We recently watched Nick Kroll’s latest Netflix standup special, Little Big Boy. It was the kind of comedy special that had something for everyone and one of the few that the Cabbage has watched all the way through with us. Usually they disappear around the half way mark because usually that’s when the comedian choses to use their sexually explicit material. I don’t blame them. There’s many a comedian that Michael subjects us too that I don’t think is funny, but Nick Kroll’s special was pretty funny and relatable. He has this bit where he talks to himself using what he likes to believe is Jason Statham voice. He has these talks while staring at himself in a mirror and one would like to think they’re pep talks, but they are not. His inner Jason Statham says the most horrible things to Nick. It was so bad that at one point I looked at Michael and said “I thought I trash talked myself, but this guy wins in self trash talk.”

Really, I was appalled but also very impressed.

This week, I’ve been working on my color coded Google calendar in attempt to make it a little more honest. The 5:30 AM wake up call is not happening right now because it’s cold and dark and I’m in full on hibernation mode. When the weather changed over to not bearable outside weather, I kept the dog walk time on the calendar thinking I would still get up and get on my yoga mat. That hasn’t happened except maybe once or twice. Did I mention that it’s cold and dark and that I am a hibernating animal? As I removed that color block from my calendar, I expected to hear something from my inner trash talker, but instead another voice spoke up and said “remove something else!” Then I just started deleting all of the things that are on my calendar that are intentions and added the things that are set in stone dates, like doctors appointments and planned weekend events.

Then I took it all one step further. There are large salmon colored blocks on my calendar for Monday through Friday labelled ‘work’. That’s it. No details about what that ‘work’ is or scheduled work related things. Just work. Last year I noticed that I was double booking myself for things at work, scheduling training times for people when I had promised to help someone else on a different microscope. That kind of thing. Part of this has something to do with microscope availability, but a lot of it has something to do with my inability to say no. I’m all “no worries, I can do it all.” This is false. So, I looked at my week and the actual scheduled things in my work day and started making more salmon colored blocks to overlay the work block. Salmon is the color I’ve chosen for work related things. I don’t know why. It is not my favorite color. I’ve saved that color for things that I really like doing, not that I don’t like my job. I like my job about 90% of the time. I enjoy the color of salmon about the same amount.

This isn’t about colors.

This is about recognizing the time spent doing things, and by golly, I do things. Lots of things. I think I’m doing nothing or very little, but I am doing a lot of things. Sure there’s a chunk of time between 5:00 PM and 8:45 PM that has nothing scheduled, but I haven’t gotten around to adding ‘make/eat dinner’, ‘clean kitchen’, ‘get lunch together for the next day’, and ‘sit on my butt on the couch watching TV’ to the calendar. It’s not always TV; sometimes I’m reading. Anyway. I haven’t added ‘free time’ to my calendar and I look at those empty time slots and see them as moments when I can do what ever the fuck I want. And this is where my inner trash talker wants to start in.

Who do I think I am to think I have time for sitting on my butt doing nothing?

I’ll tell you who I think I am. I am the person that had to explain to someone that they cannot use this particular microscope to image 560 and 594 at the same time because they cannot be spectrally separated. I am the person that sat down with a graduate student and confirmed fluorescent signal before setting up a twenty four slide batch imaging run. I am the person who taught a chair yoga class during lunch and then ate lunch at my desk while reading an article titled “Integration of whole transcriptome spatial profiling with protein markers”. I was the person to clean out the pool of oil someone left in a 20x air objective so someone else could actually use it. And if you don’t understand even half of the things I’ve just listed above, then at the very least you understand that ‘work’ means WORK.

My inner trash talker barely even exists.