You'll Know I've Got a Writing Deadline When You See Me Detailing My Car

by Terri Psiakis on 19 July 2009

This article is part of a series. Read the previous article here >

On any form that asks me to list my occupation I usually answer 'Writer/Broadcaster/Comedian' but technically, I’m leaving something out. If there was more room on those forms I really should be adding 'Highly-skilled procrastinator'.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore what I do for a living and can’t for the life of me imagine doing anything else. I just like to take my sweet time when I’m going about my work. I tell myself things like 'I just need to let the ideas bounce around my head for a while' or 'If I spend time just mulling over it now, it’ll be much easier when I actually sit down to write.'

Maybe on some level these statements are true but most of the time they’re probably crap. I’m just a big procrastinator. Over the years that I’ve spent writing stand-up comedy, television material, freelance articles, various sketches and scripts, web content and most recently my book (author!) I’ve also completed a myriad of tasks in the name of procrastination.

Some of these tasks have included (and I’m not making any of these up):

Re-arranging furniture throughout the house
Detailing my car
Detailing the dog
Taking down all the curtains in the house, washing them, waiting around for them to dry, hanging them up again
Vacuuming the drapes
Completely re-designing the shape of the topiary hedges in the garden using secateurs instead of hedge-trimmers
Sorting the clothes into my wardrobe into seasons, then colours, then back to seasons again (colours was quite clearly a stupid idea)
Planting 100 spring bulbs (of which about 80% came up, which was awesome)
Ironing cushion and quilt covers
Re-organising the pantry, the fridge and all the kitchen cupboards
Alphabetising the CD collection
Cleaning a self-cleaning oven the old, damn-I-wish-this-oven-was-self-cleaning way

And then there’s procrastinating by purposely distracting myself with television. The Bloke is mad for sport so we have cable TV, but I only ever really watch it when I’ve run out of household tasks to perform in the name of procrastination. Chat shows are my current televisual drug of choice and over the last couple of months I’ve been sucked in by Ellen.

I think Ellen DeGeneres is a brilliant comedian. She exudes great warmth and candour and has used her position as a host and celebrity to encourage donations to a number of worthy causes. Despite that, I’ve decided that Ellen’s show can bite me. It’s a chat show, right? So what’s with all the dancing? I got a stopwatch out during one episode (yes, I do have too much time on my hands) and Ellen spent just under six minutes dancing. Dancing by herself, dancing with the audience, dancing with the guests. And it’s actually unnerving to watch, because she’s doing the kind of dancing you do while you’re stirring something on the stove. It’s the kind of dancing you do when nobody else is watching. Basically, she’s doing the kind of dancing you might do before you take your pants off and frankly, watching her do it in front of millions of people always makes me feel weird.

Ellen has a live DJ on-set (as opposed to a dead one, which would be awkward and no doubt raise questions.) Her DJ is the whitest man in the world and looks more like the sort of guy you’d expect to find repairing computers. He spins a tune, Ellen takes her dancing into the audience and the audience in turn goes right off. Ellen gets her groove on and everyone around her starts shaking it as though their pills have just kicked in. I sit there on the couch thinking 'Why am I watching this? And where are my pills?'

One day I watched the show and was surprised to find Ellen being uncharacteristically serious. She was talking about something that had happened at one of the animal shelters she supports and it seemed like a pretty sad situation. 'She can’t possibly dance now,' I thought to myself. Ellen’s last line of the segment?

'Tell you what I love almost as much as animals? I love dancing.'

Never underestimate a 50-year-old woman who wears a suit jacket and tennis shoes.