It is ten in the morning now. Well, five minutes past that. That’s when this went out, who knows what time it is now when you are reading this.
I woke up at six.
Four hours is a long time on a Sunday morning. What all have I done? I don’t know yet. I am writing this on Saturday. But I think I will wake up at six. I’ll lie awake on my bed for another fifteen twenty minutes, give, or take, around, or about.
An hour later I’ll decide not to use the phone anymore, at least till it is ten. Instead, an hour after that you will see me charging my phone having maxed out its leftover battery. YouTube takes up a lot of juice. Then I will proceed to open the iPad; might as well. It is half past eight, give or take, around, or about. Another hour later I will have my breakfast. When I will have finished that, this will have gone out. That’s for sure.
It is ten in the morning now. Four hours have passed by quickly this Sunday morning.
Guess I was wrong about that.
(What Remains of the Day?)
That compels me to consider what shall be done with the hours ahead. It is a Sunday, one recalls, but even doing nothing takes planning nowadays.
A friend called thrice in the week gone by. All three calls ended with different shows I must watch. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Which one do I pick? Netflix feels like the early days of Tinder now. Or the last days of Tinder. When did that ever change.
He had tweeted a fourth one. I know because I saw it today morning, I mean yesterday morning, when I wrote this. In fact I saw the tweet earlier in the week. I went back to see it again because I forgot the show.
I don’t like twitter much. I might like Instagram more, but it is heading down the same path that I took with Twitter. I am more careful with it, staying away from the strays and the filth, as much as one can. And so the path seems better. It is filled with art and poetry, but we all know where it leads still. But there’s time for that. It is a Sunday after all. I just read a poem by Billy Collins on it, he wrote it for me. I am sure he did, because he said so:
I saw a page from Amruta Patil’s graphic novel. I followed her last month. That was an interesting incident. That day I had decided to do something new. God knows what compelled me, but I decided I will make a graphic poem - a poem on the first chapter of Kafka’s The Castle. I even tried my hand at it. If you are not reading that right now, it is because it didn’t work out very well, neither the graphic, nor the poem.
That got me that day to go to Instagram for some inspiration and serendipitously found Amruta’s profile. More specifically, I caught her first work -
I thought that’s exactly what I should do. I am reminded of my watercolour set and my pens and my journal where I paint and I write. And I thought that could be a good place to return to. Maybe I’ll do something with it tomorrow - that’s today.
But I know already that my pens won’t work. Ink spots have come and dried up on them, it has been that long since I used them. Well I have time, maybe I can clean them, refill, make them new. That’s a meditation.
But I will ignore all such urges this Sunday morning and scroll on Instagram instead. Nothing will seem interesting though. There are more ads than usual. I go back to the photos I liked yesterday. I’ll find a post on Alipore Post about Rohini’s, thoughts and plans in these quarantined days. Now that’s a meditation.
It speaks of newsletters as well. It will trigger thoughts of all the newsletters and links from them I have bookmarked. There’re so many of them. There’s stuff on email, things opened but unread on Chrome, saved for later on Pocket, liked on Twitter. I take count and I will bring the list down to this -
Undula: A Story by Bruno Schulz - people are going nuts over it on Twitter
A Meditation on Light and Land - a graphic essay!
Soul of the Nilgiris - a photo essay on Goya. I love Goya Journal.
The Cellar by Dina Nayeri
How Dishoom scales with Quality - New Consumer’s interview with Shamil Thakrar
This Talk Therapy episode with Alex Kantrowitz
Edith Zimmerman’s Mermaid
Craig Mod’s Ridgeline 79
Tom Ryan’s Quest for Simplicity
And this one from Robin Sloan which made me think of my idea of serialising a short story on a newsletter.
Wait minute, I will think. Didn’t I plan to go through the Desi Books podcast this weekend? I will start with its first episode.
But not before I catch up with what’s happening on YouTube. This talk on short stories looks fine!
With that it will be an hour before I begin anything else. (Two!) Half the day is gone. I think I will tackle the list after lunch, but it will be two thirty by then and the hour for siesta will beckon. It’s a Sunday who is going to say no to that?
Finally I will start things at five. Five minutes will go by and I will decide that it is too much to do on a Sunday. I will plan to read them over the week, that should do it. Time will move around the house, through TV channels and WhatsApp groups. At six in the evening I will decide I should get back to my books now that nothing else is happening.
But then, maybe I can watch YouTube for five minutes before that.
Hours pass by but I don’t see them.
It is ten in the night now, around, about.
An email pops in. Another newsletter. It is What to Watch by Bilal, #97. Another movie, another show. Maybe I’ll watch it later, maybe I won’t. Netflix feels like…