“Well, I was going to study, but while I was studying I was focusing on other stuff…” Yeah. And I was going to read.

You may wonder whether it counts as deceiving myself if I know it, but I think it does as long as knowing does not change my behavior.

What am I talking about? Well, I have reflected some more on how fate seems to go out of its way to thwart my purchase of more bandwidth and, in particular, a Android tablet. (Not a pill, but a large handheld computer with touchscreen.)

So I thought back a few months, to this past winter in my home in Riverview. The house was old and not too well insulated, and the winter was cold. The electricity price was high, what with the cold winter and a couple dry years behind us. (Norway mostly uses hydropower.) So I thought to myself: “For now, I will just let the living room stay just warm enough to not risk the kitchen freezing. But when the spring comes, and the cold is less extreme, I will fire up the wood stove almost every afternoon and spend my evening in the living room reading a good book.”

The spring came, and eventually became summer. But I only spent a quarter of an hour or so, a couple days, in the living room. Otherwise I stayed glued before the computer, until I started taking the long walks in May, after the serious health scare I had back then.

Now, I am saying to myself: “The Galaxy Tab is perfect for reading. I will sit in the living room each evening reading my e-books on it, instead of playing City of Heroes or The Sims 3 or refreshing Google+.”  Yeah, sure. It is not hard to predict what will happen. After all, as psychologists are fond of saying, “past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior”.

Besides, I already have a couple paper books that I have not read all the way through, and a couple more that merit a reread. But I don’t get out of my boss chair in the home office to go read them. I don’t even go read the comic books that I was planning to read a second time before giving them away.

I know myself too well to even be surprised anymore. But perhaps that is my one and final hope, that I am starting to see through myself?