comfortably boring

what is it about me that makes people think i spend my nights in clubs or on dates?  even the people close to me seem shocked when they ask what i did last weekend and i say, "same as normal, i worked, wrote, read and stayed home".  it's as though they expect me to have done something different this week.  is it that i am a single expat with no issues talking to people? 

last night i was home watching a movie about the triangle relationship of man, woman and mutt.  i have an email this morning from a close friend sure i was out gallivanting because i didn't reply when pinged.  the assumption that i would be home and was just not thinking about communicating with the outside world apparently wasn't considered.  this is someone who knows me and should know better.

i have a small collection of hangouts where i am a regular.  when i walk into them the staff knows where i am going to sit, what i am going to order and what i will be doing while i am there.  the latter is the easiest of the three to project; there is 80% chance i will be doing email, 15% that i will be writing and 5% that i will sit and read.  i am a creature of habit, but these parts of my life are obsessively repetitive.  

i came to a cafe this morning for a quick breakfast, i am still here hours after i planned to leave.  this is day four of sitting in cafes for long stretches of time, day two of doing little more than core dumping random thoughts to the web.

there is no email going on, it is a holiday, my out-of-office auto-reply is turned on and i am carrying my mini-laptop.  the one that does not have work email access on it.  there is always web-based work mail, but i am simply refusing to open that in a browser.  tomorrow is also a holiday, but i plan to crack and work on that day.  i think this is more balanced than working straight through holidays.  it is an attempt to be a bit less boring. 

 

but boring is what i accept i am.  i have repetition built in, and i crave comfortable routines.  i was talking to my daughter yesterday and we discussed a movie that we can each quote long segments of.  we can do this because we have watched it over and over again.  i woke up this morning thinking about the conversation and realizing that i wanted to watch it again tonight.  actually, tonight will most likely be a long night of re-watching movies i have watched over and over.  comfort movies, with dialogue that i will be able to hear the kids quoting as i watch them. 

when i am not working, being repetitive with movies and cafes or writing random thoughts, i tend to spend my time reading odd books.  as i type this there are two books in front of me.  the first is "mutants: on the form varieties and errors of the human body"; winner of the guardian first book award in 2004.  it is a great book, and is only second best to "good germs, bad germs: health and survival in the bacterial world" which i finished earlier this month.  the second book is, "flirting with disaster: why accidents are rarely accidental", a book that talks about the organizational and psychological impediments to avoiding disaster.

"flirting with disaster" reminds me of "engineering is human", a book i read years ago which focused on how technical issues were allowed to creep into designs. issues which later caused the design to fail.  this newer book discusses how and why organizations fail to accept and correct issues which are causing them not to succeed.  given the project i was assigned last week, to make suggestions to correct the issues effecting our organization, and the press announcement this week that our organization did experience a public failure, it is no surprise that this title caught my eye while i strolled the shelves of a massive bookstore last weekend.

i need to finish these thoughts.  i am going to go home and curl up on the couch with my DVDs, i have take-out that i bought over the weekend.  i knew my favorite restaurants would be closed for CNY and i was having preemptive cravings for the comfort food they provide.  i stocked the fridge with tau pow nachos, corn bread, butter chicken, garlic batura and chocolate cake.  i will be able to relax and enjoy the foods i love, as i watch movies and read books i love.

this does sound boring, it probably is boring... but its also exactly what i feel like doing.  just a simple and easy night with no pressures.  this sounds so much better to me than being out and yelling over the sound of amplified music, coughing through smoke clouds and chatting with people who put more emphasis on building their wardrobe than their book collection.

so i am still not sure; what is it about me that makes you think i am anything but comfortably boring?