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May 4, 2010

Time and status



Time and status seem to go hand in hand. The little path isn’t as straight forward as it appears to be at first glance however. It’s status to have lots of time to do exciting things like, I don’t know, rock climbing and overnight trips to Paris. The irony in that is that you have to work a lot in order to be able to afford that. If you don’t work as much surely you have more time on your hands, but you can’t do the extraordinary things. That example is however a tad extreme.

If you’re more down to earth and looking at it, you can boil it down to having time to spend with your kids/partner/hairdresser/that gay guy down the street but the things that enables you to have that extra hour a day is low status. Look at it. It’s high status to make your own slow cooked meal with special ingredients from twelve different very specialized stores and low status to eat take out. It doesn’t even have to have anything with the nutritional facts to do. You can order a salad from the pizzeria and make greasy whatevers at home. It’s the fact that you have time to go to those little tiny stores with clerks wearing green and white aprons helping you pick the perfect spice rather than calling a pizzeria on your way home from work.

It’s not high status to bum around, to watch bad movies on TV, to nap your Sunday away. It is high status to go out with your friends and pay 8 times the price for your drinks just because someone has to pay rent, salaries and insurance for a business. It’s high status to have weekend plans that are exciting to hear about on Friday and entertaining to hear the stories of on Monday. It’s simply status to fill that time you have with statusesque things.

There’s even status in bread! Easy to make things are low status, like scones and muffins. Sour dough bread and ratafias are high status. So basically, if you spend your time doing all these high status things you will have no time left to just chill. Maybe I should have included floral arrangements here. They can be complicated too. It’s kind of nice to just pick a tulip of daffodil from your not so well kept garden too. The flowers all die at the same rate anyway, don’t they? And so do we. I say eat falukorv and powdered mashed potatoes and tell stories of mushrooms instead of wearing high heels in the kitchen. Oh, how low status of me to say that. I don’t mind. I kind of like my garden messy too where it looks as if the flowers are sprung through the entwined souls of last years batch.

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