More of me whining

I can’t get excited about things. I can’t care about things. I’m calling the doctor this next week. He’ll probably just tell me that it’s “part of the grieving process”, like last time. But I need something to make me care.

Graduation is on Wednesday. My housemates’ parents are coming. I have a couple of people coming, but all along – most of this year – I just haven’t cared that much about graduation. I know my achievements from this year. I checked my transcript today (again) and, yes, my dissertation was the highest mark that I got all year. And I’m graduating with merit. Yay me. But the ceremony itself? It’s for other people. It’s for parents, it’s for families. It’s a ceremony marking the conclusion of a year that most people have spent two or three months moving on from. And I’ve had two. I had my high school graduation and I had my BA graduation. It’s not that I don’t care about the MA – I do, I’m quite proud of it, and I miss the work terribly. And I have people coming to mark the occasion, and I’m excited to see the people that I haven’t seen in weeks who are coming for it (everyone I know, except one, is graduating at the same ceremony). But I don’t actually care about walking across the stage and receiving my certificate. I don’t care about the ceremony.

I do have quite a lot of free time, but I have low energy and low motivation so all the projects that I have on my list never quite get done. And then I feel guilty because, if I want to be a writer, I need to write. But I end up watching old TV shows and rereading books that aren’t very good (and ignoring the books that I haven’t read yet) and writing falls by the wayside. It’s an excuse, but I can’t seem to break out of it. When I do get around to doing something productive, like applying for more jobs or something, it always takes about five times longer than I want it to (because I have no energy and get distracted easily

Maybe I just need this time of apathy, to recharge. I don’t have the money to let it go on too long – and it’s affecting my teaching to the point where I’m REALLY not going to have any money because I’ll no longer have a job, hence the need to go to the doctor – but I need to stop with the self-imposed guilt. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually the other stuff will, too. But the first step is to get myself mentally healthy again.

Yeah, just more of me whining

I seem to be at yet another career crossroads. I have been teaching part-time at a school, covering some classes for a teacher who's been ill long-term. I am getting incredibly bored. Some of this has to do with the timetable - it's very sporadic, but just enough that I can't really find another part-time job. Some of it has to do with my general mood - I am incredibly apathetic right now, and it's hard to tell which is causing which. Some of it has to do with the fact that teaching kind of feels like a "been there, done that" - and that worries me. I know I am a good, caring teacher. I'm just no longer sure that I should be.

I have started to take steps to get past it. I still have the employment problem that I don't have a teaching qualification (so, if I stay in teaching, I would either have to stay at private schools or get one, which is the current Plan) but I don't have experience in anything else. I have applied for a couple of internships at my postgraduate university that should help expand my experience and CV. The thing is, though, the school may still need me. It's still very nebulous whether the teacher that I'm covering will be coming back full-time at all, I learned today. I don't want to abandon a school that needs me; I don't want to abandon a job even if it's not ideal when I don't have anything else in the pipeline. But I can't keep going in this limbo - coming in and essentially being at school full-time or nearly full-time when I'm only teaching 1-3 lessons per day [I have been getting to school at 8:30 or so every day, and leaving at 1:30 ish except for days when I need to be there until 4]. If I'm going to stay, I need a more....consolidated timetable. Or a fuller one.

I have to do something to get past this apathy. I have any number of projects bouncing around my head, but I do not have the motivation or energy to work on them, even when I give myself deadlines. I just can't seem to care, and that's not going to help the job search or the productivity at all. I spend my time doing the things that should be done in 'coffee break' times (like, say, blogging. Or checking Google Reader), and not doing the things that I should be taking a break from. And then it's nearly 10 or 11, and because I'm either exhausted or the alarm's going off at 6, I still don't do them. Something needs to change. I need to get my drive back. I need to pull out of this incipient depression (after several days of being relatively okay, I woke up crying again this morning). I need help.

The devil is in the details

The school where I'm temporarily working is having an inspection this week. Everyone's very worried about it. Sometimes I think I should probably be worried about it too, but I just can't make myself care. For one thing, an inspection is supposed to see how things normally run, so there's not really anything different I can do. For another thing, I don't have any administrative responsibilities that they'll be checking. For a third thing, no matter what the outcome of the inspection, I am not really going to be affected. For a fourth thing, I still have the "I'm new" excuse.

I keep running across tiny little things that I have no experience with. Like yesterday, when I told my class to finish our activity for homework, they told me about "homework timetables" and that they're not supposed to have English homework on Mondays or they'd get overloaded. These are the sorts of things that it is good to know. They are also the sorts of things that, if you are used to the system that uses them, you don't think to mention. They are so automatic to the way you work that it doesn't even occur that it's not done or done differently in other places.

I just know that something is Not Right in my life. I believe very strongly that your body/mind/soul tells you when something's wrong and, while nothing seems Wrong right now, something's Not Right either. I need to do something to get back to where I'm 'supposed' to be - the career path where I feel comfortable - not complacent, but comfortable. At least I've stopped crying in the shower every morning - but that doesn't mean that whatever was bringing it on has been solved, just that my mind/body/soul has shut down from dealing with it. Hence the apathy, I suppose.

One clue to this Not Right-ness was Monday afternoon. I felt fine at school, developed a headache on the way home, was home by 2....and was asleep by 2:15. I woke up sometime after 4:30, still with a headache, and was groggy and headachy the rest of the night. The temperature in our house doesn't help, either - our gas bill was higher than we were expecting and higher than we want, so we're trying to conserve. This, of course, means that we do things like bake more and keep the electricity use high, but whatever. We'll get through it somehow.


I think I'm getting burned out from education. Not from me learning - I still want to do a PhD at some point - but just from being in the education bubble. I am quite bored and apathetic right now about being a teacher. While for some people that may make them stricter, for me it lets my classes kind of run amok, which then doesn't do anything to increase my enthusiasm. I want to do something else for a while: it will help me clarify, one way or another, my desire to be a teacher. I still have the problem of have experience in education but qualifications for other things, but I'm working on that. Back to the soul-destroying job hunt I go, I suppose.

Are you ready for some football?

I know I mention this frequently in the fall, but on Sundays it’s one of the only things I think about: I miss football. I splurged on myself a few weeks ago and got the season pass for NFL.com’s “Field Pass” – live and archived radio coverage for the rest of the season. It’s totally worth it. I don’t have to rely on questionable streaming sites, and if I miss a game, I can listen to it at any point during the week. (I haven’t, yet, because there haven’t been any ‘can’t-miss’ games that I’ve missed. But I could if I wanted to.)

One of the complaints that people who don’t like American football have is that the play stops so often, usually for commercials and whatnot. It’s an argument that I agree with, but that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game. Part of it, for me, is that commercials have become such a part of the ‘football experience’ that I don’t even notice them when I’m watching a game live or listening to, say, B102.7 and Coyote coverage. Field Pass, though, doesn’t usually include the commercials – the Chargers station did a week ago, but most of them don’t. Most of the stations play music, an oddly familiar classical set that I can’t quite place, during the ad breaks. And there are a LOT of ad breaks. I knew there were a lot of ad breaks, but as long as there were ads – as long as there was speech and noise filling the airtime – I didn’t really notice them. When it’s music, especially music that isn’t intuitively football music, it’s really really obvious how much time of a football game is spent not playing football.

