4.30 on a Friday afternoon. I'm supposed to be working on the artwork for an upcoming exhibition to be held soon but I find myself discovering increasingly innovative ways to procrastinate. It doesn't help that I am sitting in my glorious home in the middle of a balmy afternoon when everyone else is hunched over their keyboards in the office, busily working and trying to ignore e-mails like this.

How much would you pay for this kind of freedom? In my case, it's costing about two-thirds of my last-drawn salary. I'd be happier with half, but it's only been six months. So give me another year before you start proposing to me, yeah. Unless you don't mind your (I mean, our future) children going to school wrapped in old pieces of carpet and eating the tupperware in which their bekal (rations) is supposed to come in every now and then.

A friend of mine who has been freelancing for the past six years and consequently has a conjugal relationship with maggi mee thinks this is the kind of life humans are meant to lead. I agree with him in that the 9 to 5 routine is sometimes unnecessary, but in terms of it being artificial, I'd now have to wonder. The Quran plainly states that God created the day for working and the night for remembrance, so spending half your life in an office must be how it's meant to be.