The release of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody got me thinking.  Mostly, it got me thinking that, even though I love Queen with the devotion of the twelve year old girl I was when I discovered them, I’m really sick of seeing that biopic trailer every time I try to watch a video on YouTube.  I was sitting through the trailer again the other day while waiting to watch a video of some random girl doing the dance from “Thriller” in full zombie makeup, and I started thinking about an article I’d read that said we spend roughly 2 years of our lives in the shower–or possibly 6 months, depending on (as far as I can tell) if you’re British or not.  I started to wonder how many hours of my life I’ve spent watching the Bohemian Rhapsody trailer.  Then I started to wonder how many hours of my life I’ve spent watching trailers for movies I’ll never see.  Then I started to wonder how many hours of my life I’ve spent singing the song “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  Then I got out the calculator.  After that, things just kind of spiraled and–well, this happened:

Amount of Time in My Life I’ve Spent Doing Things That Aren’t Usually the Subjects of Articles About How Much Time We Spend Doing Things:

1. Singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”:  I kinda gave this one away in the title, but here’s my reasoning:  I sing this song in the shower at least once a week, from start to finish, including all the bits with the words that sound like a hymn from the Church of Satan.  Multiply the song’s 6 minute run time by 52 weeks in the year for (cough cough) years and you get:  8112 minutes/135 hours/5 and a half days.  I think Freddie Mercury would have been proud–you know, as long as he never actually heard me sing.  Oh, Lord.  You don’t think he can hear me in heaven, do you?  I’m pretty loud.

2.  Watching movies I secretly think are stupid because my friends have crushes on the actors:  1116 minutes/18 and a half hours.  For this total, I added up the running times of the third Jurassic Park movie, two Jennifer Aniston movies, Dumb and Dumberer (the sequel; I liked the first one), Deuce Bigalow:  Male Gigolo, and all five Twilight movies.  I’m not including movies like She’s All That, which I thought was going to be stupid but I ended up really liking, or Batman and Robin (the one with George Clooney), which my friends and I were all excited to see but agreed afterward sucked pretty hard.  I’m also not including Titanic because I was always very open about how stupid I thought it was.

3.  Putting off doing things I don’t really mind doing:  I’m not really sure about the exact figures for this one, but I’m guessing the number’s pretty high.  I’m going to peg it at about five times the amount of time it would have taken to just get off my butt and do it.  Sample activities I’ve spent about five times as long putting off as it would have taken to just do include:  emptying the trash, writing thank-you notes, calling my mother back, getting a breast exam, and meeting my boyfriend’s parents.  I should probably leave that last one out of any calculations I do, though, because it’ll screw up the curve.

4. Yelling at my pets:  This one truly shocked me.  Over the course of my cats’ lives, I’ve spent about 78,625 minutes/1310 hours/55 days yelling at them.  I feel like a really bad kitty mommy.  I estimated that I spend about five minutes per day per cat shouting “No!”, calling them bad cats, and occasionally chasing them around the house screaming “Why are you so evil??”  I didn’t think five minutes was excessive, but with two senior kitties plus their big sister (she died a few years ago), five minutes per cat per day really adds up.  I feel bad.  Not bad enough to stop yelling at them, but still pretty bad.

5.  Stalking boys I had crushes on:  I was trying to figure out a way to calculate this one, and I eventually settled on this:  By the time I was done stalking a guy, I had learned as much or more about him as I learned in an entire college course–one I cared about, anyway.  I skipped a lot of the Gen Ed requirement classes (note to my mother:  I’m totally kidding about that.  I attended every class.  I definitely didn’t skip one class so many times that the professor asked my friends if I was sick).  So I made a list of the guys I’ve had crushes on, and if you count each one as a course, I’ve stalked enough guys to complete a college major.  I basically have a degree in Obsessive Infatuation.  Bet my philosophy diploma isn’t looking so bad now, huh, Dad?

6.  Time I spent learning the dance from the “Thriller” music video:  none, because I didn’t do that.  The person in that YouTube video could have been anyone under all the zombie makeup.  The fact that I have the exact red leather jacket that Michael Jackson wore during his groundbreaking musical short film helmed by An American Werewolf in London director John Landis proves nothing except that I have keen fashion sense and spend a lot of time on Ebay.  But if I were the person in the YouTube video, I would just say this:  it’s a lot easier to dance like no one is watching when you’re pretty sure no one can recognize you.  Also, how come today’s zombies don’t dance?  I understand about the problem with body parts falling off, but just stay away from twerking and you’ll be fine.

7.  Walking around in public without realizing I had food/ink/stickers/weird crease marks on my face:  I’d love to tell you, but I can’t make an accurate estimate until my “friends” tell me when they put that “I’m a porn star–ask me how!” sticker on my forehead.  Seriously, guys.  I went out to get the mail like that.  Not cool.

8.  Reading other people’s blogs and sulking because they’re so much better than mine:  just, all the time.  It’s depressing how freaking talented everyone else is. They’re so funny and smart and cool… why is everyone else always so much cooler than I am?? I’m smart!!  I’m funny!! I’m talented–I learned the dance from “Thriller” in just three days–wait…crap.

I give up.  I’ll never be cool.  I’ll always be the crazy lady who yells at her cats and dances in a zombie costume on Halloween (I put the “trick” in “trick or treat”) (yeah, no, definitely not funny.  Sorry about that).  But if my only legacy is that I spent over 100 hours of my life singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I can live with that.  There are worse ways to spend your time.

Addendum:  Apparently the Bohemian Rhapsody movie sucks.  Weirdly, I still want to see it.  Damn you, YouTube!

[The image used in this blog is in the public domain at, as almost always, pixabay.com]