Also, dear NFL: can you PLEASE stop scheduling all the games that I want to follow (Pittsburgh, Minnesota, New Orleans, and Indianapolis are the main ones) at the exact same time? You have four game time slots throughout the weekend: early Sunday afternoon, late Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, and Monday night. There is no reason that all of the teams that I follow need to be playing at the exact same time. You are not making this easy for me. I’m not even complaining about the Sunday night and Monday night time slots because I know that my inability to listen live to those games is my own fault for living in this time zone. But seriously. Spread the games out on Sunday. Please. The way things are now, I have four games to keep track of in the early timeslot, and none that I really care about in the late one. Is the overloading of the early timeslot really necessary?

A new job and other stuff

I find that my life is a lot more productive when I’m more scheduled. Something about having limited time makes me actually use the time I have.

I just started a new job. It’s part-time, it’s temporary (until Christmas), but it’s an income for now. As long as it gets me through until I apply for my next visa, I’m okay. [Note: the visa will not guarantee me a job afterwards, but should make it a little bit easier, plus to get the visa I need a minimum bank balance so that I can prove that I’m not going to be a drain on UK society.]

The job is a teaching job, which also accomplishes the goal of getting experience in a UK school so that I can apply for the GTP (which is an employment-based teacher qualification program). In fact, the head of the department talked to me today about treating this next month as if it were an unofficial GTP. So in addition to teaching classes, I will occasionally observe and be observed (a few times a week, we’re thinking). I am all in favour of this. Anything that makes me a better teacher and gives me a bit of an edge finding another job is a good thing. As an international (non-EU) resident, I face quite a lot of barriers to employment until I get a permanent visa (which will be difficult for me to do without a job).

But anyway, the job. Like I said, it’s part-time, it’s temporary, it’s teaching. It’s a private (independent) school, which is how I’m able to work there actually as a teacher even without qualifications. I’ve taken over some classes for a teacher who’s been ill since August. He’s recovered enough to take back his exam-level classes, but that leaves quite a few classes that he’s not ready for yet. So I’m teaching a class of year 9s and a class of year 10s and I share a class of year 7s. I’m teaching Lord of the Flies to the year 9s and Great Expectations to the year 10s.

It’s been a bit rough. The other teachers are wonderful, and I have no problems with any of them apart from my natural shyness and independence which combined make it difficult for me to offer opinions and ask for help. The fruoghness has come with the kids, especially the older ones. I am the third teacher they’ve had this year, and it’s not even the end of the first term. I am obviously new and unfamiliar with the school’s procedures. And by the end of my first week of working (I started teaching on a Wednesday and the crisis hit last hour on the next Tuesday) they’d pushed me and themselves to a breaking point. Things are better now – they’ve been yelled at, repeatedly, and I have a better idea of what to do and how to handle them – but I’m used to classes who, for the most part, love me, and even if they don’t, they respect my being there and they don’t punch each other out in the middle of my class. (Unless they’re making a YouTube video.) I need to become better at discipline and classroom management with classes that I don’t know, with students that I don’t know, and with systems that I don’t know. If I can’t, I’ll never survive the GTP next year (assuming that I do the GTP next year).

And I do still want to get teacher qualifications – at the very least, it would be nice to have qualifications to match my experience. But I also am still looking for office-type jobs. I can’t help wondering what it would be like to work in an office instead of a school, having set tasks to do and a defined job description that doesn’t necessarily require me to be ‘on’ all day.

And this leads me back to my opening statement. This is a great job, a great school, and may lead to further things next term (details pending). But I’m not busy enough to get things done. There’s always ‘more’ that I could do, of course, but I’m only scheduled to teach a few class hours – or, in this timetable, half-hours – each day. Today, even, I only had one half-hour since my double class was cancelled (the class was doing something else with their form tutor). I was technically done teaching at 9:40 this morning. I stayed, of course, for a quick staff meeting and to at least outline my classes for tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday – I didn’t go much further for various reasons, including not really having a sense of how much we’ll reasonably get done tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday, and having no classes until 11:30 tomorrow so I can spend the morning tweaking it, and having a huge block of time Tuesday to do more – and ended up observing a class which, as previously mentioned, is a good thing. The thing is, if I’d had more classes to teach yesterday, I probably would even have gotten more done. Because I wouldn’t have had as much time to ponder what I was going to do, I would have made decisions faster about what to do in my various classes. And probably still gotten the blog posts written and etc. etc. etc. Oh, well. Sigh.

As I was leaving today, I told one of my colleagues that I was done for the day, and she jokingly asked if I wanted to teach her afternoon class instead – I told her that, seriously, if there are days when she’s feeling too overwhelmed by her other stuff and can hand me a lesson plan, I’ll do it. And by the end of the brief conversation, we’d tentatively agreed to team-teach a General Studies unit about the different education systems/experiences in the US and the UK. Yay for more work and more experience!

I really do enjoy all the other teachers in the English department at this school. This school year so far has been incredibly chaotic for them – there’s the teacher I’m covering for who has been ill and is not sure when he’ll be able to come back full time, there’s the head of department who needs leg/hip surgery sometime in the late winter/early spring and has been trying to arrange that as well as take care of the personnel changeover of this fall, there’s the lovely one who had a miscarriage over half-term, there’s the new one who had a minor breakdown last week, there are a couple of part-time people who are wonderful but not in every day….it’s a department in flux but everyone is so nice and so supportive of everyone else.

There’s not a lot else going on in my life. I still miss my ex – one of the hardest things about that terrible Tuesday that I mentioned above was that I wanted to text him and tell him about it, so that he could sympathise and then make me laugh and forget about it – but I couldn’t. Not because I ‘can’t text him’ – because I can, we’re still friends of sorts, I saw him a couple of weeks ago and we’re fine – but because if I had, it would just have been a way for me to try to hang on to the way things were between us and not the way things are, and that’s not healthy.

I have no idea what I’m going to be doing for Christmas. I don’t think I’ll have enough money for a plane ticket to go home, unless one of my parents helps me out, and I don’t know where various family members are going to be for Christmas anyway. Staying here would certainly be easier from both a financial and a bureaucratic perspective. It may be incredibly depressing, though.

NaNoWriMo

I started to attempt National Novel Writing Month again this year. I've done it in the past, and I've even "won" twice. This year, I'm not going to finish.

I could make excuses like "I just started a new job" (true) "which usually leaves me exhausted" (true) and "I'm trying not to lose my semblance of a social life" (true) "which means, for example, that I only have an hour at home on Tuesdays" (true), all of which are factors in my wordcount of less than 10K right now.

But the main reason that NaNo is not working for me is that I care too much about this story idea. It's one that's been in my head for literally years, and I want it to work, even in a first draft. And right now it's not working. The plot isn't there and the tone is absolutely wrong. And I care too much about the story to want to throw in flying monkeys or black-suited ninjas.

So the way I see it, I have a few choices. I can try to restart this story, locking myself away and trying hard to gget to 50K in...twelve days. I could restart this story and change my goal to either 20 or 25K (...in twelve days). I could switch stories, also resetting the goal.

