Time wasting

Sometimes I really despise the internet for making it possible for me to waste my time. Last night I got home, picked up the laundry and then rewarded myself for this heroic industriousness by spending the next three hours conked out on the sofa, listlessly clicking at websites and eating quite disgusting salt & vinegar crisps.

I didn't really have the mental strength after a day at the office to work on the second draft of my novel, and there wasn't much more in the flat to eat apart from the crisps and some cheese that I vaguely suspected had given me vomitting as a birthday present. But there was a lot of other things I could have done with my time.

I could have got some exercise for the first time in over a week, by walking around Happy Valley.

I could have taken the laundry out of its bag, rather than leaving it in its pregnant form on the kitchen counter.

I could have drunk all the booze in the house that I could lay my hands upon: ok, there's only two bottles of beer, but there's also a litre of the ferocious Swedish Glogg that I could have amusingly offended my brain with.

But no, instead of anything eventful or productive, I lay on the sofa and idly considered emailing somebody to ask them why they were angry that Mattel's new range of African-American Barbies weren't African-American enough. Maybe I shouldn't spend so much time on websites for American women who are obsessed about dolls. As a result, when my girlfriend came home at close to ten o'clock, fatigued from tutoring small children in the mysteries of English, I was in a pissy mood and feeling hungry, but she didn't seem overly convinced by my suggestion that we go immediately back out so she could watch me eat pizza.

Rather, she suggested, I could eat something that was already in the house. I didn't tell her that after eating a whole bag of crisps, I couldn't see the virtue in that. So instead I had soup and crackers, which I saw as a rank injustice, because the previous day I'd felt like staying in and instead we'd gone out. But we can't go out every night, on account of currently being a bit skint, and I knew I was being petulant, and if I'd really wanted to go out and eat a pizza, I could have interrupted my solid work at doing nothing in the previous three hours. But when you're in a sulk, rationality has a lighter grasp than usual, so I stirred the soup silently yet furiously, too embarrassed to admit I was in a sulk.

Soup was fine though.

Maybe it would have been better with a thin, crispy base, slathered in tomato sauce and mozzarella, but that wasn't absolutely necessary, and I didn't have to wait ages for it while getting antsy at the waiter because there were still things on the internet that I had to get back to looking at. And eventually I stopped sulking.

Drank some of the beer, and that was awful. Don't drink Erdinger Dark Weissbier, it is ruddy terrible. Bought some cupcakes this afternoon though, because I figured they might be a nice thing for the girlfriend, and not just because I wanted to stuff them into my greedy, ever consuming craw. I wonder which of those possibilities is the true one?