Dave Pollard has a piece about saving time for bloggers. It's a reminder that I'm back in a place where time is in short supply and needs to be rationed.
During my vacation I slept nine hours or more most nights. I would idle the evening away in the living room, hanging out with family under the guise of watching television or playing cards, going to bed between midnight and one o'clock and sleep until 10:30 or so the following morning. Apart from a visa appointment at the embassy at 8:30 early on during my trip I had no pressing commitments. After the 23rd most museums and other places S. would want to see were closed anyway.
Coming back, it's hard to adapt the Taylorist mindset required to rouse myself from sleep out the door to catch a bus in less than an hour. For the moment, I'm still going to bed long before ten at night, so it's relatively easy to wake up at 6:30 and take an hour and a half. It doesn't feel as if I am slacking — I'm just not being ruthless about doing only what needs to be done in the shortest way possible.
It's enough to make you want to curse whoever invented agriculture and the associated evils of civilization and long for the existance of noble hunter-gatherers, who could do anything they wanted after they had got enough food to subsist. It's a myth, I know, but so attractive.