Really Lazy

I’ve been unusually lazy today. Well, perhaps not unusually lazy—but definitely actively lazy.

This week has been a series of petty annoyances . . . the air conditioning not working in the car, housekeeping tasks piling up, lack of parking spaces, forty pieces of first-year assessment to be marked in a week, lack of sleep, rain coming down just as you’re heading to a lecture while wearing a white top, unexpectedly becoming unable to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb right in the middle of a lecture.

These little pinpricks are actually something that I enjoy, in retrospect; it’s the slowly developing to-do lists of life that make me realise (briefly and ephemerally) that I’m actually a grown-up. Oddly, the fact that I live in my own home, am a wage-earning adult, actually get to choose furniture, and have the ability to control my own television-watching experience doesn’t actually bring my maturity home to me, as much as the little irritations.

But the end result is laziness.

The final two weeks of the Ph.D. were so fraught, and the whole experience so exhilarating but exhausting—I feel like I need a holiday. And the mid-semester break coming up doesn’t count—I’ve just finished my first years’ marking and the second years have submitted their first assignment.

So, in the absence of a reasonable holiday period, I’ve spent the day sitting on the sofa (the uncomfortable sofa, for reasons I can’t actually explain) and watching the entire second season of Green Wing.

But this is where the problem comes in. I don’t want to neglect the blog, because I enjoy it and I don’t want to get to the stage where I think “Oh, well—I don’t have to update regularly.”

But I don’t want to blog about Green Wing.

Because I’m obsessed.

I get these obsessions occasionally. I thought—one upon a time, when I made myself stop reading the Narnia series for a while, because I was getting a little funny about them—that they were just part of the exaggerated emotional states in which one spends one’s adolescence. Essentially, I thought I’d grow out of them.

But apparently I haven’t.

They don’t completely overtake my life—they’re leisure-time obsessions. So now I just lean into them.

The last one was Fables. And that shouldn’t be in past tense. I’m still obsessed with Fables, but it’s calmed—although that may be an optimistic claim, because I did become a little worried when one monthly issue was delayed by six weeks.

Before that, it would probably have been Deadwood, which was accidental—I bought it for my brother for Christmas, thinking he’d like the swearing and violence, and then he dared me into watching it.

Green Wing is the latest—and it, too, will settle down over time.

Anything that I develop an obsession with (and it’s not a new obsession every week) stays with me—they remain something that I enjoy watching and re-watching over the years.

Okay, except for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I’m not sure where that came from, all those years ago, but I really did enjoy it once.

Ahem.

But I’m not writing about these obsessions while they’re still in the early stages. After all, you need to keep the crazy at least slightly under wraps.

Once I’ve finished watching season two, I might be able to explain why the show delights me so much.

For now, I’m just going with the flow.