Published: 27 October, 2009, 17:49
Edited: 5 November, 2009, 06:42
Recently, I was accepted into a university course, a Masters in Procrastination. Naturally, I deferred it. Perhaps I don’t really need the qualification after all.
I’m trying to get myself into a routine of writing, if for no other reason than to give myself some sort of a sense of self-satisfaction and the feeling of possessing at least a semblance of self-discipline. Alas and alack, the road to hell being allegedly paved with good intentions, this goal is merely serving to highlight the fact that I have an attention span roughly equivalent to that of a sparrow who’s just raided a rubbish bin at McDonald’s. This from a person who used to think that “attention deficit” was when people were ignoring me.
At school, I was always prone to turning essays in that had only been completed that morning on the bus. Of course, the handwriting was a bit scratchy (this was before laptops, but after papyrus), but I invariably managed to scrape over the line. As the saying goes, 50 per cent is a pass, 51 per cent’s a waste of time.
Sadly, this tendency had vanished little by the time I made it to university – something which I actually did defer until my early thirties. I had, by this time, become slightly more organized. Working fulltime and studying fulltime doesn’t allow much room for mayhem, so I found myself planning things ahead. My fellow students - full of the haughtiness that home-cooked meals and having your clothes washed and your house cleaned for you can do little to diminish – would ridicule me at the beginning of semester as I doggedly wrote down the due dates for assignments in my diary. This actually did help me, but I felt no small resentment when these same whippersnappers would beg for, and be granted, extensions on the basis that their cousin’s wedding had been on the weekend before, or that book regarding the influence of Laurence Sterne on Gogol’s writing had already been checked from the library under the name of “Higgs”, and was now overdue. No sympathy! No excuses!
As the saying goes, if you want something done, give it to someone who’s busy. Or, as my father used to say (it’s only fair that I quote him, having already given my mother’s wisdom a run), inertia breeds inertia. I have another take on it, which is that time is rather like a liquid: it will occupy the space afforded to it, or perhaps it is the reverse. Imagine that whatever it is you have to do is represented by one liter of fluid. If the container you are pouring it into is wide and flat, the liquid will occupy the allocated space. If, however, the container is narrow and tall, the liquid will also occupy this space. Hence, I always try, however vainly, to aim for a narrow and tall receptacle.
Then again, this theory has emerged from the same mind that says life (also time) appears to be twice as fast as it was when I was 20 because one year now represents one-fortieth of my life, whereas then it only represented one twentieth. Who could trust such logic? And why are you still reading this?
Whatever good habits I developed at university have largely been eroded by my time in Russia. This is a place in which it actually pays to do things at the last moment. I once met a Swedish expat here who claimed that having more than one administrative goal per day was folly in Moscow. He maintained that, if he achieved that one thing, he would be satisfied. Harboring any loftier goals is the path to disappointment, in his view. I wouldn’t go that far, but I have had my organizational efforts tested on several occasions. For example, it’s useless to try and plan a railway holiday more than 40 days in advance. The tickets simply are not on sale until then. Not only that, but you can’t get a price or a schedule beyond that timeframe.
One of the by-products of this notorious difficulty to get anything done is that supposedly noblest of virtues: patience. I’m not saying I’ve perfected it yet, but I’ve come a long way.
So what if I don’t manage to finish the four or five stories I started? Will anything catastrophic happen? I seriously doubt it. Will I get in trouble as a result? Highly unlikely. Will I disappoint my reader? Possibly, although I did send some nice flowers for her birthday. You never know, I may get around to the other stories sometime. And at least I have a couple in the pipeline for when that deadline rolls around again.
Until next time, then. Unless, of course, I’ve managed to put you off too.