Damien sits at the window with his head in his hands. Flora takes the seat beside him.
Flora: Hey! How’s it goin’?
Damien: I can’t believe I did it.
Flora: Did what?
Damien: You know I’ve been working shifts, right?
Flora: Yeah.
Damien: I worked ’til six this morning, went home and passed out, and I had this dream. I dreamt I hadn’t got any of my Christmas shopping done. So I jumped out of bed, and I literally ran to the mall.
Flora: And then you realized it was a dream?
Damien nods, his head still in his hands.
Flora: You got time off at Christmas?
Damien: Yeah, I don’t go back ’til the 29th.
Flora: Sounds like you could use a break. Want to go for a coffee?
Damien:(looks up at her) You buyin’? I don’t get paid ’til next week.
Flora: Sure. But how were you going to do any shopping if you don’t have enough for coffee?
Damien:(shakes his head and chuckles) Thank God it was just a dream. Would’a been a nightmare if I’d actually tried to buy something.
We all make choices for ourselves. Every day, every hour, every minute. Do I get up, or lay in bed five more minutes, what do I eat, what should I buy with the little bit of money I have, what to say, what should I do with my time? Sometimes these choices are hard, many times we make them out of habit. But you know which choices I really hate making?
What to choose for somebody else. I’m sure it’s why I hate Christmas shopping. It’s not the crowds, the parking lots, or the expense… Okay, it’s also the expense. But deciding what somebody else is going to like, want or need is so much harder than buying for myself. And that’s difficult enough.
I think my personal hardest choice is what to do with my time. There are days when I have so little that I have to prioritize by logic, doing the things that absolutely must be done first, and there are days when I suddenly have lots of time… Then I start looking at my non-priority tasks and have to decide where to start. Which is where I begin to procrastinate, because choosing what to do first is just too overwhelming. So I end up on Facebook, reading about what’s going on with the US election (talk about choices!) (I’m not going to know what to do with myself when it’s finished) (where was I? Oh yeah, Facebook) or finding cool writing or publishing tips to read about, or silly memes to giggle over, not to mention the little movies that start automatically now – why do they do that to us?!? They’re too irresistible, like the snack aisle in the grocery store when you go shopping whilst hungry.
Today I chose to go to the library, to get a little work done on my novel while the babysitter was here. It was a good choice, since it didn’t cost me any money… except the book I bought at the library’s fundraising store. Ugh.
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