Or I could quit thinking of it as NaNo, which is a fairly arbitrary thing anyway that in the past has left me mentally and writingly (you'd think I'd know a better adverb for that, wouldn't you? One that actually exists?) drained and uncreative through December, and just try to write something, a few hundred words at least, every day.

I pick the last one.

Happy Remembrance Day

They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them

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Last Post

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My all-time favourite poem

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And one of my all-time favourite books


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I was going to write more about today, and memories of today, and try to parse out why I am so fascinated by WWI, but I started a new job last week and even though it's part-time, it's still exhausting (and the last two days have been particularly emotionally draining) and I just need to collapse. I'll put it on my list for 'posts to write soon' but I can't promise that I'll a) remember and b) actually do it. I'll try, though.

My mind is confusing sometimes.

Oh, man, I miss football. I miss football so much. The Patriots and Bucs played at Wembley today and I so want tickets to next year’s London game and I want a friend to come with me so that I can talk about the game, both during and after. I am disappointed that the Vikings lost, but they kind of gave it away (TWO turnovers returned for touchdowns? Seriously?), it’s not good for teams to go undefeated too long because it creates way too much pressure, and if they had to lose I’m glad it was to the Steelers so that I could see Stefan (and kind of laugh at how upset he seemed that he only got to about the 30 on one return, instead of running it all the way back) because he is awesome. Oh, and speaking of undefeated teams? STEP IT UP SAINTS.

It is still weird for me to think of Brett Favre with the Vikings. He was such an iconic Packers quarterback, and the rivalry between the Packers and the Vikings is so, so, so strong, that it’s so hard to see his playing for the Vikings as much beyond a slap in the face to Green Bay. It shouldn’t bother me this much, but it does. (And next week is the rematch! Yay!) Other player transfers don’t bother me this much. When Terrell Owens left the 49ers, I didn’t care. (Although I don’t care about TO much anyway, except to wish that he’d shut up, go away, and get over himself.) Ricky Williams, one of the highest-profile signings the Saints ever had, is playing for the Dolphins now and currently against the Saints, and this does not bother me at all.

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Today I went to the Robin Hood Pageant. It is essentially a Renaissance Fair that is pretending to be in the 13th century. It was awesome. Re-enactment festivals like this are places where, in order to get any kind of enjoyment out of it, you can’t take it or yourself too seriously. Also, it’s nice to see things marginally connected to the things I’ve studied, and think “Right, maybe all my education and knowledge isn’t TOTALLY useless.”

All the performances were, of course, Robin Hood based. The jousting performances were Robin and the band against the Sheriff and Guy (who did not look like Richard Armitage, but was blond like the guy from the 1980s series and not unattractive). The ‘medieval sports’ for kids purported to be recruitment for Robin’s gang. There was a no-strings puppet show of Robin and the Potter and Robin and the Monk. There was a storyteller, a book-binder, an alchemist, a juggler/fire-eater (who I wasn’t sure about from the description but who turned out to be quite funny). There was also falconry – for performances they use Harris hawks now, and the guy gave some interesting information about how to train birds, and what the different levels of birds were (peasants could fly kestrels, kings could fly goshawks, and everything in between), and the Harris hawks run to flush out the prey and it’s fun(ny) to watch. Wilf, one of the Harris hawks, ate things he wasn’t supposed to eat (such as a bit of a hamburger and chips) and then didn’t catch the ‘rabbit’ that was a demonstration of his hunting abilities. The falconer was kind of worried about him. He (the falconer) also demonstrated a barn owl, which is beautiful with such a big wingspan…..

The jousting was also incredible – it was actual jousting, with horses and blunted lances and a quintain and all. Robin won, of course (the jousting may have been real, but the battles were choreographed, of course), and it was cool to see. I had a bit of a bad moment when the Sheriff was a bit slow (for my taste) getting up afterwards [I …. really don’t like it when they don’t get up] but he did eventually get up and seemed fine.

One of the things that going to this did for me – besides updating my medievalist geek credentials, as if they needed it – was to kind of reassure me that there is a place for me and my interests in the world, even outside of academia. Don’t get me wrong: I still want to do a PhD and do feel like academia/education is the place where I am supposed to be, but it’s nice to know that I am not completely alone in these obsessions, and that there is a place for them, even in an entertainment/niche type venue. (Not that there’s anything wrong with entertainment as a niche. Far from it.)

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Speaking of my medieval geek interests, and entertainment, after writing this the other day, I started a list of medieval poems that I could adapt for television/movie/modern literary versions. I figured that I can’t justifiably complain about them not being there if I’m not willing to at least attempt to do something about it. I’m not going to say ‘it’ll be easy!’ because a) I’m not stupid, b) I’ve never written a screenplay before, but I know how difficult even a bad 30-day novel is, and c) I’m not stupid. But it’s something I think I should try. I watch a lot of TV and movies, and read a lot about the writing process in those media, so I have a basic understanding of how it works. And I know some of these poems almost by heart, so I have more than a basic understanding of the source material to know what can and should be included or not. I think I can do it, or, at least, I think I can try.

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I was going to write a bit about a ‘discussion’ I had with a friend last night about religion that started and ended with him telling me I was going to hell, but almost 1000 words is enough for one night, yes? (If only I could write this much on my fiction! Oh, well….)

This absolutely disturbs me. I don’t have a problem, per se, with a ranking system based on how many students drop out, since I think that is a relatively reasonable indicator of quality. I don’t have a problem with a ranking system based loosely on student satisfaction surveys, with appropriate caveats for personal bias and whatnot. I don’t even have a problem with a ranking system based on results, although that requires some sort of standardization and runs the risk of ‘teaching to the test’. In general, I don’t have a problem with ranking systems for education – with so much choice, there has to be a way to narrow the field a little bit or people get overwhelmed.

Earning potential should not be a part of these ranking systems. I understand that my attitude is born out of an upper-middle-class, privileged background that allows me to think this way, but education should not merely be a means to money. People should study something that they’re interested in, ideally in a program that provides transferable skills. (And employers should recognize these transferable skills, no matter what it says on a person’s certificate or diploma.) If you aren’t learning about something that you’re interested in, if you don’t work at something you enjoy at some level, then all the money in the world doesn’t matter.

Also, future earnings can’t possibly be a secure, reliable factor. Look at how much the economy has changed in the last couple of years, and the last decade. Plus, a qualification is not a guarantee of a job offer, much less a salary band. Certain courses – the ones that list higher potential earnings – will be flooded with people who have only a minimal interest in the subject, which will overload the job market – which right now is overloaded anyway. I see no good reason that is not purely mercenary to include potential earnings on a ranking system.

This is not to say that potential earnings do not have a place when people are making a choice about what to study. Just that they shouldn’t be used in a ranking system, and especially not one linked to funding of courses or – especially – whether or not a course continues to exist, as is implied in the first paragraph of this article.

Also, quango: Originally: an ostensibly non-governmental organization which in practice carries out work for the government. Now chiefly: an administrative body which has a recognized role within the processes of national government, but which is constituted in a way which affords it some independence from government, even though it may receive state funding or support and senior appointments to it may be made by government ministers. [OED]

Soap Operas

Guiding Light, the longest running entertainment program in the US, ended last week after 72 years on radio and TV. I find this kind of sad. I understand that the TV industry is just that, an industry, and it’s driven by costs and ratings, but soap operas and Guiding Light in particular seemed like stalwarts, like they’d never end. Even if other soaps failed (Sunset Beach, Loving/The City, etc.), soaps in general would go on, and Guiding Light would always be there.

