Synchronicity

I recently came to a realisation that I have become a fundamentally asynchronous being. Here are some examples of my asynchronicity:

1. I hardly ever set an alarm clock, I just get up when I've woken up enough.

2. My preferred method of communication is email.

3. I listen to BBC radio via listen again whenever it suits; I watch TV and movies via DVDs and downloads; I don't have "live" TV.

In fact, there's very little that I do that is strongly synchronous. The only examples that come to mind is that I occasionally go to scheduled talks and meetings (usually scheduled by me in the middle of the afternoon so as to give plenty of slack) and I usually go for lunch between 12 and 12.30 so as to catch up with people for lunch (but this varies from day to day, and is not a standing arrangement). In other words, either through accident or design I have a lifestyle which is very decoupled from anyone's schedule but my own. Since I usually have plenty of things to be getting on with, there's not usually any problem with wondering what to do next, or getting bored.

This tends to work fine, although it's possible that I annoy people by sometimes being very slow to respond to things. Since there's no particular urgency in anything, I just add it to the queue, and process it whenever I get around to it. Thus, it occasionally takes me up to 16 months to reply to an email, or a few weeks to do some small chore that wasn't interesting enough to be done earlier.

The only downside of this lifestyle, apart from perhaps not getting some things done as soon as they should be, can be summer up on one word: spoilers. Since I usually don't see a new TV show until a week or so after it has aired, or read a book till it comes out in paperback (much easier to read in the bath than a hardback), or watch a movie till it has been out on DVD for long enough to crawl up my Netflix queue, then when I see something 'new' is about a year after most other people have, and hence I am beset with spoilers. Usually it's easy to avoid them, but still, it can be annoying.

What makes this particularly pertinent is this dratted HP7. Having got myself into the embarrassing position of having read the first six books, I suppose I will have to read the seventh eventually. And (note this copyright freaks) the leaking of the book on the net is starting to convince me that I should buy this book and read it now, instead of waiting a year or two. And, living the asynchronous life that I do, there's actually something quite exciting about the prospect of rushing out to get something that is completely 'new'. So tomorrow, I will go out and secure a copy. Not at midnight, obviously, there's no particular rush. And maybe tomorrow is not so convenient, so maybe I'll leave it till sunday when I'm also getting the groceries. Actually, the cupboards are quite full at the moment, so I probably don't need to go to the shops till the middle of next week. Ah... it can wait.