Doing nothing

I am phenomenally bad at doing nothing; always have been and no doubt always will be.

I usually have a book surgically attached, either electronic (thank you Kindle) or hard copy, and I have shelves full of craft projects, each one in its own tin which I collect (the tins) from everyone and everywhere.

Almost always I have a half-finished quilting project on the go, producing waves of guilt for its incomplete status, and every few months pull out my collection of card-stock, papers and images to make gift cards.

Watching shows on my Kindle or laptop is a grey area; I am doing something, but it’s so close to doing nothing that it also incites guilt.

Ahhh guilt! SO Jewish! I don’t know why guilt is as Jewish as latkes and matzah-balls but it just is, at least in my generation and the one before. I’m not sure that the younger ones feel the same which of course is A Good Thing.

Sensible people are able to sit down with a cup of tea and admire the view. I sit down with a cup of tea and a book, and only glance occasionally view-wise. Or sometimes it’s a cup of tea and Solitaire on my Kindle. I can play dozens of mind-numbing games of Solitaire while I’m drinking my early morning wake-up tea and snarling at any small person who interrupts. There is nothing creative about Solitaire but it passes the time.

I dislike intensely spending time on being pampered. While other women – most of them I suspect – are delighted to have facials or massages, I loathe every minute, so I don’t indulge; well, for me it’s not an indulgence, it’s purgatory! (By the way, have you come across beauty products which “enhance” or “boost” your skin radiance; that pre-supposes you have some radiance to begin with, a dodgy conclusion in my case.)

I can only just manage to stay still long enough to have my nails done but I hate every minute, especially as you can’t easily read while being manicured and the whole process is phenomenally, extraordinarily, fantastically boring. The only piece of pampering I actually like is the head massage over the hairdresser’s basin.

I’ve always disliked looking at myself in a mirror, which probably explains why I make so many clothing mistakes. I close my eyes when I clean my teeth and squint when I brush my hair or attach earings. In the olden days when I wore lots of eye makeup I would resolutely gaze at the eye I was working on and ignore the other. Incidentally, when my eyesight began to give me problems and I needed to wear glasses most of the time I found it difficult to put on eye makeup at all. My daughter solved that problem by buying me dinky glasses which allowed me to fold down one lens to make up that eye while being able to see through the other. Brilliant!

I’m not particularly fond of “going out”. Generally speaking, I’m a home body and despite the fun and the intellectual stimulation of being with my friends, there’s always a small part of me which wants to be home with a good book – and chocolate. I was never a “party girl” even at the age when it was common to party.

Those who know me only in my older and noisier days may not credit it but as a young woman I was extremely shy, so going to parties was truly a penance. I think that’s part of the reason I became a locked-in smoker; it gave me something to do with my hands and allowed me to feel a trifle sophisticated. In fact, the reason I took up smoking in the first place was in my first year of university. Only 17, I was tremendously uneasy sitting by myself at the Union or elsewhere and the smoking gave me a slight edge, allowed me to feel just a little bit more “grown up”.

I used to hug the wall at parties and in those days didn’t drink (although I made up for that later) so I didn’t do much hanging around in the kitchen with the drinkers. My parents drank whiskey (or whisky) as an aperitif but it took me years to get used to it myself. The wine of choice in my early uni days was Red Ned, extremely rough red wine in a flagon. As I suffered from migraine, this wine was a bad choice for me and even white wine was problematic. Eventually, of course, I came a little out of my non-drinking shell, and then more out of it and then even more out of it to the point that a working lunch had to be in a licensed restaurant. I’m not the slightest bit proud of the hard-drinking me and gave it all up some 25 years ago. Cigarettes lasted longer; I only gave them up under 10 years ago which is just as well as I understand that these days a packet of cigarettes is around $50.

 

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

John F Kennedy at a dinner for Nobel Prize winners: “I think it’s the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White house – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”