I used to be a huge soap opera fan. My mom watched Days of Our Lives and Another World when I was very young – to the point where, when SoapNet started showing old episodes of Another World, things were familiar. My own personal fandom started one vacation, probably summer vacation, when I was in middle school with The Young and the Restless. After a year or so of that, I moved on to Days of Our Lives (I am slightly embarrassed to admit that the possession storyline drew me in, although it’s not what kept me) and Another World for the last year or so of its existence. Then I found out that an elementary school classmate of mine was occasionally an extra on Guiding Light, so I watched that in the hopes of glimpsing her. My roommate sophomore year of college taped Passions and would watch it every evening, and it was a small room so I watched too. Then, the year after I graduated from college, when I had nothing to do in the afternoons, I turned on the TV. I don’t remember what got me hooked on them, but somehow I ended up hooked on All My Children and One Life to Live, with General Hospital thrown in by the end of the year, partially because I was too lazy/distracted to change the channel. Thanks to SoapNet, I rewatched early-to-mid-80s Another World and kept up on all of the above. When I got my computer for Slovakia, my second year, and was investigating the wonderful world of free podcasts, I rediscovered Guiding Light and newly discovered As the World Turns, both of which had audio podcasts of their episodes. If I’m in a TV-watching mood in the US, I still will happily turn on SoapNet. Soaps are the television equivalent of Harlequin romance novels (which I also enjoy, probably more than I ‘should’). They’re formulaic, they’re repetitive, they require attention but not a lot of thought to consume, and every once in a while there’s something that stands out as beautiful or genius or true.

The thing about soaps – and fiction in general – is the story. That’s why I watched, anyway. (That and the hot guys.) Humans are a story-telling animal. That’s why even non-fiction books have to have some kind of narrative structure to them and some kind of character to identify with and care about. If they don’t, it’s like reading the dictionary: informative, but not something that (most) people do cover-to-cover or for fun. I watched (or, that year in Slovakia, listened) because of the story, because of the characters. I wanted to know what happened to these people, and I wanted to know how and why it happened. (And if the story didn’t turn out the way I wanted, John and Natalie on OLTL, then I often drifted away if there wasn’t any other story keeping me hooked.)

The other thing that soaps can provide is history. Guiding Light was on the air for 72 years, and one of the reasons that it survived so long is because of its slow transitions through its history. That’s how most of the soaps that are still on survive. They started with a core group of people – usually a family – and introduced new characters in connection with that family, not in isolation. As the new characters became established, then perhaps the original group would fade out, but not until then. This is one of the problems with soaps today. In a desperate attempt to attract new viewers – especially in the summer when teenagers are out of school – producers throw new, usually teenaged characters at the show in a usually-futile attempt to make something stick. If these newcomers have a connection with established characters, it’s tenuous or very limited – in a new group of five ’16-year-old’ characters, one may be the child of a supercouple, usually a child that we haven’t seen for a while who has now undergone SORAS [Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome] and should really only be about 8 years old if we’re going by real time. (This is also one of the reasons that soap opera mothers can steal their daughters’ boyfriends – at a certain point every character over the age of 21 is portrayed as within about fifteen years in age of each other, unless they are in ‘grandparent’ character in which case they’re allowed to have grey hair but not usually a social life except in certain circumstances.) The year that I lived at home and was watching four or five soaps a day, minimum, I stopped watching consistently during the summer because I was so annoyed by the new teenaged characters that I didn’t know and didn’t care about. (I learned how to use the DVR so that I could fast-forward through storylines like that that I didn’t like.) Most viewers want the consistency of the history of the soap - an acknowledgment of characters and storylines past - and shows ignore that history at their peril.

Another thing that I find wonderful about soaps is the sheer volume. Almost every daytime soap in the US right now is an hour-long daily. There are no repeats. There are times during the year when they don’t air – major sporting tournaments, especially tennis in the summer, for example – but there is no ‘hiatus’ like primetime shows get. A primetime season of 22 episodes is just over a month in daytime soaps. The sheer volume of work that goes on with soaps is absolutely incredible.

There’s a good mental_floss article about soaps and the ending of GL (I figured since I commented about a bad mental_floss article a while ago I should link to one that I enjoyed). I particularly like the slightly snarky comments that undercut the actual good work that soaps do to highlight social and global issues.

Goodbye, Guiding Light. I'll miss you.

Sometimes you need to talk about something else.

Life kind of sucks right now, so I am in avoidance mode so that I am not in constant emotional-wreck mode.

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I was talking online to a friend of mine who is also going through a hard time, and we agreed that one thing that would be helpful when we are going through hard times is to talk about something other than what we are going through. Not ignore the bad things, necessarily, but everyone asks, “How’s it going,” and it’s exhausting to rehash everything over and over, and to dwell on it for too long. So my first message to her today was “I’m here for you if you want to vent/rant/talk about something else entirely.” She appreciated that.

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I have found a way to watch football online. I love football. ‘My’ guys have had a good day, too. By which I mean their names have been mentioned on air. That is exciting for me.

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I finally put up almost all the pictures and things on the walls in my room. It still feels kind of like a dorm room, but I’m sure that once I settle more into the rest of the house, that feeling will ease. I still feel like a student, is part of the problem. Once I get a job of some kind I hope that feeling will fade a little bit.

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Because of the depression/grieving that I’m going through right now, I have all these ideas for ‘things I should do’ (edit the novel, brush up on Latin, write a PhD proposal, etc.) but don’t have the energy or motivation to actually do them. This, of course, adds to my stress and depression. I’m working on it. Job-searching is soul-crushing and I find myself repeatedly refreshing facebook and twitter for about three hours, and then getting annoyed with myself for wasting time. I really should give myself a break. Something will turn up. It always does, somehow.

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Depression/grieving is also exhausting. Even when I haven’t been crying, my eyes feel like I have. Being around other people helps, most of the time, but I can’t count on that for the however many hours I’m awake during the day. I’ve got people-oriented things I can do this next week, at least.

The perfect end to a perfect day

I am not having a good day. I mean, my problems are nothing in the grand scheme of things - many people have it much worse, and even many people I know have it much worse - and they're not even problems as much as 'things-I'm-having-trouble-dealing-with-right-now', but still. Not a good day. I missed out on a job opportunity (I heard about the job on Saturday and probably should have gone in Sunday or Monday, but didn’t, and today it was gone and I got looked at like a crazy person for even asking about it), I’m stressed about various things (including an unexpected casual communication from an ex-love-of-my-life on Monday – not necessarily stressful in itself, but definitely mentally and emotionally confusing), and my grandfather is 91 years old and in imminently failing health. I actually had to lock myself in a bathroom stall at the mall and cry because it was either that or cry in the middle of Market Square. And I don’t cry in public anymore, if I can possibly avoid it. [Actually, I don’t cry anymore if I can possibly avoid it. The last two months have been anomalous.] It’s been full-out tears today, too, not just the deep, shuddering, no-tears sobs that plagued me during the dissertation and concurrent romantic woes.

