It's A Hard Life

I find myself on the interlocking horns of a pair of dilemmas; a breeding pair, probably.

As it turns out, the Step Choreography course, despite a change of name and a very-slightly updated curriculum, is officially the same module I took about three years ago, and my attendance is thus pretty much redundant. I stayed today, for the exercise, and because it was mildly entertaining to revisit all that stuff, and because I'd damn well got up at the crack of dawn and cycled down to Vauxhall to do it and it would have seemed a bit churlish to flounce off home. And I certainly did spend a lot of the day sweating, which is generally a good thing in my current lardy state.

But having discussed it with the tutor at the end of the day, there really isn't much point me going back tomorrow, and I don't expect to feel at all inclined to do so in the cold light of morning. In fact, now that I've put it down in writing, it's blindingly clear that I won't go back, which pretty much euthanizes the first of those dilemmas. There was a question about letting down my fellow students, some of whom seemed to find me a useful resource, but sod it, they have their bloody tutor for that, and in any case "letdown" is my middle name.

The second is: if I'm not doing that tomorrow, what the fuck am I doing?

Given that work is knee-deep in deadlines, the responsible thing to do would be fess up, knuckle down, and kick the sorry arse of that bloody Flash project once and for all. Or, if that happens to be stuck in client-testing hell right now, which it most likely is, put in the hours on any of the other limping, pointless projects that constitute my sorry excuse for a career.

But really, who'll care? Everyone expects me to be away, and is reconciled to my absence (a terrible hardship, I know). Friday is already scheduled as downtime, as far as I'm concerned, as far as they're concerned. Changing that now would only confuse matters, and for what? Bringing forward the final delivery by a few measly hours? Most likely not even that.

When instead, I could spend the day dossing around, surfing the net, reading weblogs, iChatting, watching rubbish TV, installing MT-Blacklist, maybe putting in a few hours on the long-neglected Marching Boys edit.

A cynic might say: yes, and how is this different from your usual working-at-home day? But that cynic can fuck off, because there's a very big difference, smartypants: if I'm actually taking the day off, I don't have to feel guilty about doing any of those things.

And that, I suppose, pretty much wraps it up for dilemma number two. Perhaps I'm not as indecisive as I think :)
Posted by matt at November 13, 2003 08:43 PM