On routine

I like routines. I keep trying to set them up. I divide my day up into thirty minute pieces, and dedicate each piece to an activity. I make to-do lists, and now, because I'm a designer, I add little checkboxes next to each activity that I can place a tiny black tick mark in once it is accomplished. No unsightly crossing-outs for me. I try to live a regimented life and find that over time it gets easier. The tasks become automatic and nearly mindless. Exercise is something like that now. I jump up and down and contort my body in alarming ways, while huffing violently as my face turns tomato red. To distract myself from my discomfort, I watch food shows (lately, Masterchef Australia, but also Nigella, Food Safari, Eat Street, YouTube cooking channels...) and it's nice to have a direct reminder of what I'm torturing myself for.
I enjoy cooking, but I don't care as much for the attendant activities: catering to appetites and palates different to my own, shopping for vegetables, the perennial struggle of keeping a shared kitchen clean... Besides, cooking requires thought, far more than exercise. Steps need to be planned in advance and performed in a certain way. Onions cannot be left to burn while I go apeshit over and over.
Then there are the sub-routines I keep trying unsuccessfully to set up for myself. Practicing the guitar for half an hour a day. Trying and failing to floss every night. Calling relatives and friends more frequently. Volunteering. Spending more time reading. It's easy to say that I don't have time for these things, but that is untrue. I don't make time for these things yet, because it is far easier to spend half an hour scrolling down Instagram (it's endless! that's freaky!) looking at tastefully arranged food photos and then, suddenly, it's dinnertime.
We don't usually plate food in little mounds surrounded by pools of gravy, but everyone on Instagram does. I tend to pile on my carbs higgledy piggledy and drown them in gravy, but that looks unappetising in a photo. This was an oat and green moong pongal, with a vendakkai puli kuzhambu (okra in a tamarind gravy) and velarikkai pachchadi (cucumber raita, south Indian style). The pongal was an attempt to make the usual rice-and-lentils even healthier while also using up a bag of steel cut oats that I bought on a whim and have since been studiously avoiding, because if we're being perfectly honest, no matter how much you rave about it on Instagram or how beautifully you plate it, does anyone really like oatmeal porridge?