Between dramas

On Sunday night, around 7pm, I found myself with nothing to do and it was highly unnerving. With so much going on it didn’t seem right to just be relaxing on my bed waiting for the final of The Apprentice to start. I moaned to Danny that we should be doing something and he gave me the obligatory eyeball roll that I have become quite good at ignoring. Persisting in my mission to find something to do I opened up my notebook to start writing a list only to find that the list was already written and there really was nothing more to add to it.

My world started tumbling down around my ears. This is crazy, I can’t go on like this. Just sitting here, feeling impotent, knowing that we have so much to organise, so much to do. There MUST be something.

“Of course there is Ms Rotbart”, says my conscience “for a start you could go downstairs and start backing up the hard drive on your computer which you’ve been meaning to do for about a month; oh, and there’s always the laundry”.

Isn’t it odd that somehow those kind of jobs don’t seem very relevant? The hygiene factor – the stuff that, no matter what is going on in your life, still needs to get done; those are the jobs you never want to do. So much so that in my world of lists, buying and website development, these jobs don’t even exist as things that need to be done. This is the world of the non-jobs. Jobs that only achieve something for a short time until they need to be done again, or jobs that don’t contribute to the bigger scheme of things but need to be done anyway.

Don’t think that I haven’t realised that it’s precisely those jobs which are going to be my bread and butter come April next year, yet in my head that is somehow different as we’ll be getting paid to do those things. I have no doubt that our own laundry, and our own chores will get relegated to the bottom of the pile over and over again as more ‘worthwhile’ stuff takes precedence.

Jobs that don’t directly relate to the business don’t seem to count. They seem irrelevant and pointless and I *stamps foot*, *screws up face* don’t want to do them. For that reason they never appear on a list and I certainly don’t want to be reminded of them by my ever-present conscience.

I’ve become almost blind to the relatively large computer on the floor of my parents dining room, waiting there patiently for me to back it up. The words ‘it’ll get done at the weekend’ seem to trip off my tongue when I’m asked about any one of these non-jobs and, bar the odd mumble from my conscience, I seem to be quite capable of letting Danny get on with the laundry without the remotest twinge of guilt.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year… all these days mean that I cannot do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it. People are on holiday, companies close down, everyone seems to have the plague and I’m just sitting around waiting for chaos to ensue in January. Unfortunately all that’s on my plate at the moment are these non-jobs which means, at some point, I’ll just have to get on with them.

I can almost see my mother calculating the list of jobs she’s going to remind me I need to do while reading this blog. There’s no getting away from it now; I’ve detailed my procrastination in black and white and it’s open season.