Stuff Pretentious People Like: Being Busy

If there’s one thing pretentious people just love, it’s being monumentally busy. The world is a fast-paced place, after all, and pretentious people are right in the thick of it at all times. They’re not like the rest of us, who just glide through life with nothing to do all day, waiting for them to be available so we can have something really fun to do. You are the Ford Crown Victoria to their Porsche 911 Turbo, so you better get out of the way, at least until they tell you there’s room in their passenger seat (which might be on the 10th of Never, honestly).

Despite their monumentally “occupied” status, don’t expect to ever see them anywhere out on the town. They don’t do the same things socially, because they exist on a higher plane, participating in activities to which you are not invited. They have a whole other set of friends that also have a whole other set of friends. And none of the friends you share in common will ever see them either. While this may sound suspicious (and you might start to suspect they are actually sitting at home on any given night in elasticized ankle sweats, eating Edy’s Dibs and watching re-runs of “The Ghost Whisperer”), the whole phenomenon makes sense. The friends you have in common obviously suck as much as you do and aren’t invited either.

While pretentious people are very busy, they are often not very happy about the horrible things they have to do. These also double as excuses for why they can’t work you into their schedules this week and will have to be penciling you in until after their “busy season:”



1. Work. I bet you didn’t realize pretentious people have jobs (being so very awesome seems like it would be a full-time endeavor), and jobs that are 10 times more taxing than anything you could even imagine. Actually, you probably knew about the absolute shit storm that is their office environment, because you probably spent 5 hours today reading their 50 Facebook and Twitter updates, full of very colorful adjectives that make you feel like you are right there, with an obnoxious, demanding boss standing over your shoulder, preventing you from checking your personal e-mail or im’ing all day long. You may also have found out about their dire, busy, unreasonable work situation by two other means: through a hastily-written response to an e-mail from you attempting to solidify plans for the weekend, telling you in 3 paragraphs or more why making plans is impossible right at that moment because of how busy work is that day; through a short, hectic, stressful response to an instant message you sent to ask a quick question about when the person intends to return a DVD you loaned him/her 8 weeks ago. You’ll probably never know exactly what this incredibly important job entails, because there’s just no time to explain (and how could you wrap your little head around it?). No matter what, pretentious people know one important fact – no one in history has ever worked as hard as they do … not even James Brown.






2. Stay up Late or Get up Early. Because you’ve never had to get up before 11 a.m. a day in your life, and because “You don’t need as much sleep” as your “superiors” do, you don’t know the feeling that results from getting less than 12 hours of sleep per night. Pretentious people are sometimes forced to get up at ridiculous hours to be at work or get on conference calls … sometimes as early as 10 a.m. When no less than 12 hours of sleep will do – and 10 a.m. is the magic waking hour – you can expect pretentious people to be very busy starting at 10 p.m. However, because of their busy lifestyle, this often does not happen. Sometimes they have to stay up late to go see friends’ bands play on a school night or go to a charity event with the friend of a friend of a friend that knows that guy from that band who used to be Bruce Springsteen’s assistant. And you can’t expect them to be in any shape to do anything with you the day after that, can you? NOTE: This horrible task can also be used as a way to further leverage an unreasonable work environment, because anyone that was reasonable or humane would send an employee that only got 7 hours of sleep the night before home to prevent that person from getting sick/not being able to think straight/being unable to keep his/her eyes open/etc.



3. Go without a Vacation for 6 Months. If you know just one awesome person, you are probably aware of the dangers of not taking a vacation at least six or seven times a year. Just thinking about and being outraged by going without a one- or two-week vacation for 6 months or even a year can occupy a lot of time in a person’s schedule. After all, normal people get many, many vacations per year to tropical destinations and a chance to really “de-stress.” In real life, and not insane, obligation-filled, responsibility-driven, deeply-sucking lives that involve very adult problems like jobs, mortgages, children, house-cleaning, grocery-shopping, bill-paying, etc., even if you promised to do something important, as soon as you decide to take a vacation, you are in no way obligated to anyone but yourself. If you are truly awesome and super busy, you can let as many people down as you want, drive the company you work for into the ground or let someone die in the street (if it comes to that) starting two weeks before your intended vacation time is set to start and ending two weeks after you get back. You need time to pack and prepare, because you’re worth it. When it’s time to go to Detroit or Memphis on a two-week road trip with your unemployed best friend and her disability-collecting boyfriend that squats in Brooklyn, you can’t afford to miss going to see your favorite band that plays just 30 times per year in your home city, so let no one – and no company that pays your salary’s dwindling revenue – stand in your way.


The bottom line is, when it’s “busy season” in the Land of the Rather Awesome, go with the flow. The world doesn’t really work on your schedule anyway. You’re just lucky enough that every once in a while the world decides to take some time out of its busy schedule to give you a night sitting at your corner bar so you can get out of the house for a change. You have been a little bit depressed lately …