My Uncontrollable Readathon

After a rather long time I am working by myself on a project. I am not reporting to anyone in my area unlike most of the previous jobs. I have to overhaul marketing and sales departments of a company (I know, I am that good, okay I am not but you get the drift, I am getting good at my acting skills :D). I am doing all this by myself because a lot of people I worked with had collectively decided that they had enough of this consulting shit and left their jobs. So, the number of people that I actually talk to in office has reduced from counting with two hands to one. And to make things better I work out of the client location. It’s so not a good feeling when you have to fake it 24*7 in office and show people that you are actually working through the 8 hours.

I have unfortunately fallen into these projects where half of it happens through meeting. We have a meeting to understand shit from the client and then we have another to explain them what/how/when we are doing. The list is endless. By the end of the project if anybody wants to have another meeting with me I am going to poke their eyes out with a Pilot pen. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to sit through a meeting that goes on for almost three hours of droning? I space out in between only to realize that I am doing the meeting and I am not supposed to be thinking about the latest Haven episode. 

After the insane number of meetings, I have to document every single inane detail. Now, the problem is that in between I get bored and I go online. And the diversions begin. I get fascinated by a thousand different things. Little things. Trivial things. Almost anything can catch my imagination and spur on a thought-a random article on Wikipedia can cost me hours of a day as I link from page to page. I am actually going through JStor to download research articles like:

• The Trouble with Mary Jane’s Gender: Exploration of some of the gendered dimensions of contemporary cannabis politics and culture
• Moving out of Poverty: A study on people who moved out of poverty during the decade from 1995 to 2005 in rural areas of four Indian states: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Third Annual Report on Online Service Providers’ Privacy and Transparency Practices Regarding Government Access to User Data
• Human Sacrifice: Talks about a theory of rational human sacrifice: the purchase and ritual slaughter of innocent persons to appease divinities
• The Legitimacy of the State in Fragile Situations: The report expands upon conventional understandings of the state and its relation to society, and presents a more thoroughgoing empirical understanding of legitimacy than is typically employed in studies of fragile states

If you are trying to find any connection between the above articles you wouldn’t. I am single-handedly using the many facets of Google to find interesting information in unlikely places. I have Google Keep to remind me of the things that I have read while I am offline (read on my Kindle) to check them out later on. And if you think that I am being very in touch with the times and news you are wrong. I don’t care much about the things that keep happening around me even though, these days I do go on to FirstPost at least once a day but this is more of an avoidance strategy than anything else. 

I OD on talking to people all day that I can’t even think of having another conversation when I get back home. I shut my door and get back to my reading and drink copious amount of coffee/green tea. I think I need to get out of this project otherwise my roommates are going to think that something is seriously wrong with me. 

On the bright side, I can now talk for ages on the privacy policies of Google Vs. Twitter or about Milton Friedman and his ideas on capitalism or even on how to write a novel (I am actually helping a friend in reviewing his first). But, if you want to have an honest conversation about my state of mind - no can dosville babydoll!