Thursday 9 June 2011

taking back control/resolutions update

Hello. Have you noticed that I put entries to this blog in so many different ways that you can probably never tell which me I am being? I'm like Anna in The Golden Notebook sectioning my blog life into catagories. I imagine that black is for discussions of practicalities (like why I have no funding), red is for rants, blue is like this one (a conglomerate of thoughts because I have no cohesive idea for this entry only a mess of thoughts) and yellow for my literary emotional posts which I think are the only ones really worth their salt being the most honest.

Sometimes I think that I am Saul Green too, because I switch so readily from these stances. I sometimes think I am borderline bi-polar. The day effects me so much that I'll jump from confident and happy to insecure and skittishly anxious at the drop of a hat. It's the time I'm living in.

I just wanted to say that I have taken back control. I don't know if it is better or worse truthfully but it is there and that's all I can hope for right now. I went and booked a holiday to Tenerife for Stuart and I half way through August. Warm weather, swimming pools, beaches, the sea and water parks. Stuart needs a break; I'm worried that if he doesn't get one he will start to disintegrate. He said to me the other day "I never thought of myself as the sort of person who needs a holiday". His GP said he's on the way up. I'm on the way down. Taking back control also manifested itself in trying to find a job. I am currently rather bitter and I feel as though led on. It isn't fun to be told for a year that you are the best and everything you want will come to you, no questions asked, and then when that time comes it all seems to slip through the cracks. My career floating away by incompetence and nepotism and flimsy promises. I applied for a full time job and I'm sending CVs. A month ago it was "this is not the end of the road by any means". A week later "apply for everything, we have a good chance". Now it's "an outside chance" and "a good chance for St Andrews next year". What changed in this month? I certainly didn't. And if things that were certain can slide down such a scale now I doubt I want to hang around for next years lies. I'm going to get a job and leave such dreams behind. I've been living it too long and you they all had their chance to secure me. I know if I get a good job now I'll never look back.

The other matter of business I want to share is the half year update on my New year's resolutions. I said I would update more often but I never thought it interesting enough to do so. Anyway:

1. ride mary-anne more - mary-anne has been sold so now this doesn't apply.
2. save up for a deposit - this was going well. I had to save £5k total in the 4 years, I saved up £2k and then this wholw funding scenario happened and I decided to sort out the holiday. I still have savings, they just can't be applied in that manner at the moment. This is one to wait for December.
3.Save up cat 'instead of insurance' fund - £10 per month per cat being saved for them.
4. Keep running regularly - rodger wilco. done and done.
5. Don't Succumb to Politeness if Ever Faced with the Former Bridesmaid Again - No opportunity as of yet
6. Get a masters, get funding for 3 years and start my phd - hahahahaha, I'll manage the first part. I really shouldn't have made something I couldn't control a resolution. If this all fails, it wont be because of me.
7. Learn Something New: Latin - yea I have not done this. yet. But if I'm not doing the phd theres no way. Plus I learned leater Dutch would be more useful.
8. Don't Rely on the TV to Get to Sleep - this failed. may try again.
9. Bake Something, Once a Month, in the Shape of Gingerbread Men, and Share it with my Brother, Jamie - we did it a few times but Jamie's final year got in the way.
10. Never Buy Bread From a Shop - the one I am most proud to say I have thus far achieved, albiet we eat less bread than we did before.
11. Grow My Vegetables More Efficiently - mid way through this one
12. Once a Month, with Stuart, Cook a Home-Made, Joint Three-Course Meal - yes pretty much done, we decided to do it based on a place in the world by taking my hug a world toy/cushion, whirling it about and blindly pointing to a location.

Sunday 5 June 2011

time and waiting

Recently when I've been waking up in the morning I feel like I can't be bothered. For most people I expect that this is a routine feeling and I used to get it any time I had to wake up and go to work or awful tutorials when I was an undergraduate. But since I have been doing this masters I have had no reason to feel like that and for a long time I didn't. Getting up for classes was fine because it was interesting and the people were intelligent. My job was so good that I actually miss that it is over until September. If I had work for university to do I looked forward to it, like I was taking a step in the right direction and what I was doing had an end point and a reason that made me want to put in the effort. Somehow that has gradually dissolved and I awake feeling like I just want the new day to shut up. Stuart will always come and sit with me for a few minutes before he goes to work while I start to wake up. I love that he does that. But now these feelings of pointlessness are so strong that I begin to associate them with the whole experience.

I said to him the other day that maybe I'm not as happy as I make out. I feel like a manic depressive, but I don't know if it'd just that I have too much time on my hands. I've stopped feeling guilty if I don't do any work for my thesis for a week. I've stopped worrying that all I have done thus far isn't good enough. I've stopped putting myself down because I know my modesty is for others, not for me. I'm really fed up of being told just how good I am, how I'm the best degree in history in thirty years, and yet I have no funding. No-one wants to continue my career. I am rational and I know that I will probably get external funding but it's the fact that I know that the only reason I will is because my supervisors are creating a shit storm to do so. I hate that there are people in that university sitting in some meeting room discussing applicants and deciding that I don't get any. They are deciding to give the funding to their own students because that's what they want. I am not naive. I know of nepotism and favouritism and self-interest. But how can life be the way that you work as hard as you possibly can, you put in your all, every little bit that you have, and it's the best, you are told so, yet it is still just not enough. Why should I have to wait for another year. Another year. Another fucking year of my life wasted. And that truely is what it is, it wouldn't be a choice and opportunity and travel. I would have no money, I would have to get a job, I would be overqualified, I would work in some dead end retail pit of self-loathing and I would have to postpone all my plans, all of our plans. Another year in the city, another year of waiting for security and the ability to start everything. Call me selfish. Tell me there are people out there doing so much worse with much bigger problems. People in debt, people without jobs. I don't care. I worked as hard as I could and I always have. I've always put everything I had into this and picked up the slack for the countless morons who lazed and stopped and now it's all come to this, that still I won't be given it. Because of select individuals and because of administrative monopolies of influence. The worst thing though, the worst of all is that I know I am a pawn. I know I am playing piece to use for influence and faction within an institution that is changing. I know I represent control for other people and I am being used, tempted with career and academia. Why did I never hear back about that prize? Why is my dissertation article not published? Where are last semester's marks? What about Sicily? And why do you conspire to keep me at arms length. I'm not a fucking toy. You can't switch me off.

It's not the things that are happening that make me not want to get up, I'm no coward, I can deal with harsh realities. It's that you wont tell me. And like a child, I wait.

I feel so disconnected right now. I have no structure in my life. Apart from my brother's graduation, the three-day trip to London and a session to get my eyebrows waxed, I have literally nothing in my diary. And it's not because I can't keep a diary. This week for example, I have nothing I need to do. Not a single thing. I await news of a sort of friend who may come down. And even then I don't know the day. I went onto facebook this morning and saw a post from a friend. She's been in Copenhgen. I didn't even know that she was going. And she was my bridesmaid.

Life has become a choice between living it in people and living it in myself. If I live in people I have to brace myself for constant emotional turmoil. Being let down and stood upon like some piece of shit lying in the street. If I live in myself I choose solitude and career and I await my fate with nothing but my own time to keep me company. I am an innovative person, but filling all this time is hard. I know the idea of all this time off seems like a heaven to you. It always does when you don't have it.