Procrastinators Don't Always Lose.

Day 69

Saturday

Having racked up 23 years as a professional procrastinator I should have seen this coming. Its 9:24am on Saturday and at 9:30 I have to teach an English class. I thought I’d be sneaky and just play “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” from Netflix via my laptop. Having already set up my Netflix account and checking to be sure the movie was there I went to bed feeling confident about my plans. Well, right before I was supposed to leave I decided to go ahead and load the video so all I had to do was press play when I got there. Didn’t quite work out. Netflix doesn’t air movies overseas. 6 minutes till class starts I madly google Christmas movies. Disney’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ is the only kid friendly flick I can find. Running through the rain, only to have to back track and get my rent, because after all I am tutoring my landlord’s kid I arrive 15 minutes late. My landlord laughed and said she thought I’d partied too hard the night before and overslept. Handing over the rent money I assured her that my daily 6:30am alarm for school during the week had pretty much cured me from ever sleeping past 9am.

As I began to head to the playroom where I hold the lesson my landlord let me know that her youngest was sick with the flu and then led me to her to just say hi (and prove how sick she was??). All the while I’m thinking, thank you, thank you so much Mrs. Landlord, for bringing me into your home with a sick child. If you get me sick before I go home, and I can’t fly because I’m in bed with the flu, there’s going to be words.

I really didn’t have to worry about the failure of Netflix because the kid’s English was good enough that the actually understood the movie, ergo, they couldn’t pay attention to it, nor stay seated for 5 straight minutes. At their request we powered down the movie and just made snowflakes for an hour, while chatting about what they were going to for Christmas and 3 Kings.

And as I said goodbye, I smiled saying, “I’ll see you next year, I’m going home to my country!”