Being Busy and Being Extremely Busy

I said in another blog post how I love responsibilities, or at least taking on responsibilities willingly, and how I wish to take more and more of them, but have to limit myself due to already being at my limit of how many things can I do at a time... This is what I call, being a busy person, which is someone that has a fair amount of responsibilities and doesn't have enough free time to take more responsibilities on... Even if I do have a reasonable amount of free time.

And don't get me wrong, I love being busy, I think being idle is annoying. I don't want to have as much time as I could possibly need to read, play and the like, I want to get busy with responsibilities I choose for myself, because I love organizing stuff and I love busying myself with those things. It's really fun for me. A lot more than reading or playing games... But as with everything in life, being excessively busy is bad, anything in excess is bad... And that's how we reach today's blog post.


I spent my last week on my mom's home, her home is 3h away from mine and the bus fees are by no means cheap, so I tend to stay there a few days whenever I visit... And well, being a daughter or not, I am a visit, so I expect some degree of attention, some time to talk and stuff... I even help her out with a few things she is doing, more than how much I helped back when I lived with her in all honesty.
Essentially, I'm visiting my family, and as such, I expect to spend some family time together, I wouldn't bother with visiting otherwise.

Well... My mom has a terrible disease called: "OMGWhyAreYouSuchAWorkaholic!?YouAreAlreadyRetiredForHeaven'sSake,GoRestABitYouCrazyWoman!" for the lack of a better term. And well... She is doing some reforms on the house, last time I went there she was changing the balcony's wall and putting a decent one in its place (the former was so terrible that you couldn't even wash it properly), this time she was painting the house's walls and putting some embroidery on it... While she was paying someone to paint them, she was the one putting the embroidery and... Well, it's really hard to put it, but it requires some effort, especially if you're a perfectionist like my mom is.

So... What do I remember of my visit? I bought new glasses with my father, I went to the shopping with my mom to buy some new shoes and I talked quite a bit with my brother about games, movies and such... Oh, I also played a bit of videogames and worked, since I work at home office and didn't take a break for the visit .(dead God, how horrible it is to work at other people's home though, my productivity fell drastically! >.<)

So well, what's the whole problem? Hmmmm... That is about as much as I remember? I mean... What else did I do with my mom? I tried finding an opportunity to tell her about my girlfriend for 3 days straight, before I finally found some time while we were out buying glasses, but she seemed to almost show no interest in it and seemed to completely forget the part I said she lived on the other side of the world and that I could only talk with her in the mornings, so doing anything on the mornings was an absolute NO for me.
And well... I don't remember talking to her any other moment... Sure, we visited my grandma twice for lunch, though those visits generally last a few hours, which lead me to get bothered and start telling her that we should go back home... This time? She didn't even wait for me to finish, she left my grandma's home while I was still eating and went back home to get back on her work to put the embroideries on the wall.

It doesn't help that she also sells perfumes and does some teaching work on the church she goes to... But well, the point is... My mom is what absolutely overworked, and she sees no problem with this.

Sometimes when we fought in the past, she said that she wasn't made of iron, so she couldn't do everything by herself... Well, after a while, in different fights, when she said stuff like "why can't you do 'only' [insert thing here] when at your age I worked at 3 jobs and studied?" which I answered with, "because you're made of iron, I am not." as this is the only reasonable explanation to how anyone could do as much as she did... I think I already talked about this part in specific on another blog post, so let's skip it.

It seems like the norm for my mom isn't for someone to have a certain amount of time for themselves, and another part for their responsibilities, but rather, have 120% (I say 120% because she is usually dead tired for most of the week because she was too busy to sleep 8h, she usually sleeps 4h or less.) of their waken up time dedicated to who knows how many responsibilities she found for herself... It doesn't help that anything she decides upon needs to be finished as soon as possible. It can't take one month to put embroideries on the wall, it needs to be done here and now, that's how she handles pretty much everything.


Hmmmmm... I'm not sure what kind of conclusion I want from this post... Did I enjoy my visit? Yeah, sure, I went to a birthday party, talked quite a bit with brother, got new glasses and new shoes...
Did I enjoy my time with my mom?
... What time? There was no time, she was too busy, she is always too busy.

It's pretty amazing how she can busy 24/7. I spent a whole week there and I can't remember talking to her at pretty much any point aside from when we went to buy my glasses... Even while we ate lunch at my grandma, I only remember her looking at the TV while eating crazy fast to go back working...

I don't like this, it's not that I'm not used to her being like that, but I no longer live with her... I'm visiting, I didn't go there for the sake of having a sub-optimal environment for working... I went there to talk, and that wasn't fulfilled... Sure, I'm selfish, but how hard it is to find a bit of free time everyday to spend with your family?

Being busy is fun, but being overly busy is... Haa... It's ridiculous, honestly. Mom earns 10x more than I did, even if she has to sustain a bigger house, my older brother and a person that comes to her home to clean the house and cook dishes, she still has plenty of spare money if compared to me that barely pays bills... It can't be that hard to wait a month or two to save up the money to ask someone to put the embroidery instead of doing it herself.

I wonder for how long will she endure if she keeps working herself out like that... Hopefully she doesn't have a heart attack by the time she is 60.

*sighs* If there is one thing she served to me as an example of, is how much should I avoid working until I had 0 free time and had to sacrifice sleep time to have more work time... It just... Doesn't make sense.

I wish there was a magical way to make her realize being overly busy is not normal at all, rather, it's something nobody should do... Actually, on that matter, I remembered a fun thread... I was going to conclude this, but now I remembered a thread, so it's going to be longer... >.>

Someone made a thread about how many books have you already read... I think the thread was hilarious. It put people that so far have read 50-100 books as people that don't like reading much, and I'm like... What? These are more books than most people on my country will read in a lifetime, it's pretty absurd.

I remember they putting people that already read 1000-2000 books as bookworms... Supposing an interval of 20 years, that's around 50 books per year, which amounts to 1 book per week... Supposing some 6h per book, that ends up as around 1h reading everyday, more or less... It's not that much if you think about it, but 1h everyday for 20 years is no small feat... I honestly think it's absolutely impossible for me to ever get that much free time.

I said it before, I'm a busy person, spending 1h of my everyday reading is by no means feasible, I have many other things to spend my time on... And I think that is normal for the vast majority of people...

On the other hand, if you can't spend 1h of your month reading... There is probably something wrong with how busy you are. And this is what I see on my mom, someone so busy that has stopped reading a book since ages ago, not because she doesn't want to read it, but because she has no time to.

I honestly wonder how can someone think it's okay to be super mega ultra busy... You Only Live Once, so... Better make sure you enjoy this like, YOLO can be a pretty good way of making us think about what we're doing... We have too little time to spend, we need to make this time count.