“Where do you find the time?”
“You must really like working a lot.”
“You must be a (book worm or nerd or Einstein or driven or a workaholic or any number of assumptions people like to make about someone they barely know anything about other than they are different).
These three quotes above are questions/phrases people spit at me almost as a reflex when they find out I am going to school online full time and working full time. Usually this is because for some reason or another they have dismissed the notion of getting a higher education themselves under a file in their brain labeled “impossible” or at the very least “highly inconvenient”. Okay I’ll admit I am a bit different. Not necessarily odd but almost a little eccentric by the standards of “normal” people.
So do I like working a lot? No but I do find good work to be worthwhile and satisfying. I simply cannot sit around and do nothing. I haven’t the genetic code for that sort of thing. I’m not a nerd (unless you ask my wife) or an Einstein or a workaholic (though I have some workaholic tendencies) but I certainly am driven.
Where the “oddness” comes in is also strongly linked with where I find time to go to school. First of all, I don’t have T.V. Oh I have a television hooked to a DVD player to occasionally watch a movie but I do not get any channels or T.V. stations at all. I don’t have cable, satellite or even local regular old television. Nada, nothing. I also do not have video games or any such distractions. My living room probably resembles the 3rd layer of hell to most teenagers, a small unassuming television, a laptop, a pile of books on a kitchen table and some calculators, pens and notebooks strewn about.
For relaxation I surf the net, watch a movie or play guitar, that’s about it. It’s amazing how much time becomes available for things like school when you put down the remote or turn off the video game. Every once in a blue moon I get to sit down and read a fictional novel or something which is my idea of bliss. So is cutting television out of your life a major lifestyle choice? Actually to me it really isn’t but to watch the slow realization of horror spread over the faces of my coworkers when I tell them that I do not have television you would think that it is. I don’t know. Maybe after 5 years I’m just used to it by now.