Monday 5 July 2010

Breathe easy, big man

My clothes are tighter now than ever they've been. The restrictive nature of my growing body is matched only by the overly seasonal temperatures in which my fabrics appear to be washed and dried in during this current warm spell, and what may be comfort eating is in fact lazy nutrition.

All in all I'm now verging on 14st, heavier than I've ever been in my life, but even that extra four or five pounds is having a tremendous impact on my knees and ankles as I run in to bowl or tumble on the floor to field the ball, or even as I hustle to first base to beat out a grounder to short.

I should really keep a better grip on my health, as it is likely that my body will outlast my mind, yet at current pace one may collapse before the other, and my thoughts remain fairly well-conceived.

Deanne and I are currently moving around a lot, which has pressured us into eating whenever we can. With only two evenings per week spent at the flat in Mile End, there's precious little fresh food and so I eat out of the cupboards and the freezers; fat and starch-heavy. At the weekends it is often ready-meals or take aways, which poses similar problems, as again there is only limited fresh food in fridges and as my parents' eating habits have been disrupted by my to-ing and fro-ing, so have their buying habits taken a hit and subsequently reduced healthy variety. That said, I have the chance to cook for myself but often neglect to do so, as I always seem to be in a rush nowadays.

I only have one evening to myself, and over the past month I have tried to fill it with as many people as I can, knowing it won't be long until people disappear again or Deanne and I will be living far away from the norms of the East in the doldrums of the South West. Of London, anyway.

And so I sit here, for the first time in about six weeks, alone without purpose on a Monday night, with no one to share my time with and no revising to be doing. If I were to presume to start my course now then it'd undermine the cost of the thing, so I want to be taught to get value for my money.

What do you do with time? Think? Eat? (That one's been most popular so far) Clean? Desire? Dream? Sleep?

I have half a mind to get stuck back into Robinson Crusoe (not like that) as I help him towards the end of his habitation on the island, but it's easier to stick on a film and watch the night flitter away.

Society has never helped those with determination until they can manufacture an idea that saves other people time. Ironically, then, it's not worth even trying until I can devise a way to prevent myself wasting time creating something that will have been a waste of time to create, unless of course I can save the time I spend working on the thing by utilising it. And even then I break even, temporally at least, and hope to the mighty workings of fate itself that someone else will give it a value worthy of my time.

And herein lies the problem. What worth is time if there's nothing to do with it? Nor anything to achieve by it? Or experience during its passing? What value is money without the time to spend it? What value are possessions without the time to use them? What value is company if it exists in a dimension you are unable to control or join with? What is the point?

I have come to the conclusion, after many minutes of pondering such questions, that it is all about what you make of it. If I clean up then it is not in order to waste time, as in many ways it is deemed productive, but rather that it saves me the effort later when I may not have either the time or the inclination to bother with such trivial matters. If I choose to eat a well-prepared meal rather than a quick-fix to my ravenous body, then the provided the cause is fit for purpose then who should hold me accountable but myself, and it's likely that having already decided it was OK to act in such a way I'll probably fare favourably.

So there are those who claim, or it is claimed of them, to be time-wasters, those who use, or eat, up that most precious of commodities. But who are they who call them such to judge? Have they weighed up all the factors, examined them against themselves, the mean, the average, the range, the mode, the other statistical variants upon which empiricism is based to decide at their response? Probably not, because it would be a waste of time.

Think, dear reader, about the moments that have passed in the creation, distribution and interpretation of this entry. Am I a time-waster? Was it that my ill-prepared dinner allowed me the time to create this piece? Was it that my choices to live, work and play where I have laid my hat did afford me the opportunity to write this article? I ask only because I feel it is worth asking, and that the time taken to consider the answer may help you at a time when such matters are as pressing as the belt around my waist.

'McGuinness