Not now, I'm busy

Busy is one of those things that wax and wane – like the moon – or like the water content in your body – which bloats just when you want to show your midriff off.

Back to Busy however – which is just as traitorous. An undependable, varying, dissatisfied thing – this busy is. Everyone is busy. Always. Gmail offers status warnings that you are busy. All through the day and night – for 7 months in a row. (Can you be busy sleeping?) Your phone allows you to set a busy tone. Anyone you call seems so so busy, even if they proceed then to bitch about their boss for the next 45 minutes.

I used to be busy. I hated it. I had 2 kids under the age of 3, and I sleep-walked at 60 km per hour – through nappy-changing and feeding and rocking someone to sleep. Someone except me. I ate while running up the stairs to fetch a bottle, and I used the loo while reading a story book aloud to the brawlers outside. Busy! Exhausted and irritable. That’s what busy does to me.

Then the kids grew up and went to school. And I’d huffed off my job. So there was a time when I got just the opposite of busy. And I hated it. I called friends to ask about their new haircuts, and I offered to write brochures free for any NGO who sneezed in my direction. I read 3 library books a week, blogged with a vengeance, facebooked with a greater vengeance, and wrote a whole book.

It worked. I’m busy again. And I hate it. I’m too busy to have coffee with all those friends I begged to go out with, and too busy to cut my hair. And too busy to go to a meeting for a new project. And too busy to spend time writing this blog. I hate it.

Where’s the middle path, huh? Busy is one of those selfish, I-want-all-or-nothing creatures. Busy must be male!

Need a mid-week weekend

Chix and I just exchanged hellos, how are yous this Monday morning, and realized we’re both exhausted and need a holiday. Because we’re recovering from two holidays in a row, and you know how stressful that is!

The weekend’s more packed, than the 6.02 Churchgate local is. There’s everything you couldn’t do on the weekday to do, like:

Bills to pay and queues to stand in, and bills to search for in safe places, and to find to see that they’re overdue, and therefore different queues to stand in – to be told you’re too late and it’s the weekend, so come back later, since the office is now closed.

Shopping rears its head, since the cupboard is bare. There are exactly two and a quarter geriatric drumsticks that have fossilized, that support the innards of the fridge, so the weekend is the time to stock up. S, with his caveman instincts, likes to hunt and forage, and pick up another five kilos of something that no one will ever eat, except the ants, some day. While the drumsticks live on.

There are errands to run, school things to be picked up (where does one buy bangles of different colours for a BOY’s school project, and WHY does a boy need them?), and socks that display magical holes just a day before school opens and pressure cooker gaskets that suddenly blow and people who fall sick and need visiting, and long-lost family members who appear and need to be visiting…. And the list goes on and on…

There are books to be exchanged in the library, and therefore, the night before spent in speed-reading the book to return it. There are appointments with dentists and saloons and vets, and washing machines that lie down and play dead, and parts for extinct electrical gadgets to be sourced, and – phew!

And do NOT FORGET TO HAVE FUN! Weekends are to have fun, so you must have fun, even if it kills you. So, squeeze in a pub in between standing in a BSNL queue, and repairing a shoe. Or take the kids on a play date with other parents who look as hollow-eyed as you do.

And finally, it’s Monday morning. Time for the blues. Time for a break!

Learning : Don’t you think the week should start with a weekend?