Make the pain stop…

Recently, it’s been upmost on my mind that you can have all the good intentions in the world of completing those vital tasks which contribute to everyday life such as milking the cat, cleaning your underpants and discovering a new form of penicillin from the leftover contents of that cup of tea from over 4 weeks ago.

But when it comes right down to it, if there is a way of doing something which involves sleep or jammy dodgers, then you’re move there faster than a herd of fat people who was just been told there is a free you can eat buffet.

The predicament I find myself in, and will find myself in for the next three weeks in fact that I have a huge amount of free time during the day all of a sudden.

This, granted is due to a forthcoming change of employment, and which is normally considered the golden time (notice period to others) where you turn up to your place of work and then wander round for a bit, drinking amounts of tea which would rival a single can of Red Bull before least the HR goblins come out and say it’s wrong to state you’re the official boob inspector for the company and that the woman you’ve had your eye on for some time is packing weapons of mass distraction in that blouse which at the right angle, allows you to….err…never mind.

This would give rise to being able to, while being paid for basically just turning up at this point, setting some serious time aside for your own personal chores, or maybe finally paying the rent for your deluxe cardboard box, which has been outstanding for over 6 months.

But when presented with the possibility of time to knuckle down and finally achieve something personal and meaningful like writing that screenplay about an old man who found faith through enduring the automated checkout system at Tesco, the best thing you then find yourself doing is reading BBC news all day.

It’s gotten worse as time as gone on. For example, instead of looking over pictures of a recent trip abroad and finally getting those choice snaps ready for an award winning write-up, I played Plants Vs. Zombies instead, in an experiment to see what games I could play over the internet on the home PC.

On the other hand, they did tidy up the kitchen….

To be fair, I got to the bit where you unlock the almanac so you can read about the Newspaper Zombie and it’s also the set of levels where you first start needing to use mushrooms to produce sunlight because it’s dark. No, it still doesn’t make sense even now, but nevertheless, there it is.

Despite that really useful progress being made, the rest of the time has just felt, well, wasted.

Even though you in yourself would know full well that you are better on getting on with something else that otherwise you wouldn’t do, at the moment, at least for me, the day is just being wasted on surfing various sites on the internet and drinking too much tea and pretty much nothing else.

If I were back at home for example, there would be tons of things to do, like finally going through the boxes of trainers that have been hauled round from flat to flat for over 4 years now, getting the front door lock to actually work or working up the courage to investigate what filth was poured down the drains over the years.

Then again, they could have been done ages ago anyway.

Work only takes up a portion of the day, there are hours in-between which could be spent on doing the various daily chores which life vomits over us at a moment’s notice, but again, we’re all far happier when we’re the human version of Bagpuss, yawning a bit just before Britain’s got diarrhoea comes on for a 21 hour marathon.

Why is this? Why are we far happier when we’re doing about as much good as the people who thought another Expendables movie was a good idea?

Mind you in one respect, it’s damned easy to take the easy road. That’s the main problem, it’s almost too easy and we’ve got even more cunning ways of getting out of things which ultimately should allow us to either progress forward or cross something off the never ending list.

Take for example, exercise.

Exercise for some people, is the key to a rich and happy lifestyle, where they frolic gleefully in the sunny fields of Berkshire, just before they go and have a shower with Timotei shampoo. To me, it’s becoming just a troubling necessity just to stave off for a little while longer becoming Jabba the Hutt’s slightly less disgusting brother.

I can only dream of looking like this…

There are very good reasons to workout. The news is laced with various stock footage of ultra fat people without heads waddling about, just before some doctor turns up and says we’re all doomed if we eat another pork pie. You also have more energy as a result of not carrying round a year’s supply of lard in your buttocks.

But it’s hard to reconcile all this when the best you can achieve 9 times out of ten, is that your stomach is ever so slightly smaller and your second chin shrinks by 0.5 of a millimetre (or however you measure chins). So the best you hope for is just not getting worse. I’ve had an on / off relationship with exercise for years (mainly off to be honest), but the time has come to ensure that I move more than once a day just to drop a quantity of something which is probably similar to King Kong’s first dump of the day.

This attitude has to also start permeating other areas of existence too in order to even start being able to state that your life is more varied than the special occasion that you decide to have a bun for lunch.

But there is one key problem to any endeavour and that is motivation. If there is no motivation to do anything, then you’ll shrug your shoulders and go back to bed. Commenting on said motivational problems are fantastically easy, just getting the motivation to do something can quite another. Even worse, if you cannot see the point of doing something, then that idea goes off the duty cliff like a chronically depressed lemming.

And then you find yourself wondering why you’ve not done anything just before yawning some more. It’s a very difficult cycle to break and for many of us, we never do. What is the best way to break the cycle of putting it off? Do we start thinking that everything has to be done and there’s no choice?

Let me know after I’ve gotten past level 2-4 in Plants Vs. Zombies.