sarah eve kelly

I am making a list of things that I want for, believe it or not, the first time in my life. I want a spice rack, a lovely handmade wooden one. I want a pretty tin for putting tea bags in. I want interesting and beautiful odd ceramic mugs. I want eggplant-coloured throw cushions. I want picture frames, and pictures. I want sharp black-and-white photographs of everyone I love.

I also want a Palm Pre, but those dreams can’t be quantified until Christmas, never mind realised.

The problem is that I’m nesting. I’m just now starting to enjoy existing in my own home, rather than exploiting it for its bed and its microwave. (Coming a little late to this, I know.) Some of this is a knee-jerk reaction to the uncertainty of the immediate future: I see other people’s remodelled kitchens and riding mowers - even tea that’s one step up from Twinings sitting on a table - and I start thinking of all the things I want. I can’t have any of them at this particular moment, and that’s why I want them. (Though really, I hope I still want them when I can have them, because it’s an excellent list of things to want, and I’ll miss having them if I don’t want them anymore, right.)

End Act I.

Does anyone know what happened to June? I keep expecting to see photographs of June on milk cartons and plastered up on noticeboards asking HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MONTH? I don’t know where it went. I know I did a lot of immigration faffing and a lot of tea-tin wishing but then it disappeared on me, seemingly in the first week. I didn’t post any teasers, did I? I know I did some writing; I know I did some reading. A consultation with a physiotherapist this morning tells me that I certainly got a month older. But June was sly and I didn’t see her leave.

I blame Twitter. This afternoon I felt equipped to do nothing except post to Twitter, which is what I did. If I leave it open, nothing else happens. Has anyone done a study on this? On any drop in western productivity over the past year? I know I’ve always found ways to procrastinate; the only difference now is that they’re all more or less localised in this one machine. There are too many things going on, too many things to keep up with, and no time for video games, let alone those letters I need to write, the novel I need to finish, the Portuguese I need to learn. People ask why I don’t take my computer with me when I visit archives for my research, why I take all my notes by hand: this is why. Because if I found myself at the London Metropolitan Archives with its wealth of original documents on eighteenth-century midwifery, I would sit at the London Metropolitan Archives posting to Twitter and playing Plants vs. Zombies.

And yet I want a netbook. Really, really badly. I want want want so many things.

Will this kill social media, this worldwide dearth of non-Twitter-related activity? Well, probably not. Some people use it to work, after all, not to avoid work. I follow 97 people on Twitter and try very hard to keep the number under 100 whenever possible; there are people who follow more than 1000 people, and respond to what they have to tweet, who maintain a 100-post-a-day presence on Twitter and still - maybe - manage to do other things like take the rubbish out and have the occasional sponge in the shower. (Ah, see: someone’s just posted a Cute Puppy Video.)

Sometimes I feel the need to become very military about my day and plan it down to the minute. If I allot twelve minutes per day to Twitter, on twelve different occasions throughout my waking hours, that’s only twelve minutes, right? That’s nothing. Seven minutes every two hours for Plants vs. Zombies, to defeat Dr Zomboss (that takes about seven minutes). Ten minutes of looking for flats online every morning, over my coffee (I’ve forgotten to buy sugar for about two weeks now). One hour in aggregate for catching up on email. Two hours for walking. Three minutes per half-hour for the fucking isometric exercises that I need to do at my age. The rest for working, either on research or on the novel.

If this sort of day happened organically, and there were an evening punt or a trip down the pub to round it off, I would consider it both rich and full. But it can only happen militarily, and that feels oppressive, and I think that’s how June disappeared. The time management death of a thousand cuts. And the occasional day lost to that anteroom of ‘I’ll get to that in just a minute’, when the tweets rolled in just a bit too quickly or Dr Zomboss needed more of a lesson than I could teach him in seven minutes.

I’ve posted to Twitter twice while writing this. You should see my to-do lists. They have items like ‘have breakfast’ and ‘knit coaster’ alongside the other, more important things. Military. Oppressive. It’s Twitter’s fault.

That’s it from me, for now. You have to have goals. My current goal is to post here more often. Also to remember to buy sugar. I’m going to go defeat Dr Zomboss now. Because he’s asking for it.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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