Addiction

January 15, 2020
Wednesday

I wonder if other people are on drugs too.

I'm not talking about the pain- and inflammation killers I take for my pneumonia, but about the kind of "lifestyle" drugs that make life a bit more difficult to own.

Yesterday I made a plan in regards to my reading and writing projects that are going quite slow and in the wrong direction:

I will read for one hour in the evenings.
(10:30 p.m. - 11:30 p.m. is the time for The Hemingway-challenge).

I will work on my book during the hours when the babysitter is around.
(Four afternoons a week, around 3 hours a day).

I will document the progress of my challenges in the morning.
(6 a.m. - 7 a.m. when everybody is still asleep).

Sounds like a decent plan.

"If we do not seek the impossible, we do not even achieve what is possible."

What's my drug? It's "night-watching", my loves. (I'm just editing this a year later and have no idea why I used "my loves" here. So out of character. I believe I thought of my grandchildren who might read all this one day. Does anyone have a good plan / strategy for archiving blogs in real time so when its owner dies, it will not go down with her? / Thoughts I have on a frequent basis.) It's watching movies, documentaries, social media and anything youtube until I pass out. I did read some of Sillanpaa's book yesterday before sleepiness got to me but instead of sleeping, I watched a documentary on plant-based diet (my new religion), started watching a doc on Brazilian democracy, then sleepiness was back, so I watched the 30-minute-long wedding video of a Hungarian reality star.

(She had an island rented out for the wedding with carriages and motor boats, shoes that looked expensive and scarlet wedding gowns for all of her bridesmaids for the make up session to hang out and be video-ed. The wedding dinner took place in a restaurant that looked like a community center in the countryside where Coke, Fanta, Sprite and other plastic soda bottles, at least five of them, were in the middle of each table as centerpieces -- and the king was naked.)

I love these modern fairytales. I can spend hours with "reality" stars and their stories just to be told fairytales again. (Here comes the editor from the future again: It just happens, well happened that at the assessment day of Mariska's elementery school this very reality star and I were in the same group compiting for a place for our kids in the same class... Here is the link to my essay on those assessment days but 1. It is written in Hungarian. 2. I did not cover my meeting with this reality star at the very unlikely place of a Jewish school even though there IS a story there. I did not cover it because this is where journalism loses me. My ethics came in the way. One day. There is a time for everything.)

I don't remember what else I watched. The IG page of a former lover who had broken my heart three times? Or my sisters' IG stories showing her giving a speech in the European Parliament with the kind of ease I do groceries?

I am having a hangover. I always have a hangover the day after "night-watching" and almost always miss the alarm the next morning. I f-ck up the next day. I f-ck up and I still do the night-watching to feel free. Free of responsibilities, free of kids, free... of the world, I guess. That's me at my weakest.

Why am I talking about this?

Probably to give myself an excuse for today's failure. Yesterday night I set myself up for failure. Today I'm dizzy and tired. I'll be slow the whole day, I won't be efficient. IF, and it is a big IF all in caps, the babysitter shows up in time and my daughter doesn't give a 40-minute-long tantrum until I find my way out and hide somewhere to work: I will be staring at the computer doing close to zero work.

So I'm begging the universe, actually myself, to STOP me from doing my drug for the next few years I have left for my challenge!

I read about 5 pages yesterday of A Way of Man. I'm already in love with the hero, Paavo Ahtori. No matter what he does (and he had knocked up a girl in the beginning of the book only to leave her and his baby), I'll be on his side. That's just the magic Sillanpaa does.