As part of my daily routine, when I sit down at the computer in the morning I have a pot of herbal/fruit tea to ‘flush out my system’. I have bought a packet of white tea, but this may have been a mistake; apart from the fact that it doesn’t taste that special, I suspect that, like green tea, it probably has as much caffeine as the black stuff. I’m not paranoid about caffeine, but my body really doesn’t like it, so I try and steer clear as much as I can.
As it’s a beautiful morning, I decided to start as I used to last summer, in my more ‘positive’ period, by taking my first cuppa for a wander round the garden. It was quite uplifting – especially spotting the little froggy face peeping out of the small pond – but also reminded me of all the additional work that really needs doing out there that I have been neglecting. Then on the way back in I dropped and smashed my cup in the utility room, and while clearing up the pieces, I reminded myself how badly the utility room needs cleaning and thought about all the odd little corners of the house (some of them not exactly little) that I almost never get round to cleaning…
Someone I was talking to the other day, who works full time but also manages to keep her house absolutely spotless (admittedly she lives alone and has a much smaller house than mine), said that she plans every moment of every day so she can fit everything in. I do have a structure to my days, but I still never seem to get enough done. Where DOES the time go? When people ask me what I do, I never know what to tell them. My mind is always running, the tape is always running through my head, I have been trying over the last few months to write it all down, I succeed in writing some of it, but what is the point of that, isn’t it all just a bit banal? To keep on writing my life instead of actually living it.
Now I have confirmed my place at the conference in Oxford, there is just a huge amount of work I have to do for that on top of all the other things, and I have also committed myself to something which I have been hmming and hawing about for months, getting involved with a group in the village. They are currently designing a questionnaire to go round the households, and I have offered my ‘expertise’ (hah!), so I will have to take a look at that. Unpaid, of course, but it ‘will look good on my CV’ – as if anyone ever bothers to read my CV…
So, having moaned about all the things I have to do, I spent yesterday morning going to a lecture on Matisse, the afternoon compiling a list of favourite books (I’ve worked out how to do bloglists, but you’ll have to check Melinda’s blog as she is the artsy fartsy literary type!) and the evening prancing about as an ersatz Japanese schoolgirl. So I have answered my own question. OK, the bloglist was a mistake, and maybe the talk was too. But the main problem is probably that I can’t get down to concentrate on things because of being permanently exhausted and having no energy. My sleep pattern has changed a bit because when I come in after a performance I actually can’t get to sleep till about 1, I do then usually sleep through, though last night I was awake about 4:30. But I will be living for the rest of the week at least on adrenalin.