Dawn Intolerance

It’s a client visit at office today. I can’t open facebook. I mean I can, but it will only attract dirty stares and maybe a snide remark about lack of respect blah blah. I don’t understand why though. I mean as a quasi marketing and an almost corporate communication person, isn’t it supposed to be in our blood to network, network, network till we succeed? But anyway, who can understand these things. So no facebook at work today. That’s new. Another thing that’s new today is the early morning rising. So client visit at 8 am means waking up at 5.30 to switch on the geyser and then re-waking up at 6.15 to get ready and leave at sharp 7.15. Sigh.

So I am not a morning person. No sir. Never have been. Never shall be. Never do I aim to be. When in school, I always woke up at the nth hour and was the last one to get into the car pool. I could study all night but never manage to wake up in early to save my life – and subsequently that day’s exam. In college, I barely made it to class in time, sometimes scrambling halfway in my bathroom chappals and specks. When I joined work, I loved the fact that all my jobs started at 10 AM. And this one starts at 11. So no complaints there.

Though surprisingly it didn’t feel so annoying waking up early in the morning. Usually I get cranky and feel sick, want to even throw up sometimes. I think I have dawn-intolerance.

To explain further, Dawn Intolerance is the inability to raise your eyelids early in the morning. A sense of lead-like heaviness takes over your eyes. Any accidental exposure to sunlight brings out the monster in you. In case of exceptions like meetings, early morning flights or exigencies result in making you feel disoriented and sometimes even unwell. There is obvious lack of appetite but a necessary need to reach out to any form of caffeine for assistance in making your mind alert.

But today things didn’t seem that bad. Is it a sign of becoming older again? My grandma wakes up at 5 for puja and my dad wakes up at 7 for yoga and they say it’s the freshest feeling in the whole world. I liked the morning breeze and the transition from dark to light. The sun seemed pretty and I could take a really deep breath. I even contemplated changing my swimming time from late evening to early morning. But then again, the thought was transitory, as were these subah-subah ki feelings. Someone once told me that dawn is the time of the gods and late night is the time of the devil. And I prefer the hour of evil? Well, I am not complaining. That is the mighty fate of the dawn intolerant.

Work Shirk

I don’t know why I work. As I type this, I’m sitting at my workstation, not too enthusiastic, not too kicked, glancing at my watch every now and then, waiting for Monday to be over so that Friday gets closer. Work is a bitch. Unless you love what you do. Which is a privilege that only a few lucky ones have.

It’s not like I can’t write for a living. Yet I choose to do it in the garb of a corporate veil and try extracting some semblance of work satisfaction from it. Ideally I would want to do features and write about why Blue is the new hue. Or scribble about some place dug from the past or a leader less remembered. I would want to write a book. Only that I don’t know what about. Once in a while an idea does present itself to me in form of a dream or an ephemeral thought. But then I am stuck and I don’t know how to churn words by the hundreds.

Also, it’s all very messed up because I know I can take a break and stay at home, write from home, edit and freelance, try finish that book I once started, go for a swim and get more ideas hidden in the bubbles underwater. But I choose not to. And that is a pity. But there is a story behind that too. On days I want to pursue a management course. Will I be good at it? Yes. But do I want to be good at it? I don’t know.

Like many of us, I have come to associate self worth with work, with money, with jobs that sound important but at the end of the day, are not important to you at all. Like many would, I am also scared of starting from scratch, from going and asking a magazine for internship at this age, afraid that when I see other women my age already have reached where I should have after these many years, I will feel disheartened and return to the corporate ladder and slot myself in the stereotype again. So why leave? And hence, get stuck in this rut all over again.

I get to hear of things like, treat work like work. It’s a job at the end of the day that helps you buy worldly material things. So stop right there and stop getting emotional. I find myself wondering very often how would it have been if it had chosen science instead of arts, economics instead of literature, mba instead of mass communication but then again, would I have been happier then or even more miserable?

It’s a complex maze we weave for ourselves. A web of thoughts where getting stuck is so easy and getting out, so tough. I want to work where I can write and smile when I get published. I want to pursue academics and also teach literature. These are the two things I really want to do. But I am headed in the direction of neither. Either my passion is not strong enough or the corporate lady alter-ego has taken over me. Or maybe its sheer laziness? I don’t know. In either case, it isn’t a happy world.