society, those of us in our 20s and 30s specifically, do tend to wear business as a badge of honor sometimes.

Examples:

• My mother calls me and asks me why I didn’t call my aunt for her birthday. I reply, "I’m sorry, I have just been really busy." This is just an example, but I bet you can think of 100 different times when you have done this without even realizing it. In this case, busy is just a excuse. In reality I forgot or maybe didn’t want to but somehow our society views "busy" as being a noble excuse that is above forgetting. It’s like we want the caller to apologize for nagging us by brandishing our busy-ness.
• If you tell someone that you have been busy, they almost immediately reply with "So have I!" and, more often than not, try to make it seem like they have been more busy than you. It’s this odd form of one-ups-manship.
• People say that they are busy even when they aren’t. This often happens in combination with the last two. For example, I was on the phone with a friend a few days ago and she told me that she had been insanely busy and that was why I hadn’t heard from her in a while. But then, after the apology stage of the conversation, all her anecdotes were about the books she had read, TV shows that she had watched, social events that she had attended and computer games that she had played. If she had been so insanely busy that she didn’t have four seconds to return my call, how did she have the time to do all that other stuff? I don’t have time to do any of that, I think to myself.
  It’s like we need the other person to believe that we are busy to absolve us from the guilt of not making time, but forget to continue the lie into our stories. Another friend of mine, when I was talking to her about how I was worried that my husband works too much and it will affect his health, quickly told me that she works all the time too. Odd as it was that someone would want to be like "I work to the point where it affects my health too!" like its a good thing, it was even odder because 5 minutes earlier she had been telling me how bored she is because she has two days off a week when she is all alone with nothing to do and bored out of her mind.

Thinking about this made me worry if the definition of the word busy has come to mean something other than what it originally meant. To me, being busy has levels. "I am busy" just means that you are doing something at the moment while "insanely busy" means that you have been working 80 hours a week and haven’t had more than a few minutes time off here and there. But it seems like the rest of the earth uses both of these terms to mean the same thing. We are a culture of hyperbole so I guess it makes sense.

I know I do all of the above sometimes as well. I have been known to jokingly give my mom the, "I am busy, woman!" and I say the words busy and stress far too often. But every time I say it, I hear a little voice saying, "Being busy is not a badge of honor." I have started saying "I work too much" instead of "I’m busy" because I don’t feel like its something to be proud of but rather a character flaw I need to admit to myself and fix before it affects my health.

I also find myself at a loss on what to do in a case like this. Normally, I would write a blog entry and say, "There have been no posts in a while because I have been busy." But, knowing that most people call themselves busy when they really have all sorts of leisure time, the fear I have is that you will think me some manner of slacker putting off blogging while I watch TV.

There is also something inherently wrong with me that I care to make you think that I am busy like that somehow legitimizes my excuse. But, in the end, who am I to judge someone else’s relative busy-ness. If you feel busy because you only got to go out and party 2 times this month and I feel like I am busy because I haven’t worked less than 12 hours a day for the last three months, we are each right in our own way I suppose.

I do know that my busy-ness, overworked-ness, stress from working too much or whatever you want to call it is the source of all of the very few problems in my life and I am working very hard to figure out how to work smarter but not harder.

You consider a day “off” a day when you only worked for 8 hours.

You start a list about how busy you are and only have time to finish it a full month later.