Honestly.

There’s 168 hours in a week. I spend between 42 and 50 of those hours asleep. I spend another five or six hours watching television. Add in DVD’s and you can tack another ten hours perhaps onto that. Volunteering for the cats usually eats into another six hours, if you count commute time. Errands/appointments can easily eat another ten hours out of my week. Household chores take perhaps five hours a week total (it should be more, but I tend towards lazy slobhood in that regard). These days I’m spending about five hours a week reading. That accounts for about 92 hours of my week, with 76 hours not yet identified. Some of that time is frittered away on the computer, on personal hygiene, on playing with cats, on zoning out.

I leave the house at 7:15, give or take, each morning. I arrive home around 6:00 each evening. That's a tad less than 59 hours of my week, and accounts for most of that leftover 76 hours. That’s more than a third of my week, more time than I spend at any other task, sleep included. And I can’t write about it, save obliquely, in my journal.

You’d think that spending that much time at one place with the same people day in and day out would promote friendships. And in some cases it does. But the place I work for is famed for holding on to employees. The people I work with have worked together for ten, twenty, twenty-five years. They go to the same church, live in the same communities, and in many cases actually grew up together. I’ve been here seven years now, and I’m still considered a newbie, still an outsider. The more I learn of my co-workers, the more comfortable I am with this position. Religion, children, and work are their worlds, and there isn’t much overlap with my world. It makes for lonely days, though. And it makes for little to talk about.

So what instigated this particular piece of omphalic introspection? I was searching for something to write about. Current events tend to anger/depress me. Work is, for the most part, verboten. I have no social life to speak of at the moment. So I went web-hopping to find a site with prompts for journaling. I happened to stumble across one intended for teachers of elementary school students. I was getting a kick reading through the prompts: Talk about animals; Describe yourself; what would you buy if you had a lot of money? et cetera. Then I tripped against this one:

Write about a time when you were honest.

Now yeah, I know what the intent was. Have a kid talk about a time when he ‘fessed up to something, or when he found something and returned it. The sort of kid moral-fiber thing that makes you wonder why “fibber” is “fiber” with an extra “B” in it. (My personal favorite theory on this was expressed by a fellow twelve-year-old that the extra “B” stood for “Bullshit”. It was the first time one of my peers used that word in front of me, and made an impression both for the word and its clever application.) But I digress.

Write about a time when you were honest. I took that entirely the wrong way at first, in a “when did you stop beating your wife” sort of way. Tell about a time you were honest. It implies I’m dishonest most of the time, and so a time when I was honest is something noteworthy to tell a tale of.

Write about a time when you were honest. Well, maybe I’m not honest the bulk of the time. I certainly don’t reveal who I am at work. Withholding the truth can be construed as a form of dishonesty, especially if it lets people think you are something you aren’t. And I certainly hold back about work when I’m home. That’s partly because much of my work is technical, and to tell a story from work requires a ton of preparation and set-up, as I explain what it is that the story centers around. It’s also partly because when I leave work, I want it left behind. Some aspects of my job are more than moderately disturbing, and I prefer not to drag that baggage home with me every night. And I sure as hell ain’t honest in my journaling. Between the poetic license, the editing of “bad think” and the selectivity of my subject matter, I know that only a slice of the real me appears on any given page. Is that lying?

Write about a time when you were honest. Hell, half the time I’m not even honest with myself. Much of that is a purely Heisenberg Principal thing. To look at a thing is to change that thing. Looking at atoms takes energy. When you look at an atom, you’ve put energy into it, and you end up changing the atom. You can know where an electron is, or how fast it’s moving, but you can’t know both. You can peer into your own mind, but you change how you think by doing so. In that vein, you can never really know yourself. I’m not entirely sure that’s dishonest, but thinking you can understand yourself totally is deluded at best. Yet it’s a delusion I buy into every time I justify my actions to myself. And I suppose that’s a form of dishonesty.

Write about a time when you were honest. I suspect the last time I was honest was when I was around twelve years old, and my classmate’s use of the word “bullshit” struck me as daring and clever. When I laughed out loud at that, it was an honest laugh.