So I guess I should admit now what I should have admitted in my previous post, which was written A BILLION YEARS AGO and is now of interest to anthropologists on account of what it suggests about ancient civilisations/use of language/eating habits etc.

I admit this: I am too busy at the moment. I am so busy that one of my closest friends ever in the world is having a baby in, like, half an hour, and I have seen her maybe twice since she found out she was pregnant. Being one of my closest friends ever in the world, she has not cut me off, been snitchy, or set fire to a paperbag with poo in it and posted it through my front door. She has in fact been entirely lovely and has introduced the provision of excellent cupcakes into the relationship as an added bonus.

But I have to be careful. I have to try not to say yes to things I might not be able to make. This weekend, Stew and I booked a flight to Sydney on the same day of the actual flight and rearranged our weekends at the last minute just so we could get a few meetings with Rita etc out of the way and get back to Melbourne today. It was all entirely worth doing and I have no idea how we would have done without it, but I had to cancel lunch with a friend I haven't seen for months, whose company I enjoy a great deal.

So I have become much better at managing my own expectations of myself, and the expectations others have of me. Today though, it all fell away. I was supposed to meet someone. I got the time wrong. She called after waiting for me, on the other side of town, for 20 minutes. I was about to leave the house. I just got it wrong. I wrote down the original time, not the altered time. I thought I might die of shame.

Writing is so hard to manage. It's solitary, it depends on you being in the right mood, in the right environment. It needs to be finished on time, but it also needs to be good. So you divide your other time around it, and that "other" time becomes like a whole other continent, foreign and distant and sometimes a bit scary or threatening. You can become, to extend the metaphor, a teensy bit racist. You resent the other time, you become afraid of it and over-sensitive and thin-skinned.

So there. Those are my admissions.

1. I'm too busy.

2. I'm a time racist.

I'm not proud of either of these things. I am hoping they will both cease to be true, certainly as much as they are now, and hopefully I will one day meet my friend's baby. Not, I hope, at the baby's twenty-first birthday party. I also hope to meet the abovementioned friend-of-a-friend, provided I can look her in the eye without wanting to defenestrate myself in horror at my own inadequacies as a human being.

In the meantime, I will try to love the complex relationship I have with the limited non-writing-time I experience, and hopefully the time-racism will lead to a mutual respect and I will learn to love again. Although I would like it noted in the minutes of this Time-Racist-Annonymous Meeting that I will never, ever love the hours between 4am and 9am. Under no circuspants.