PARENTHOOD.IE

Hi, my name is Barbara and I am a procrastinator...

I’m sure there are plenty of you out there, you know who you are. You’ll probably like this entry, recognise yourselves and promise that you’ll write an answer…later, when you have the time, when the stars are aligned in just the right way.

I can drive my husband crazy, and my mother. It’s not that I do nothing, but somehow the important things seem to get lost in the flood of less important things that have to get done.

He just hates it when we have to pay a delay fee, just because I forgot to pay or return something in time. I can’t say I blame him, and for the life of me I just can’t understand how things like that slip my mind. I don’t rent at Extravision any more, I’m not banned or anything like that, but my current delay fee is €20. So every time I ask about my fee, hoping it will have miraculously disappeared, I figure I might just as well just buy four older movies for the same price and keep them. No, I will not explain my logic other than saying that by buying the movies they can be watched over and over.

Then there is another side to the situation. I just hate doing things that seem unpleasant, so I procrastinate and procrastinate.

Sometimes it’s just plain silly things. Like, I hate handing in delayed books to the library. It’s not so much the fee I have to pay, but the look I imagine the librarian always giving me, as if he/she would just love to wag her finger at me. It’s mostly in my head of course, I’m sure I got that look once and it left me scared forever, since my county librarians are very nice about my delays.

It’s with small things that kids come in handy, it’s easy to blame them for whatever you didn’t seem to have had time doing. Which doesn’t mean it’s always untrue (no, I’m not covering my trails).

Going back to the point of the frog in the title. It’s something my husband sent me on an email. The core of the message is that you should start your day by doing the thing you least want to, like swallowing a frog, and then the rest of the day will feel easy compared to that.

It’s hard to follow, but I agree with the idea. By procrastinating the frog seems to grow, but it’s such a relief when you’ve gulped it down. Not to mention how proud you are allowed to feel of yourself.