walk – Climb to the Stars

Is This Why I Stall? [en]

[fr] Peut-être j'ai besoin d'un dé pour être plus active quand j'ai trop de choix.

I am not very good at prioritising. Well, not always good at it. If there is an emergency, if we’re under pressure, if hard decisions need to be made, I can be decent to good at it, depending on the circumstances.

I am not good at prioritising my wants and desires, actually. Here is the second edge to my sword of freedom. What do I want to do today? What should I start with? Nobody is tapping their foot waiting for something from me (except my accountant, that is), nobody is forcing me to do anything, I can choose.

And I want to do many things. Too many. It’s already noon, but here is what I’d like to do with my Sunday:

go for a walk
write blog posts
continue sorting/tidying clothes so I can get rid of my chest of drawers and move my third cupboard to its new place
cook so I have food ready for the week
do some accounting (!)
go to the cinema

I can’t do all that. And choosing one means I don’t get to do the others. Cake, having it, eating it. It sounds silly, but it’s an emotionally difficult place for me. So I put off the decision by flipping through Facebook, for example.

And if I’m not careful, it will soon be too late to do any of these things I wanted.

So today I did things differently. I figured I probably had time for two of these things. So I numbered them. And I rolled a die. Twice.

I went for a walk by the lake. I took photos there. The weather was splendid, windy and sunny and changing. I didn’t have time for accounting, but I wrote this blog post and roughly sorted my photos (FB) instead.

I’ll do the accounting tomorrow.

First Day in Vienna [en]

A first uneventful day in Vienna. Ethernet at the Hotel Atlas, too much walking, an expensive orange juice and a nice girl on the train.

So here I am, in Hotel Atlas, with free ethernet, a non-feather pillow, a bathtub, and already a few more books to add to my collection.

BlogTalk will start on Monday, so I have the week-end before me to do some exploring. I’m open to suggestions, still!

My first day here has been pretty uneventful (barring “rain” from the “events” category). I’ll just make three notes.

Firstly, if you go to have breakfast at Café Westend, just opposite the station, and the waiter asks you if you would like some orange juice, be prepared to pay as much for it as for the whole breakfast (approx. 5’€, perfectly reasonable for the breakfast, perfectly overpriced for the orange juice — even though it is freshly pressed). I made the mistake of thinking it was included, and was nastily shocked when I got the bill.

Second, I tend to walk way beyond my limits of tiredness. I just don’t stop. It’s so annoying. All the more now, as I actually catch myself doing it, but still can’t stop. I really have to find a way to avoid walking myself to death this week-end.

Third and last, I made a friend on the train to Zürich — fate had me sit right opposite Andrea, who lives in Geneva and was also making her way to Vienna. We’re meeting again tonight, with her (very nice and local-now-expat’) boyfriend.

One Chay And Two Cancellations [en]

India is the country of the unexpected. A nice cancellation, a more unpleasant one, and a cup of sweet Indian tea.

India has always been to me the country of last-minute plans (like my departure for Calcutta barely two days after having met Aleika) and cancellations.

On the menu last Thursday, two cancellations — one which upset me, and the other which pleased me tremendously.

First of all, Madhav sent me a message cancelling dinner and our evening stroll in the university campus. I love Madhav dearly, but he does have a tendancy to try my patience (just as I try his, in other ways) by changing plans on short notice and and cancelling meetings I look forward to. I called Nisha and luckily, it wasn’t too late for her to include me in her dinner plans. She cooked a really nice dinner, by the way — puris and home-made gulab jamun — had she guessed that my spirits might need lifting a little?

I was woken up during the dark hours of the night by the sound os somebody coming into the flat. I was supposed to be alone with Nisha that night, as Sagar works night shifts and Shinde had run off to some festival with his fellow disciples from Markal. In my half-sleep I assumed it must be Sagar coming home early. A few minutes later I had gathered together enough of myself to check the time — it was only midnight!

I got up, and to my surprise found myself face-to-face with Shinde. His festival had been postponed by a day, which meant he would have missed my last evening here — so after some internal debate, he cancelled. We stayed up a good two hours chatting before I finally went back to sleep again.

In the middle of all that, or rather before, the chay.

I had been sitting for quite some time in front of my Internet Café during a notable power failure which seems to have wiped out all trace of electrical activity from M.G. Rd to Aundh, waiting for the message which would cancel my plans for the evening (though at that time I didn’t suspect it) or for Bijli Devi (the Goddess of Electricity) to give up her strike and resume normal activity. Sitting and waiting can become boring, even if you have stuff to write up and brightly-clad female construction workers to film on the other side of the road. As he was ordering another round of chay, the Internet Café owner kindly asked me if I would like one.

Sweet, hot indian tea in a small glass. It was nice.