On the Staycation
Leisure in Time is Like Unoccupied Space in a Room
--Lin Yutang
When I take time off of work people always ask me what I'm planning to do. Nothing produces stranger results than telling them that I'm planning to stay home and do nothing in particular. Sometimes they act pitying, sometimes they ask lots of questions, but usually they just awkwardly change the subject. I think most people don't understand why someone would want to spend a week or two at home, so here's my pitch for the staycation:
When I was a kid I wanted to do nothing more than to read books and watch television and wander around and climb trees and dig holes and play games (whether board games or role-playing games or video games). In short, I wanted to do what I was interested in doing at any given moment and to not really do any other things.
School, of course, got in the way of that. I had to do a lot of things that I didn't necessarily want to do. I had to be somewhere else, and be someone else, and be under someone else's direction. And I did it. I put my school face on, and I got through it, and got pretty good at it. But thankfully, eventually, summer would always roll around.
Summer was months of free time, broken up with a week or two of camp and a week or two seeing my relatives. The rest of the summer was me, home alone, while my parents went to work, and it was a glorious expanse of unstructured time. I would make wild plans: I built a treehouse, I tried to write a novel; I tried to read the entire encyclopedia. I also wasted a ton of time watching cartoons and making D&D characters I'd never play.
I did all sort of things with unstructured time. But none of those things involved traveling, or seeing things, or going places, because we didn't have any money, and my parents weren't really interested in traveling except to see family anyway. For a few months out of the year I got to take off the school face for a while, and gradually learned to remember who I am when I'm not pretending all the time.
But I got older, and the summers got shorter as my parents found work to fill my summers with. And then, when I was 17, I got kicked out, and I started working full time. And work, like school, required me to go somewhere else, and be someone else, and be under someone else's direction. And I put my work face on, and I was who I needed to be.
I managed to squeeze in college around my jobs, mostly part time, and had to put on a different face for that. And for those first nine or ten years as an adult I had very little unstructured time. For a few years in the middle, I didn't even really have days off (much less weeks off) because I'd go to school all day during the week and then work nights and weekends. I certainly didn't have summers off anymore because I would just work more when school was out. I needed the money. So I had some kind of face on pretty much all the time, and very rarely got a chance to remember who I was outside of work and school.
And then I had a stroke of luck in graduate school, because there was a rule that you couldn't have a job during the school year. For the first time in my adult life, I didn't have a job for 9 months out of the year. I still worked over the summer, and during the school year I was mostly in school, but I'd get a few weeks off during the school year for spring break or winter break. And after years of running non-stop those weeks were just golden. It felt like magic to have time to eat junk food, and play video games, and write poetry, and day drink, and just goof off. I didn't even care that most of my friends were gone away home or on vacation, because that meant I had some time to be who I am when no one else is around.
But since then the pace has only increased: with kids, especially, you're always on someone else's time. Even when you're notionally at leisure there are several someone-elses coming in and out of the picture needing you to be somewhere or be someone. You get some hours to yourself here and there, but that's not really enough time to find yourself or be yourself. It takes me several days of unstructured time before I really start to remember myself and feel like a person rather than an actor or a vector or a verb.
So having a week or two off work at home (especially when I can be by myself) is an opportunity for me to take off all the faces I put on and recapture that magic. I don't want to be uncomfortable and outside of my house. I don't want to have an itinerary where I have to go places or meet people or be things. I only want the thing that work and other obligations take away from me: the opportunity to do precisely what I want to or, put another way, to be myself without expectation.
On my dream vacation I want to be who I am, and read books, and play games, and watch movies, and eat junk food, and wander around, and drink in the afternoon, and just be, in every respect, like a teenager on summer vacation.