Monday, 11am. The Features Editor comes knocking at my door. "Hi, I know I owe you a diary," I say even before she has opened her mouth. I promise her to write it in the evening and deliver it the next day. I am quite convinced that I will produce a masterpiece to follow up "the diary of the future". Yet this time my mind is buzzing with thoughts to such an extent that I am helpless and overwhelmed by them and I can't decide what I want to say. "The mind is like a drunken monkey," Swami Niranjanananda had said, "it constantly jumps here and there". This was the beginning of a story I wrote for the Echo almost two years ago. It was about yoga.

Monday 7pm. I am back home, work is left behind and I can finally think about the diary. Yeah, right. The other tsunami of work comes crashing - the Plovdiv International Fair is approaching and my parents' company is in need of my assistance - and I won't go into more detail because I will flip out again. So here I am, sitting at the computer, laying out a technical manual that had to be finished by now but I am still at chapter 2 out of eight. I keep a glass of Bailey's close at hand. That's what I happen to have in the bar cabinet - I'm not a huge fan of alcohol in general. And the glass is certainly not there to boost my creativity and inspiration. It's yet another attempt to embalm my cracked nerves.

Monday, 11:30pm. Going to bed is a solace long awaited. Before going to sleep I discuss my unborn diary with my boyfriend. "What's the purpose of a diary," he asks. I start explaining that a diary nowadays is usually a therapeutic tool that's designed to help stressed or confused individuals in the pursuit of balance and harmony. After all, once you have your thoughts laid out, you identify yourself much less with them. You are not your thoughts. That's what my yoga teacher says, and that's what I recently read in quite a fascinating book on holistic medicine, Reflections of the Moon on Water by Xiaolan Zhao. "No, I mean, what's the purpose of that particular diary in your newspaper," he insists. I shrug. Maybe it's designed to entertain readers with random people's misfortunes or successes, an evil voice inside me whispers. A newspaper version of Big Brother, so to speak.

Monday-Tuesday, in the realms of Morpheus. I dreamt that I have gone on a trip to Prague. My boyfriend has left the hostel before me and has promised to wait for me. The problem is, I don't know where exactly I'm supposed to meet him. After wandering around the building for some time I remember with horror that I have left some of my tubes and jars of cosmetics in the room and I go back looking for them, stumbling on my way upon quite a good looking male individual who is also quite asleep and snoring. Now analyse that. I don't think the content of my dream contributes to the creation process of my diary.

Monday, 9am. I awake with a jolt. And remember with sadness the time just a month ago when I woke up at 7:30am each morning, full of energy. That miracle happened after I had witnessed a sunrise over Velingrad during a yoga retreat. It is a bit hard to witness a sunrise in the concrete jungle of Sofia.

Tuesday, 9:30am. On the way to work, my brain works frantically on possibilities for a diary theme. I ironically and fondly call it The Diary of a Madwoman. I intend to trace my physical and psychological condition across three months and point out the devastating effects of stress on health. I intend to measure my days in time I've devoted to yoga (zero, as of late) and health food units I've consumed (also nearing zero). Undoubtedly you see the parallel with an undying classic of the diary genre, Bridget Jones's Diary. But hers is a different battle.

Tuesday, 11am. The 24-hour struggle to come up with a brilliant diary is at its end. The result is a pathetic quasi-stream-of-consciousness jumble. Well, at least it's over, as everything else will be. Actually, I haven't read Joyce and I don't know what stream of consciousness is (what a shame!).