And then, on Skype, I get this:

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Hello [my name],

I have been in search of someone with this last name "[MY NAME]", so when I saw your name I was pushed to contact you and see how best we can assist each other. I am Mr. A. Opeyemi, a Banker here in GHANA. I believe it is the wish of God for me to come across you on skype now. I am having an important business discussion I wish to share with you which I believe will interest you because, it is in connection with your last name and you are going to benefit from it.

One Late Shafi C. [MY NAME], a citizen of your country had a fixed deposit with my bank in 2004 for 36 calendar months, valued at US$12,500,000.00 (Twelve Million, Five Hundred Thousand US Dollars) the due date for this deposit contract was the 16th of January 2007. Sadly Shafi was among the death victims in the May 26 2006 Earthquake disaster in Jawa, Indonesia that killed over 5,000 people. He was in Indonesia on a business trip and that was how he met his end. My bank management is yet to know about his death, I knew about it because he was my friend and I am his account officer. Shafi did not mention any Next of Kin/ Heir when the account was opened, and he Shafi was not married and no children. Last week my Bank Management requested that I should give instructions on what to do about his funds, if to renew the contract. I know this will happen and that is why I have been looking for a means to handle the situation, because if my Bank Directors happens to know that Shafi is dead and do not have any Heir, they will take the funds for their personal use, so I don't want such to happen. That was why when I saw your last name I was happy and I am now seeking your co-operation to present you as Next of Kin/ Heir to the account, since you have the same last name with him and my bank head quarters will release the account to you.

There is no risk involved; the transaction will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you and I from any breach of law. It is better that we claim the money, than allowing the Bank Directors to take it, they are rich already. I am not a greedy person, so I am suggesting we share the funds equal, 50/50% to both parties, my share will assist me to start my own company which has been my dream.

Let me know your mind on this and please do treat this information as TOP SECRET and DO NOT respond to this on skype for same security reason. I have more to write you about the details once I receive your urgent response strictly through my personal Email address: [redacted] We can as well discuss this on phone: [redacted]

Have a nice day and God bless.

Anticipating your communication.

Seriously? Dude, if I had more mental energy right now, I’d try to do something like this.* But I don’t, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just mock them and their obvious find-and-replace/mail-merge style, their TOP SECRET warning, their poor English (although it’s better than most), and the idea that the man died two and half years ago and it’s only now occurring to this guy to steal the money.

Also, I’m changing my Skype privacy settings – which I probably should have done ages ago seeing as I do get any number of random flirtations on Skype (note: starting a conversation with me, a stranger, with a beer stein icon is going to get you ignored and/or blocked immediately. My computer is not a bar, you don’t know me or you wouldn’t start a conversation in that way, go away and leave me alone) but I have had a couple of family members and friends randomly run across me on Skype in the past and I wanted to leave myself open for that. But no more. *shudder*

*even though that makes me miss the friend who introduced me to the site, and remember the circumstances in which he did so, which then makes me start crying again…

Eighteen months to go.....

The dissertation has been turned in; I’m not completely happy with it, to the point where I almost want to apply for a PhD just to have the external motivation to make it better, but it has been turned in and there’s nothing I can do now but wait and hope that I haven’t disappointed my supervisor and second reader.

Today (September 12) marks eighteen months until my thirtieth birthday. In some notebook somewhere I have a list of ‘things I want to have accomplished before I turn 30’. I should find that list. I know one of the things on it is ‘make a decision about a PhD’….so I give myself eighteen months to decide. Another thing I know was on the list was ‘get the novel into publishable form’. So I have eighteen months to get that done, too. I can’t remember what else was on there, other than ‘be or have been in a long-term relationship’ which is not something I can control in the same way…

What else should be on my list?

Another whiny dithering about the end of days

My facebook status right now reads, “Kendra must stop thinking about what could-have-been and focus on what was, and is.” This status is applicable to two different parts of my life right now: my love life (already discussed, at length, and I’m trying not to think about it too much) and my dissertation/academic life.

I realize, when I can think about it objectively, that yes, studying English literature is what makes me happiest, and that if I’d studied math or chemistry instead I would be having these same doubts, but about literature. And one of the reasons that I know this is my dissertation.

I have been reading about this topic (the role of musicians in Middle English poetry) continually since the end of May. I have been reading about it in general since the end of March, when I was writing my proposal, but it has been my main academic focus since the end of May. And I’m not tired of it yet.

There are still so many things that I want to research more and write more about: the symbolism of the harp in Sir Orfeo, the Christian explanations of the various texts, the background and specifics of Middle English romance and minstrel society, the responsibilities of good kings, Richard the Lionheart (and Richard Coeur de Lion), oral transmission and how that did or did not affect (or effect) the stories, and so on. I am not ready to be done with this dissertation. Not because I don’t think it’s ready (although it’s not, even though it has to be), but because I feel like there’s so much more I can do with the topic.

Is that a sign that I really should be pursuing a PhD? That I should start saving now, and work on writing and revising a research proposal? I would just like someone to tell me what to do, and where to start to do it. I clearly don’t have a sense in my own mind. The possibilities are too open for me: I could do anything (within reason) and therefore I can’t do anything.

The end of days

You can tell that the end of my MA degree is approaching, and that I am starting to get nervous about what's next in my life by the growing appeal that the following things have for me:

1. Getting a PhD [It's not that expensive! It's just three more years! So....120,000 more dollars that I would be in debt!].
2. Moving back to the US [I wouldn't have to deal with visa stuff! It would be fine! I could find a job at a company that would send me back overseas and deal with the visas for me!]
3. Moving back to the US to get a PhD [see above....and then I could get a lecturing position over here somewhere!]
4. Joining a dating service to find a Brit who will marry me and keep me in the country forever.

Seriously. None of these things are valid options for me at this point. They're just ways of putting off what I really want to do.

Once I figure out what that is, of course. Other than 'stay in the UK forever'.

I have a Plan. I found out some things earlier today that make me question the feasibility of the Plan, but at the moment, it is a three-year Plan. Year One (this year): work doing whatever I can, to get UK school time, work experience, savings, and build up some income history, just in case. Year Two: Graduate Teacher Program (this is what is causing me some worry....I need to send out some emails next week). Year Three: NQT year. Or other work if necessary. Once the three-year Plan is complete, my sister will have enough experience (hopefully) that she will also be able to move to the UK and get a job, as will my best friend and her best friend. Then the four of us move to London and all get jobs there.

If the Year Two part of the Plan fails me, then I get another job, somehow, that either gives me enough income to stay in the country on a long-term work visa or sponsorship to stay in the country on a long-term work visa or whatever else I need to do to stay in the country on a long-term work visa.

And if not, then I join a dating service and meet a Brit who will marry me and keep me in the country forever.

Poetry day!

In the hypothetical world in which I get married, one of the songs I will have at the reception is The Beatles’ Here, There and Everywhere off the Revolver album. I firmly believe that this is one of the most romantic songs of all time. (I don’t know what copyright restrictions there are about posting complete poems and lyrics and things, so I’m not going to risk it. I got the lyrics from here.)


Let’s start with the very first line:
To lead a better life, I need my love to be here
Now, I am not advocating obsessive and possessive behavior, but I do believe that having a happy relationship/being a happy person will help you lead a better life. It’s like the line from whatever movie: “You make me want to be a better man.” [As Good As It Gets? I don’t know, I just know the line from previews/commercials/etc.] Love should make you want to lead a better life; it should give you the emotional security to be able to do so.

