Re: productive time wasting

I am a time waster. And I’m good at it too. I waste a lot of time every day. For every hour of work I spend at least two hours not doing anything. Doing anything but work. Postponing the start of the work by all means possible, lazily dragging myself to the point when there’s no chance of escape and my back is finally and truly against the wall.

Well, I hear you say, you’re not alone. What’s so unique about being a time waster, a procrastinator? Nothing, obviously. Every one of us procrastinates on a daily basis, regardless of our occupation, willpower and general state of mind. We all spend away the precious hours (including some of those eight paid-by-employers hours) by doing totally useless things. And don’t tell me that checking email every 10 minutes, reading the news, tweeting and updating Facebook status, munching an apple, etc are not useless things when you’re supposed to be working. There is a theory that an average office worker spends only three hours out of their daily eight actually doing some work. That is five hours, or more than sixty percent of that workers’ time, gone to the gutter. Needless to say, the same can be said about non-office workers too.

But I must say that I am a special time waster. I am different from millions of others who waste time for the sake of wasting time, to make their long hours go faster, to draw nearer the end of the working day. I waste time to be able to work. This sounds absurd, doesn't it? But not only is it not absurd, it is also necessary.

My day always starts with time wasting and I am never able to concentrate on my daily tasks if I haven’t spent a couple of hours on useless stuff. I start the day by checking the email and reading some stuff I usually read on the internet (football pages, news etc). Then on my way to the library, where I do all of my work, the real time wasting starts. I go to a coffee shop to get an americano and linger there for at least half an hour, pretending to be reading that long article in the reviews section of the morning paper. From there I walk to Ryman the stationers on Sidney Street, where I waste another 15 minutes looking at fountain pens and feeling the smooth paper of Oxford notebooks. The nearby Waterstone’s is where I waste most of my time, though: the ground floor with all the new books, none of which I buy, of course; the winding walk up the stairs to the third floor, where I go through the familiar shelves of history and philosophy books. Add another ten minutes wasted in the travel books and guides department, and my time at the bookshop easily passes the hour. From there I walk to Corpus, where I go through the daily ritual of checking my pigeonhole, lingering in the library ground floor near the shelf with the periodicals (Sight&Sound is my all-time favourite magazine on that shelf). Only having made sure that I’ve wasted enough time in the library do I sit down and start working. And I do work for some time, without distractions.

I see this timewasting as a necessary ritual, something to appease my body, to prepare my mind for the day ahead. It is a ritual that helps me trick my lazy mind. It is a kind of ‘no excuses’ approach - having wasted so much time here and there, my mind and body have no excuses at the time when I’m finally at the desk, reading or writing. This understanding, this deal, if you like, between myself and my mind is a part of my attempts to come to terms with my existence, with the problems that only I can solve, the way in which my mind works. I don’t regret the time wasted as it leads to peace of mind and, sometimes, serendipity and inspiration (especially after the long hours spent in the bookshop).

Paul Auster's new book

I had to see the Paul Auster page on the Wikipedia - the page I've read maybe a hundred times - to learn that the great writer has released another novel since I read - with great pleasure - his last work, Invisible. The title of the book is Sunset Park, Amazon lets you read the first eight pages or so and, as it always happens with me and Auster's books, I'm totally hooked and can't wait to get my hands on the novel.

I don't know what exactly makes Auster's novels tick - is it the polished, highly readable language? Or is it the plots that take you around New York streets, following one lonely soul after another? Maybe it's the red notebook (a standard spiralled 100-page lined notebook), which is present in almost every novel he's written? I don't know. It must be the combination of all those things and much, much more. In any case, Auster is among the very few writers (Orhan Pamuk is among them) whose every work fills me with inspiration, excitement, and joy. I like to think that these writers are my distant friends whom I have never met and who write the very books that I'm waiting to read.

My reading days

I have been reading a lot in the last two weeks. It all began with my pledge to myself to finish every library book within the three weeks for which it is lent and to get a new book next time I go to the library. My wishlist coincided largely with the list of recent Booker Prize winners - I remember planning to read all the winning titles back in my university years. So I began with Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (I didn't borrow this book, though), then went to the library in search of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, but it was out on loan, so I settled for DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little.

I read Roy's book slowly, desperately trying to make the joy last longer, turning the pages slowly over a large teapot of darjeeling and countless bars of Meiji black chocolate on quiet evenings. I tried to taste every word, hold it in my mouth for some time, chuckling at jokes and sighing when Roy's fictional world threw its weight on my shoulders. In short, I couldn't get enough of this book - it eventually ended, as good books usually do, leaving me thinking about it for the rest of the week.

Vernon God Little was good in its own way. The eff words kept piling on my head from the very first page, and after reading Roy's beautifully constructed prose, it was a little disappointing, even disgusting to some extent. But later on I got used to this, and caught up with the narrator's real story, which is nothing but hilarious. I literally swallowed the book in one busy week.

I finally got my hands on the Life of Pi, which I am reading at the moment. The book is promising much at this stage (I am now in the thirtieth pages), but let's see whether I will eventually approve of the Booker Prize panel's decision.

© REUTERS

I spent the whole evening reading The Israel Lobby, the chapter on the 'dwindling moral case' from the side of the U.S. to support Israel, followed by a set of review articles ('No sentiments in war', The face that launched a thousand MiGs) and a speech by Avi Shlaim. And minutes before logging off to go on reading the book, I came across the piece of news about Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza (The Guardian story, The Reuters story).

The Guardian story displays a photo of dead Palestinians laid in rows and covered with blankets - a pathetic view, a picture of war among thousands of others not seen.

Ehud Barak is quoted as saying the attacks "will widen as necessary". I wonder how many more of those rows covered with blankets Israel needs.