Everything I do, I will do tomorrow

I’ve set aside time every day to work on my book, so of course my blogging has become alarmingly prompt and prolific. I’ve also caught up on most of my correspondence, am well up on my YouTube watching and have added to my store of random internet trivia while “doing research” for a book that is not hampered by facts in any way.

Procrastination is the second half of the two-for-one deal that is the writing gene. My best poetry is written under the pressure of a deadline for something else, holidays are planned when I have other urgent priorities, and wardrobes are organized when I’m already late for an appointment.

I have another top-class distraction now – a delightful sitcom called The Big Bang Theory. I’ve been tiresomely recommending it to everyone I meet. It has filled the void left by the fact that both Friends and Seinfeld have been watched until memorized and Grey’s Anatomy in its sixth season has dwindled from medical drama to merely drama. Book and blog can now only get written on the days when there’re no new episodes sitting on my laptop. My Torrent pipeline (one half of which is probably reading this) is almost Columbian in the fix it delivers.

Mercifully TV itself is not an attraction. I don’t so much watch it as overhear what my parents are. This is quite a good way of keeping up with the more popular serials and the news without having to actually sit through them. The only time I consciously plug my ears is when Barkha Dutt is holding forth in her “We The People” slot – this is so that my mom’s viewing pleasure is not ruined by periodic explosions of venom from my room. I do make occasional forays into Ten Sports when there’s high profile football, Formula I or some other sporting event that happened to catch my eye on the Yahoo homepage. These usually have the best commercials too – when you don’t watch them every day, they’re fun.

I had a list of things to accomplish in the first half of the year. They weren’t. Instead, a lot of others (that should have been there) got done. I didn’t get a driving licence but I did join a gym. I still don't get enough sleep but I’ve stopped smoking. I didn’t hit the halfway mark on my book but I finished painting the table I’ve been meaning to for years.

This characteristic becomes rather inconvenient when it’s annual appraisal time at work and I have a list of achievements that are significant but have no relation to the goal sheet I submitted last year. I’ll just have to do some creative match-the-following. Just as soon as I finish transferring a drawing of a complicated Inca sun on to a perfectly fine t-shirt for embroidering with sequins at a future, unspecified, probably very distant date.