A few lines later:
Nobody can deny that there’s something there.
True happiness is radiant. The best couples that I know have almost visible chemistry together. Friends and strangers alike look at them and know that they are, or should be, together.

Both of us thinking how good it could be.
The best couples that I know are partnerships. Both parts of the couple are invested in the relationship, and involved in the relationship to a similar level. If one person is more ‘in love’ than the other, the relationship is unbalanced, which doesn’t bode well. This line implies that the relationship in the song is equal. They’re both thinking how good it could be – the singer (he, from now on, because it’s The Beatles) isn’t just longing for someone he can’t have.

Same with the next line:
Someone is speaking but she doesn’t know he’s there.
This also shows the girl having an active part of the relationship – she’s just as interested in and captivated by the singer as he is by her. And I’ve totally been in that situation, where I’m with someone I’m interested in and completely forget that there are other people around. It’s a lovely feeling, especially when it’s mutual: when neither of you notice that you're surrounded by other people. *sigh*

Knowing that love is to share
Each one believing that love never dies
More proof that this is not a one-sided, unrequited relationship. This is a relationship that at least has the potential to last a lifetime. This is not a fling, where you expect it to end; this is an actual relationship with all the possibilities that involves.

Every line is like this; the lyrics are perfect. Almost every word either points to the equality of the relationship or the depth of their feelings. They show a couple that is equally dedicated to each other, not just unrequited infatuation like so many ‘romantic’ songs. And the melody is sweet and relatively simple. It’s soft and slow and singable. What better song to play at a (fictional) wedding reception, a celebration of love and partnership and the future?

My weekend getaway

Saturday afternoon I went down to London for a brief weekend getaway. There were two plans for the weekend: see the production of Arcadia on Saturday night, and go salsa dancing on Sunday night. Everything else was incidental.

I got in uneventfully, checked into the hostel relatively uneventfully although there were some problems with the specifics of which bed I was in, and then went out for a shop/wander. My hostel was literally right up the street from the salsa club for Sunday night, so that worked out nicely for me.

I went to Waterstone’s Piccadilly, because it calms me and because I wanted to check prices on a few things and because what else am I going to do at 5:30 on a Saturday night in London? I restrained myself from buying any more books. I can’t buy any more books until I have an income of some kind. Then I bought some food from the Tesco Express at Trafalgar Square and sat on the grass outside the National Gallery and ate and read and people-watched. Trafalgar Square was packed – not only is the plinth project still going on – although I still find it more interesting as a web feed – but there were also some acrobatics/break-dancing/magic performances going on. There were also a few protests – I saw one guy in a Polska shirt making what I assume will be a YouTube video about the political situation in Iran, and there were some Falun Gong supporters handing out leaflets just past St. Martin-in-the-Fields. I felt a little bit guilty brushing them off, but one person can only care about a certain number of causes before exhausting themselves, and I’d rather support someone I actually know.

I wrote about the performance of Arcadia here. Suffice to say, it deserves every good word that it has gotten, and I have a few new actor crushes.

Back at the hostel, I remembered why I don’t look for hostels first when planning weekends like this one. You can’t beat the price, and when all you need is a bed for the night, it’s fine – but everyone is so young: they’re on a gap year, or just spontaneously travelling, and if they’re not a current student then they’re ‘actually a college grad!’ as one girl smugly said. I know I was the same way when I was 20, 21, 22, 23 – and to some extent still am. Doesn’t mean I can’t mock it when I see it.

I tried to sleep in Sunday morning, since I knew I would be staying up incredibly late. I made it to 9 o’clock, which is not really sleeping in when you don’t go to sleep until 1 or 2 am and are planning on staying up until 6. I had seen a poster on the Tube for an exhibit at the Wellcome Collection about ‘Exquisite Bodies’ – mostly anatomical models: it looked interesting, and I’d never been, so I decided to see if I could find it. The Wellcome Collection is near Euston, so it wasn’t a horribly long walk (I was staying near King’s Cross), and I picked up some food at the train station to have for lunch. The museum was fantastic. The special exhibit was indeed full of anatomical models, quite a lot of which featured pregnancy which reinforced my “ADOPTION!!!!” belief. The rest of the museum was also quite interesting – exhibits from Wellcome’s own collection, one case of which made me want to research and write about death rituals across cultures/time periods. Somehow I wasn’t quite as fascinated by the collection of amputation saws and obstetrical forceps. Then there was a section on different aspects of research that they do – I found the genome stuff quite interesting, malaria less so, but that’s just my personal interests and research. Each section – there were four, I think? Human Genome Project, malaria, obesity, and the body/health – had an area of artistic representation (sculpture, painting, writing, etc.) connected to it. There was one print in the genome section called Twenty Three Pairs by an artist called Andrea Duncan, where she represented the 23 human chromosomes as socks, which I thought was very cool, and a poem in that same section called “To John Donne” that I liked a lot as well. (I should do a Poetry Day again….any suggestions?) Anyway, the point is that if you want a different museum to go to in London – not that there’s any lack of them – The Wellcome Collection is very cool and well-done. Interactive parts that aren’t just for children, as well, which is nice…..

Then I ate my lunch in Green Park and tried to decide what to do next. I ended up walking around the shopping areas, including a browse through Carnaby Street and a return to Waterstone’s Piccadilly where I unexpectedly found out what my absolutely least favourite teacher of all time is doing now. At this point it was mid-afternoon, and I still had several hours before I was meeting people for dancing, so I went to the V&A – my original thought was to go to one of the Proms Concert Music series, but I didn’t want to spend more money than I had to and didn’t want to have to deal with a schedule and whatnot. I may come down some other time in the next few weeks specifically to do one of the Proms. So I went to the V&A instead, and admired the plaster casts of the Plantaganet tombs. Fontevrault is so on my list-of-places-to-visit someday.

There’s not a lot else to do on a Sunday afternoon for an hour or so before meeting people, especially when you’re wandering by yourself, so I went back to the hostel and packed up my stuff and put it in a place that I could grab it easily when I came back in the morning (a good thing as it turned out, since due to the aforementioned confusion over beds, when I came back this morning there was someone sleeping in the bed that I would have collapsed on. But as it was 7am already, and my stuff was all ready to go, I didn’t care so much). Then I wandered through the Russell Square area, talked to my sister (and drained my cellphone battery, oops), and reminisced about early visits to London.

Met my fellow dancers with no major problems, and went to a weekly salsa event that, as it turns out, is at the hotel that we stayed at one of the first times we were in London. Danced, danced, danced….then went to find food which is not easy to do at 10:30 on a Sunday night. We ended up getting a takeaway and eating it in the waiting area of King’s Cross. We also did some impromptu salsa and rueda in the waiting area of King’s Cross, to the amusement of the night staff and people waiting for the last trains. Finally – after about two hours of eating, everyone else drinking and trying to find ways to put off going to the big salsa club, we made it to our – well, my – main destination. Where we stayed until 6 am. There was never a point where I wanted a dance and had to go more than a song to be asked to dance. But, then, some of the fun for me at major salsa events is watching everyone else and admiring how good they are. But still – lots of dancing, lots of new people whose names I’m either never going to remember or never knew in the first place (and a very few for whom that is a Good Thing – my creepy-guy-repellent WAS NOT WORKING. Grinding is not salsa. Grabbing my arse is not an appropriate salsa hold. And kissing my ear before you’ve even made eye contact, without saying a word, IS NEVER OKAY. SHUDDER.) But anyway, I got lots of good dances, some with people that I knew and most with people that I didn’t, and the only dark spot (other than the creepy guys) was the total vanishing of the friend that we’d gone there to meet, sometime during the last song. I hate incomplete evenings like that, without even a chance to say goodbye.

