June 8th, 2006:

My time not spent at my day-job or travelling to and from my day-job is so limited that I try to pack as much into it as I can. Even if it wasn’t that way, I’m not the type of person to sit around and watch TV while waiting for the next thing to happen. I don’t go to bed early just because I have nothing better to do. I don’t go to the mall and window shop to kill time before dinner.

Some people think that my desire to schedule and plan events and activities makes me too rigid and without spontaneity. These people are generally the type that only plan anything on the evenings of weekend days and spend the rest of their time eating nice dinners and watching TV. Hey, if dinner and TV is all you want out of life, then that’s great, but I’m looking for a little more than that. I’ve got things to create, places to go, people to meet, conversations to have, poems to write, songs to hear, tears to shed, and sunsets to ponder. “You are either a poet, or a corpse.”

[drawn by "gapingvoid":http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html, found via "Genuine Incorporated":http://genuineincorporated.com/2006/05/30/whats-the-roi-of-humanism/]

Most people who would complain about my scheduling have never spent an entire day with me to see just how spontaneous it can be. I’ve had people drop by my house with less than 20 minutes notice on a Saturday morning and we ended up making an entire day of it. I’ve called a fellow “poet” (not one of you TV watchers or late sleepers) to say “I’m near your house, wanna do something?” and found myself with plans I hadn’t had before. I change plans in the middle of the day on a regular basis. Sometimes, I get half way into something and realize I’d rather be doing something else, so I do. My schedule just seems rigid to these “corpses” because when they happen to cross it they want to specify a start time for the one event they are concerned about so they can plan to arrive at the very last minute possible, yet they don’t want to be specific about that time just in case the line at Wendy’s is longer than they expected.

With people that tend to have rigidly scheduled lifestyles, inactive schedules, or schedules that I know nothing about, I make rigid plans. This way punctual people can adjust their other activities around these rigid plans and unpunctual people can piss me off by showing up late. However, when possible, I’d much rather make flexible plans. This, however, requires that everyone be flexible as well and that their activities are ready to accommodate additional people.

I like to make plans like: “Let’s hang out Friday night. I’ll give you a call when I’m headed your way if you haven’t called me first.” This means that we both have some other stuff that we need to do, want to do, or can do. We each do our own thing until we’re ready to meet up. If you call me before I’ve called you, then your spontaneous plans merge into my spontaneous plans and they become our plans until we part ways later that day. The same happens if I call you first. Imagine if, before dinner, I plan to do some house work and you plan to take your kids to the park and return something at the store. If I finish my house work before you finish your errands, I can easily meet you at the park or store. If you finish returning your item and are at the park with your kids, you can easily stay at the park a bit longer, or bring the kids to my place as I finish up the house work I’m doing. That’s called flexible planning.

Most people aren’t capable of flexible planning, because they are too concerned with “getting ready” for an activity, and are unable to make a new situation interesting instead of having something interesting handed to them. However, rigid scheduling with many people results in me being on time and waiting for them to show up late. So, I’m starting something new with the way I schedule my time with others.

I will continue flexible scheduling when planning with other flexible schedulers in flexible situations. I will continue rigid scheduling with rigid schedulers, inactive schedulers, unknown situations and time sensitive events. In the event that someone should show up late for a rigidly scheduled event without a good excuse, then I will consider our next rigidly scheduled event to be flexible and will assume that they either don’t mind waiting for me if I don’t arrive on time or that they will call when they are ready to meet up to ensure that I am.

This only seems fair, right?