Meetings? Or Not?

Sometimes I think I put too much emphasis on how Alcoholics Anonymous many meetings I attend.  I'm back from a long trip with no access to meetings (I offer no credible excuse as to why I couldn't attend one of the thousands of available on-line meetings) and barely a month home and I'm sensing some annoyance with my regular meeting.  There are a lot of regular members there which means I get to see and hear from a lot of the same people - while I appreciate their dedication in helping the meeting to thrive do you have to share at length at every meeting?  I continue to maintain that most people are not nearly as interesting as they think they are.  I also express a gentler, kinder seething at why some members think the timer the group voted to install to ensure that no one talks too long and more people get to share is some kind of ignorable suggestion.  Three minutes of droning on and on is too long as it is but to blithely continue to producing more droning noises after the timer has sounded is way too long.  I lose interest in a great share after a couple of minutes but anything longer than that and the person's voice begins to sound like a dentist's drill in an adjacent room while I'm trying to fall asleep.

I've got a couple of non-recovery projects and tasks I've been trying to get rolling for a while now and the meetings are taking up more time than I can spare if I want to get these things rolling.  There should be a balance between recovery time and living life time.  If I spend too much of my day in recovery efforts I stint my normal life but if I shirk my recovery efforts then my normal life starts to . . . well . . . suck a little bit.  I didn't go for six weeks and I was fine.  I did my daily devotions and meditated and the like but I wasn't involved in the  meeting process and it was, in a way, good for me.  It freed up chunks of time to do other things.  It's analogous to SuperK living in a hotel for a week all by herself on her recent trip to see her brother.  She enjoys my company and her life at home but sometimes it can be healthy just to be by yourself, doing what you want to do when you want to do it.  I'm not going to drift into the room and intrude with an uninteresting story.  If I live my life like this all the time then I'm selfish but if I get to do it from occasionally then I'm taking care of my own mental health.  SuperK golfs on Wednesdays so I make sure to stay home that day.  It's just me and that's just fine on Wednesdays.  She was nervous about being on her own for a week in Idaho but she enjoyed herself quite a bit.