The crew of us that had gone together then went to McDonald’s to fortify for the rest of the day – they were all going to Notting Hill Carnival, but I knew that I would just freak out if I went, so I instead caught the first train back to Nottingham (thank goodness for bank holidays and no off-peak restrictions) where I came home, charged my phone, checked facebook, and slept for a whole three hours. I’m surprised I’m not more tired now, actually. I think I may be able to make it to midnight fairly coherently.

And then it’s back to work for me. I only have a week to whip the dissertation into shape, but after the getaway it’s all seeming more manageable.

Fear of Commitment, continued

"Calling All Cynics"

This is, I feel, a good definition of skeptic, cynic, and pessimist. It’s like the definition I heard or read once for introvert vs. extrovert – I can’t remember where I heard or read it, but I have completely adopted it – where an extrovert is someone who recharges by being around other people and an introvert recharges by being alone. With that definition, I am definitely an introvert. I need to be around other people sometimes, or I go stir-crazy, but being around especially large groups of people definitely drains me.

I feel the same way about the definitions given here, especially when it comes to me and love. I think I’m somewhere between a skeptic and a cynic. I trusted, and was betrayed/let down, and it was devastating. I was devastated. By that criteria, I’m a cynic. But I don’t think that I refuse to trust now. I am reluctant to trust, definitely, but I don’t think I completely refuse to trust. There are people I have met recently that I trust.

But then I think about how I was with my last ‘boyfriend’ – I was and am still totally crazy about him, and wish we hadn’t had to end things, and am going to miss him terribly when he finally leaves town. But I deliberately told myself I wasn’t going to fall in love with him. I wouldn’t let myself – even in my own head – use those terms. I like him a lot, and there’s no one else I’d rather spend time with right now, and talking to him in any form makes me happy, and seeing him (especially dance) with other women makes me insanely jealous to the point where I feel physically ill. But I won’t let myself, even in the privacy of my own head, say that I’m in love with him. Whenever I started coming close to that idea, I would remind myself of the reasons that it would never work long-term, or I would force myself into an emotional or communication distance – deliberately so that I wouldn’t get too close to him and fall in love. So, yeah, I suppose that, with him, I refuse to trust. I suppose that I am, when it comes to relationships, a cynic.

This also plays into my previous post about what-ifs. What if I’d let myself get closer to him and fall in love with him – or admit it, at least – and just let myself go all-out emotionally, the way I did with CD? Would things be different now? Would we have been willing to at least attempt a long-distance relationship? Or would I just be devastated again, and have lost him from my life completely? Obviously, there’s no way of knowing, but I can’t stop myself from dwelling on it.

It’s like the article says, “Deep inside all skeptics and most cynics is a deep ache to trust again, but to do so without the fear of being let down, disappointed, betrayed or devastated.” I doubt that he reads this blog, or even knows that it exists, but I almost wish that he did. I wish I could say these things to him, but I can’t. I don’t trust him – or really myself – enough to think that it would make a difference. The cynic in me can’t believe that it would make any difference. Even though deep inside I want to be proven wrong, I want to have that chance, I can’t and won’t let myself take that emotional risk. And I will be stuck with these what-ifs forever.

Fear of commitment

I apparently have a fear of commitment. I can't make decisions about my life and stick with them. I am constantly wondering, "But what if I did this instead?" or putting off decisions until it's too late to do anything about it.

My latest thing is getting a Ph.D. For years I just assumed that I'd get a Ph.D. eventually. I am good at academics, my parents work in academia, etc., etc. This fall when the application deadline was approaching, I passed on it. I had just barely started the Master's - at least that's what it felt like - and had no idea what area I wanted to work in. Since part of the application process here is a research proposal, and I had none, I passed. After the essays in May - a completely emotionally and mentally draining experience - I told myself that I'd clearly made the right decision, that I couldn't possibly spend the next three years putting myself through that.

Then I started work on the master's dissertation. And the closer I get to the end of it - *insert panic here* - the more I realize how much I enjoy it. The more I can see myself doing something similar, long-term. The more I wish I were going on to do a Ph.D. And I don't know if that's just because I'm nervous about 'what comes next' - the whole job search thing especially - or what. But the thing is, I still enjoy my topic. I'm a little bit bored, because other than the dissertation there's not a lot going on in my life, but I still enjoy my topic. I enjoy finding new things to read about it and I even enjoy the frustration of the writing, trying to figure out what exactly to say and how exactly to say it. (Maybe it's also a sign that non-fiction writing is something I should pursue more intensively than I have been doing....)

I also have been going back and forth about the job search. Obviously I am here in Nottingham for the next while, due to leasing a house here and things like that. And there are really good reasons to stay in this area. But as I look at the job listings, I can't help but be tempted by many other places. I'm almost paralysed by choice. I find myself rationalising looking for jobs in Birmingham and London especially - it's not that far by train, etc. - even though I know all the reasons why I am staying here, and should just stick with it.

I can't escape what-ifs. How would my life be different if I did - or had done - this? What if I'd done something differently in my relationship - would things be different now? What if I found a job in London - would I be happier? What if I decided to pursue a Ph.D. - how would that change my life? I need to find focus.

My dad's visit

My dad came to visit at the beginning of August. It was lovely. We rented a car and were able to go around any number of places that I couldn't or wouldn't have gotten to on my own; we also spent some time just hanging out and trying to understand cricket.

Note: I still do not understand cricket. I understand it a little bit more now than I used to, but I think I need one or both of two things: 1 - to attend a live test match. 2 - a specific player to watch/follow through a game/series.

One of the nice things about my dad being here, and taking me around places, is that it reminds me of some of the things I like about this area of the country: the history. London is the obvious place for history, of course, and god knows I love going to London and going to the museums and turning a corner and seeing, say, the pub that Chaucer frequented (it's in Southwark) or Dickens (it's in the City and is actually quite dark inside) or whatever.

History in the Midlands, at least the history that is packaged for tourists, is much more of the 'normal people' form of history, where 'normal people' often means 'noble people who were active outside of London'. Pre-Industrial Revolution sites are stately homes of landed gentry, not usually royal (there are exceptions); post-Industrial Revolution sites are, you know, focused on the Industrial Revolution and its effects including the rise of the merchant/middle/industrialist class.

