Waste Basket

Time is precious! And to make up for frittering away yours these past couple of years on pointless anecdotes, half-assed homilies, and pictures of my dinner, I'm sharing my patented, field-tested list of things that were a complete and total waste of my minutes. Or hours. Or years. Learn from my experience! I'm like that neanderthal ancestor who ate the shiny red berries and keeled over. Bet you the rest of them ate grass after that.

1) Pondering the meaning of life.

You're never going to figure this one out. Well, maybe if you had a million years, but you don't. What you do have is a refrigerator full of cheese, and it is mouldering AS WE SPEAK.

2) Wondering why person X, Y, or Z wasn't madly in love with me.

These people had congenital brain damage. Moving on.

3) Enticing cats who did not want to be enticed.

There you are, squatting on the sidewalk like a constipated poodle, holding out your hand and making cooing noises at some feral, half-mad feline recently escaped from a rest home for troubled cats. Its fur is matted; its eyes are slits. At any moment, a mugger or other ne'er-do-well will come along and cosh you over the head and steal your wallet. Is this really the way you want to go?

4) Corsets.

No.

5) Prising presents from their wrapping paper with the care of a neurosurgeon pulling apart the meninges to expose the delicate cortical matter beneath; thereafter folding the paper and inserting it, with pomp, into a lower drawer of the basement storage cabinet.

You will never reuse this stuff. You will discover it decades later, wreathed in mouse droppings. You will consider hiring a ringer from the rest home for troubled cats.

6) Worrying that the airplane will crash and you will die.

A: Drugs.

7) Blogging.

Phooey.