I’m in a Rut

I’m in a rut, creatively speaking. It’s not that I have a writer’s block. I don’t. The ideas abound plentifully but I just can’t muster up enough enthusiasm to put them down.

I blame it on the heat. I swear, it doesn’t rain soon, I won’t be responsible for my inaction.

It’s is so sweltering that even with the air-conditioning on my poor laptop keeps hanging. Speaking of air-conditioning, as if my social conscience wasn’t enough to dissuade me from having it on all the time, last month’s electricity bill certainly did the job. At times like these I wish I worked in an office. It is so much easier to bury your social conscience under the weight of collective irresponsibility. I find myself thinking obsessively about Margaritas – the frozen kind. The only problem is I don’t have Cointreau and no idea where to get it. So I called up some friends in the middle of the afternoon, thereby sending them into a tizzy thinking that I had taken to drinking in the afternoon. One concerned friend suggested marijuana instead. So much more appropriate for afternoons.

On the subject of pressure, my maid has gone on leave. That’s thrown my entire morning schedule out of gear as well. Now I have to make my own tea, not to mention, bed. By the time I’m done with the added chores at about ten a.m., I’m exhausted and ready to go back to bed. Earlier I would get at least a thousand good words written by then.

And the fact that I haven’t got any work (now, honey, don’t be upset. I know housework is work) done by ten drives me crazy so I can’t work even afterwards for a while. Just shows how everything is so interconnected and finely balanced that the tiniest deviation can produce cataclysmic results. Don’t look at me like that, authors are supposed to be notoriously self centred.

On the same subject, but on an unrelated note, the replacement maid, who speaks nothing but Marathi (who’ll only do the dishes and the cleaning but won’t oblige with the tea and the bed), has been dropping words like sari, salwar kameez, bonus. Now, I don’t follow Marathi all that well, so I really don’t know the context. But I can’t help feeling that those are not-so-subtle hints.

I figure I’ll give her a sari when she obliges with the tea and the bed.