At 5 a.m last Sunday, my father-in-law texted me a picture of a cozy slipper and asked, "You want?"
My first response was, "What is that?", immediately followed by, "Yes I want".
Never say no to free gifts!
Seeing as I was up, he went on to tell me that both he and Shane's mum were out shopping (they're currently traveling) and that they could send us live pictures of clothes and other miscellaneous items so we could choose everything for ourselves. That would have been nice, except, by the time his text arrived, we'd already passed out at the foot of the bed. The aim was to get to the bed somehow so if you ask me, we'd accomplished the mission. You see, you can't really control these things when you just spent the entire night attempting, yet failing, to spread French cheese on your bread because you're on your fourth glass of wine.
We both woke up much later that afternoon with dried cheese on our clothes. It was already dark outside and the room smelled funky and boy, is that disorientating.
My parents-in-law are very disciplined, unlike both their children and that blithering basket case their younger son married. They wake up at 4 a.m every morning, go swimming and exercising for about two hours, following which, they shower, have breakfast, and get to work before any of their employees even reach the office. Then they stay at the office for about twelve hours, maneuvering around all kinds of people, taking new risks every day, and putting out unexpected fires every other hour. And after a long day of work, they have a simple dinner and go to bed, latest by 9 p.m. There's no Sunday, no public holiday, not even a Kerala Harthal that can get in the way of their routine and they don't understand how anyone could survive without a proper routine like theirs.
So I trust that Shane and I could now give them a crash course on the subject considering the week we've just had. There was no day, no night, not even a proper meal these past couples of days - everything just melded together and formed a blob comprising of six consecutive days of little structure and boozy happiness. I would go so far as to say that the past six days have been like one very long day (to me, the first of December), where we took a couple of naps in between, ate snacks when we got hungry and showed up to work when we needed to. And we needed to show up quite a lot as Shane was on-call and I was interviewing guests for the podcast at four in the morning. But all the showing up somehow never interfered with our lack of a routine, thank God!
Sometimes, we were rewarded for it by the universe, like that time when we received an email announcing that our podcast had been featured on iTunes (India) in the 'New and Noteworthy' section.
But most of the time, we just rewarded ourselves by having zero respect for the next day and staying up till 5 a.m again to finish a book or write a piece of code that no one even cared about. Basically, what happened is that I decided to celebrate a little victory of mine last Friday and the celebration never really ended. So I turned into a tamer version of 'Shane from Uni' - a strange being who had the uncanny ability to survive on very little sleep and nutrition for weeks at length before passing out for two whole days at a time to recharge and repeat. In the meantime, Shane himself got super nostalgic by this sudden change in me and bounced right back into his former self from five years ago. At one point, after I told him that we'd have to go to bed in half an hour as it was already 3:30 in the morning and we both needed to show up at places in a few hours, he turned to me and earnestly said that he really appreciated the structure I brought into his life because without it, he would have just stayed up all night doing whatever he wanted to do, like 'Shane from Uni'.
That ought to have snapped me out of it but I kind of like this dysfunctional lifestyle now. I'm in a holiday mood and I feel there's very little that can fix me. The fact that Edinburgh now gets just about seven hours of daylight per day doesn't help either because when it's dark at 4 p.m, you just want to change into your pj's and drink hot chocolate. And who even wakes up early when the sun itself only rises at 8:30 am?
Although, last evening, I contemplated on fixing this routine thing and bringing back structure into our lives. But that's when we made plans with The Bromance and a couple of other friends to get a very late Christmas dinner three weeks from now, one where our reservation is for 10 p.m. Our logic was that it was going to be a Friday night anyway, so there was no harm in having a super late dinner. But I immediately knew that a single late night was all that was needed to disrupt a new productive routine so why bother fixing it now? Moreover, there's a bit of traveling coming up and that always chucks routines out of the window.
So despite my ambitions to be super-productive this month, I might just end up having a month-long holiday with little spurts of getting things done and it will only seem like a very long first of December in my head. As you can see, the case of the blithering basket-case is quite hopeless. But she couldn't be any happier right now.