The benefits of procrastination (or OMG, what have I got myself into)

No, NO! Don't take the title SERIOUSLY! Procrastination is bad. Trust me, I know!  And leaving everything to the last possible moment really doesn't have any benefits.

Except one or two maybe, and only given very particular circumstances.

There was this translation I had to finish.  To be honest, I could have finished it at some point yesterday. (Sincere apologies to my client if he reads this)  But I didn't finish it yesterday and instead set my clock for 5 am this morning, granting me about 4 hours of sleep.

Yes, I'm dead tired.

And that is the benefit.  Because I have to take a 13 hour flight today.  












I don't particularly enjoy long flights, which is why I like to sleep as much as possible on the plane.  And that's where being tired because of previous procrastination can come in handy.










Instead of constantly looking at my watch to see how much longer the torture could last, I might just sleep through a large part of the sardine experience. 



With any luck I'll be so tired when I get on the plane that I'll be in the arms of Morpheus (NO, not the Matrix character, but the God of dreams) in no time.

That is the plan.  On my first 13 hour flight 3 years ago, I was awake for a total of 3 hours!  Fabulous flight ;-)

But there is another benefit of being busy in the final  hours before a departure.

It's the panicking aspect. It gets postponed. No, not the panic about the translation; the other  PANIC!  Only now, 4 hours before my plane takes off, do I fully realize that I don't even know how to pronounce half the cities that I will visit in the very near future. Find a Vietnamese person and have him or her pronounce Nha Trang and you will know what I mean.  Consequently, with the scarcity of Cambodian people in the Western world, how can anyone be sure of their pronunciation of Phnom Phen?  And that is probably the least of my worries. 

While the Vietnamese word for train station is Ga, which most likely is a left-over from the colonial period (gare in French), who can say how to say train station in Cambodian? 



Luckily that doesn't really matter since Cambodia is a train-free land ;-)

I think the biggest conundrum I face right now is that whenever I travel somewhere new, my brain simply refuses to accept the likelihood that I will be present in places that my brain has known as images for a looong time (usually childhood), but that was all they were: images from another world; superimposing oneself into these pictures is something my brain doesn't do well.  It's a line from that old Human League song again: See things you thought you'd  never ever see.  The brain is slow switching out of that thinking pattern. And when it finally has to accept the facts, like when I was standing in front of Mont Saint Michel for the first time, it leaves me standing with my mouth open ;-(

By the time I have reached Vancouver Airport none of those worries matter anymore; I just want to get out of this city. QUICKLY !  Why?  Next post.