The Online Video Ass Trap

It's all about the transition between doing the work and not doing the work. I personally love that moment. 

You've been working on something epically grown-up, maybe a cross-stitch or prizing out a sesame seed from your back tooth using only your tongue, when the thought comes – 'Well, that's that done; I think I deserve a break.' It's the best feeling, taking a load off.

Unfortunately, for me anyway, minutes turn into tens of minutes and then hours. Before I know it, such time has passed that my toe nails have grown noticeably and the dog that once needed feeding now needs burying.

[Personal disclaimer: I don't actually have a dog]

Such was my day this Wednesday. So, I'm supposed to be volunteering here in Auckland. I'm taking this stop-gap on my travels of the world. The thing is, I'm fully intent of staying in New Zealand via the marvellous fact that I am an electrician, which sort of makes me like a kind of wizard. I find myself filling time doing not very much and taking quite a lot in return via this free homestay accommodation, food and drinks, internet and espresso-maker coffee.

When I use the machine, I imagine myself as the barista in a café, but then quickly brush the sense of obligatory coffee-making to one side, feeling thoroughly drained at the thought, instead I sip my frothy beverage and become customer, a role I'm much more comfortable with.

After mowing the lawn (for a period of time that I tell myself fills the allotted minimum of two hours work, but which is actually more like the time it takes to watch a low budget teen-ninja movie), I saunter indoors and make myself comfortable on the biggest sofa I can find in the capacious living room. I have things to do, but this just feels better.

In no time at all, the afternoon transitions to evening. I tottle out every now and then to refuel on pie, or the odd spoonful of Mövenpick chocolate chip ice cream. I then return to the dent in the sofa where my ass has been for the last four hours with a cheese plate and a selection of wafer-thin crackers; I place a glass of fruit juice on the cabinet and continue to lay for another four hours watching UFC and Top Gear clips on youtube. I feel like life is good.

What I'm actually doing is numbing the responsibility of finding a job or doing something that will facilitate that achievement. But watching clips of cars I'll never own and seeing people get punched in the face is amusing me today.

I reach for the mango juice and put the glass to my lips. Before I tip it back, I look down and notice that a few specks of something-or-other are now floating in my drink. As I pull the glass away from my mouth I notice the whole thing, inside and out, is covered in ants.

I reel in disgust and start taking random guesses at how many seconds would have passed before I barfed it all up had I actually drank the ants. They seemed to be enjoying the 'bits' so I let them have it and just lay back down in a kind of motionless stupor watching online movies – using up a good portion of my host's thirty gig download allowance like a digital vampire.

There comes a time when I tell myself 3:30am is just plain unreasonable and I really should put this day, and my head, to bed. 'Tomorrow I'll be an adult,' I say to myself and take the walk back to the shed in the dark of night; I stay at the bottom of the garden like a hobbit. It's a wooden shack with a bed, a ping-pong table and thin plywood walls that block incoming sounds as effectively as the wafer crackers I was eating earlier. I begin to imagine how much better it would be if the walls were made of crackers; I wouldn't have to go up to the house for meals for one thing. I could grow cheese outside and have a cheese and cracker party every day. (I'm assuming cheese is grown from some sort of tree.)

The builder also thought it would be a good idea to put a corrugated plastic sheet section on the roof just above the bed, so that during any time of day or night when it rains – and it rains a lot in Auckland – I can be woken by the sweet pitter-patter of raindrops above my head. And if that doesn't do it, the tree surgeon next door chops off overhanging branches with a chainsaw which land with a thud about eight feet from my slumbering face. No one wants me to sleep here.

The sound of the chainsaw cuts into my dreams and causes me to slip into a murderous, half-conscious state of dribbling; secretly I hope he will lop off his own arm, although seeing a bloody stump on the plastic skylight would send me over the edge for sure.

But all things considered, life is good in Auckland. I'm still waiting for the employment fairy to leave me a job under my pillow in exchange for the CV I place there every night. No one told me it wouldn't work, so I keep trying.

In the meantime, I play solo points ping-pong(!) and go out with my girlfriend, whom I'm hoping won't leave me when she realises my ninja-sly skills in procrastination. Anyway, better get on, I've a life to lead – and it's all tied at twenty a piece.