What could possibly go wrong?

At the moment, I am making a six-minute animated movie.

Six minutes.

That sounds manageable, doesn’t it?

It is not.

I have given myself ten weeks to take this thing from a vague idea rattling around in my head to an actual little movie with a beginning, a middle, an end, characters who know what they are doing, and preferably no furniture floating mysteriously three inches above the floor.

The movie is called Your Time Is Important to Us.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t just making a movie.

I was making a Mary Makes It Work story.

So what is Mary Makes It Work, anyway?

That question has been following me around for a while.

This isn’t really a retirement site.

It isn’t a frugal-living site, although I am certainly frugal.

It isn’t an animation site, even though increasingly there are animated people, talking sunflowers, suspicious mist, and other things wandering through here that technically do not exist.

What I keep coming back to is this:

How do you make a meaningful, interesting life with the money, time, energy, and circumstances you actually have?

Not the life you would build if you suddenly had twice the money.

Not the life being sold to you by somebody on the internet who would very much like you to click the link below.

This one.

The life already sitting in front of you.

Mine happens to include a little house, a couple of dogs, a cat, a computer, a yard that keeps growing whether I am emotionally prepared for it or not, and an increasingly elaborate imaginary universe.

So I work with that.

And that is where Fab comes in.

Fab is the woman who lives in that imaginary universe.

In the movie, she takes a part-time job helping people recover lost time.

At first, this seems perfectly reasonable.

Well, reasonable by Fab standards.

Then one caller tells her, “I think I’ve lost Wednesday.”

And Fab looks at her own calendar.

Wednesday is missing.

That is when things begin to go wrong.

The movie is funny and strange, but underneath all of that is something I have been thinking about a lot.

Where does our time actually go?

Some of it has to go to work.

Some to dishes and mowing and grocery shopping and standing in the kitchen wondering why we walked into the kitchen.

But an astonishing amount of it can simply disappear.

Scrolling.

Drama.

Worry.

Things deliberately designed to keep us agitated.

Things designed to convince us that our lives would finally be satisfactory if we bought one more thing.

Hours that don’t become memories, don’t make anything, don’t help anybody, and don’t even leave us particularly rested.

Just…gone.

I don’t think an ordinary life is a failed life.

This may be the part I care about most.

There is a tremendous amount of pressure to make life look exciting.

Go somewhere.

Buy something.

Have an experience.

Reinvent yourself.

Document it.

Post it.

Do it again next weekend.

But most lives are made primarily out of ordinary Wednesdays.

You make supper.

You water something.

You fix something.

You read three chapters of a book.

You sit outside with the dog.

You work on something nobody else understands yet.

Maybe you embroider something or plant tomatoes or learn Blender for reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time.

Those hours count too.

Maybe they count more.

Why animation?

Because a camera can show you my desk.

It cannot show you what happens in my head while I am sitting at it.

Animation can.

So Mary Makes It Work is becoming a combination of the two worlds: the very ordinary one I actually live in and the strange little animated universe I apparently carry around with me.

I’m not using animation to replace my real life.

I’m using it to show the part of my real life a camera can’t see.

And right now, that means spending ten weeks making six minutes of film.

Which is objectively ridiculous.

I know.

But I also think there is something worthwhile in deciding that a small thing matters enough to finish.

Not because it will become famous.

Not because somebody has promised there is a market for it.

Not because it is the sensible thing to do.

Because I wanted to make it.

So that’s where we are.

A missing Wednesday.

A woman named Fab.

A sunflower named Loorie.

Something gray lurking where it shouldn’t be.

And me, sitting at my desk trying to figure out what happens next.

Six minutes.

How hard could it possibly be?