It’s a question I’ve spent the past four months asking myself on an almost daily basis. Having a full slate the past semester with five classes and working full time (gotta have insurance), I felt like I was constantly sacrificing my free time towards school work, observation in my clinical class, or catching up on sleep, which isn’t to say that I ever squashed my optimism about having free time by hitting the brakes on my entertainment purchases. No, I kept on buying books, comics, video games, CDs, records, etc. during my educational entrapment, which leaves me a bit baffled about what exactly to do during my free time.

I’ve been trying to catch up on an embarrassingly large DVD backlog (both my own DVDs and those arriving weekly from Netflix), but I have a hard time watching an entire film in one sitting, the back of my mind constantly shifting back and forth with thoughts of what to do next or even what I could be doing instead. Since I’m not having to wake up at 7:15 AM anymore to face a stressful 45+ minute drive, I’ve been overcompensating on sleep, often sleeping past noon and lounging about as though I were unemployed.

I think one of my biggest problems – and it’s nothing severe – is that I’ll often buy things before I’ve properly enjoyed the things I already have. I’ve got a mound of half-read comics, books, magazines, etc. growing by my bed that I sometimes think I’ll never get around to reading. Still, I’ll often go out and peruse book stores when I’m bored instead of brewing up a pot of coffee and sitting at home reading, often returning home with a new addition for the ever-growing pile. I’m the same way with video games, though the $60 price tag on new video games tends to inhibit those purchases more often than not. I feel like one of the consumer zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1978); I don’t quite know what to do with myself, might as well go shopping.