Dad suggested going to Newstead Abbey, but I have been there twice in the last ten years, and have less than no desire to go back. The Romantic poets tend to annoy me and I can't stand Byron as a personality. Instead, to satisfy the literary pilgrimage portion of the trip, we went to Eastwood. It made for a nice afternoon trip - we went to the main museum which also had quite a lot of information about mining in the area and daily life for the working class at the time, as well as Lawrence's life, and we went to the birthplace museum, in the house that Lawrence was actually born in. I quite like Lawrence, actually, and think that his writing often gets overshadowed by either the more 'experimental' modernist authors like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or people like that, or by the obscenity trial about Lady Chatterley's Lover. I really liked Lady Chatterley's Lover. I liked the writing style of Sons and Lovers, although I found the central relationship between Paul and his mother incredibly creepy. I also want to read Women in Love, but haven't gotten to it yet.

We also took a day and drove up to Gainsborough Old Hall. That was fantastic. We found out when we got up there that Gainsborough has a claim to be the place where King Canute 'tried' to stop the tide, so that's really cool in and of itself. The Old Hall, although smaller than other manor houses we've been to and completely surrounded by the town now, is a fantastic museum. The kitchen and banqueting hall area is set up as it would have been in the late fifteenth century, when Richard III visited, and the kitchen especially shows what a working medieval kitchen would have been like. The audio tour gets a touch long at times, but is informative without being boring. Gainsborough Old Hall was also a safe place for the Puritans/'Pilgrim Fathers' before the Dutch exile and journey to America. I can imagine that they do quite a lot there with living history/reenactment events - it's a perfect place for it.

Over the weekend that he was here, we did things slightly closer to home. First we went to Sudbury Hall. The Hall itself is fine - nice, but nothing really extraordinary. The Museum of Childhood, on the other hand, is amazing. A nice mix of display and interactive - including a 'chimney' that kids can climb through to see what it would have been like for chimney sweeps, a Victorian classroom, and a room on storytelling/books/imaginative play. It was a blast. We were there with my godmother and her granddaughters, and another family friend with her husband and mother-in-law. The girls loved the Museum of Childhood, even the older one who's fourteen. (She and I had a lovely squee-ing discussion at the Doctor Who exhibit that was part of the 'pop culture'/'collectibles' exhibit.) The eight-year-old was in heaven. She went through the chimney about ten times. There's also a lake on the estate, with about two dozen swans that we counted, so we got some relaxing "be in nature" time in as well. The other nice thing is that, no matter what, days at my godmother's are always full days with my godmother. If she comes in to Nottingham, then it's lunch and maybe an hour or two of shopping. If I go there, it's "Oh, no, we'd better drive you back because it's after dark now."

The Sunday my dad was here, we went to Chatsworth House. It's one of our favourite places to go - in fact, I had begged off a trip with some friends the week or so before because I knew that my dad would want to go. Chatsworth is so beautiful. The house is currently undergoing quite a bit of restoration, but is still open to visitors, and they have an exhibit inside called "Chatsworth at the Movies" or something like that. Obviously one of their main film connections is The Duchess, but there's also Pride and Prejudice, where Chatsworth is both the interior and the exterior for Pemberley (as it may have been for Austen herself), and an upcoming movie called The Wolfman which I don't really want to see, but might since it features Chatsworth. (...what? That's normal.)

Chatsworth was also hosting a Jaguar car show that day. It was an incredible, welcome coincidence, because car shows are one of the things that my dad and I do together when we can, and we both appreciate Jaguars greatly. It was nice. I miss cars sometimes.

We also wandered through the grounds. Gave up on the maze - we know there's a way in, because we could hear people in the center. We just couldn't figure it out. We wandered around the gardens for a while, just enjoying the views and the fresh air and the fountains and the beauty of the area. I even took a few pictures, which is quite rare for me.

We'd rented a car, as I said, and a GPS system to go with it, because driving on the other side of the road is difficult enough without also having to figure out how exactly to get places. The only time the GPS was a problem was in Gainsborough, where it told us that the Old Hall was at least half a mile away from where it actually was. On the way back from Chatsworth, we turned off the GPS (it wanted us to take the motorway, and traffic was backed up for miles to get there) and managed to find our own way back. Success!

We also did some Nottingham-touristy stuff: The Galleries of Justice and the Caves, both of which now do dramatised tours although I think I preferred the Caves a few years ago when it was an audio tour setup. Also we learned that there aren't really any cybercafes in Nottingham - one up on Mansfield Road, I think they said, and a few computers at the information centre. That's it - at least, that's all that the information centre told us about. (I wonder if that would be a feasible small business idea, or if there are enough wireless access points around to make it unnecessary?)

While my dad was here, we also spent some time just chilling. I read Silks, by Dick Francis (which I reviewed on my new book blog, where you can also find some comments about literary pilgrimages a la our Eastwood trip), we watched The Ashes, we went to two pub quizzes (my normal monthly PGSA one and a commercially-provided one at the carvery attached to the hotel), and we ate takeaways. All in all, a good trip.

Feeling old

In nineteen months I will be thirty. My mind boggles at this fact. Most days I do not feel that I should be closer to thirty than to twenty-five. I look at how people my age are portrayed in the media (TV shows and movies) and think that I have not accomplished anywhere close to what they are shown to have accomplished, in any aspect of my life. I need to stop comparing myself to fictional characters. (I need to stop comparing myself to real characters, too.)

I still don’t completely know what I want to be when I grow up. Right now I’m trying to get back into teaching, but I have the bad habit of wondering – what if I would be happier doing something else? What if I’m just wasting my time waiting for this stuff to get worked out, when really I should be working toward qualifications in something else? Why can’t I just find something and be content with that?

Last weekend was the sesquicentennial celebration of my hometown, which included an all-school reunion, which included my ten-year high school reunion. I can’t believe that it’s been ten years. I still have vivid memories of high school. A decade cannot have passed when I remember it so clearly.

My life is nothing like I thought it would be ten years ago. When I graduated from high school, I thought that I'd go to Luther, get a job, have a relationship, and it would all work out. I never thought that ten years later, I'd still be floundering and drifting, looking for something to spark off some kind of passion within me.

Will I find that passion before I'm thirty? Before my next reunion? I hope so....

Why I don't want to go back to the US

I am so tired of the looks of disbelief and shock when I say that I don’t want to go back to the States when I finish my MA (or, indeed, ever). So. Tired. It all comes back to my general life frustration with people who can’t quite understand that other people have different motivations and desires than they do. Just because you want to go to the States doesn’t mean that I do. And it doesn’t mean that I am weird, or crazy, or misguided because I don’t.

If I went back to the States, I wouldn’t be able to go back to my hometown. There’s nothing explicitly preventing me from going there, other than the job market. The major employer in my hometown is the University, and it is highly unlikely that I would get a job there. Also, I don’t want to. As much as some people I know complain about the lack of things to do in Nottingham, Nottingham is a hotbed of activity compared to my hometown, and everywhere around my hometown. Therefore, if I wanted to get a job, and have any kind of a social life, I would have to move somewhere else. If I stay here, I can stay in a city that I already know with people that I already know.

It would not be out of the realm of possibility to move to, say, Chicago. However, if I moved anywhere other than Chicago (or a city of similar or larger size), I would have to have a car. There is very little public transportation between cities in the US unless you are on the eastern seaboard. If I lived in Chicago or somewhere similar I could probably manage to survive without a car. Anywhere else, I could not. And if I had a car, I would also have to have little things like car insurance and, probably, a parking permit or a garage. If I stay here, I don’t have to deal with a car. I can get around perfectly well, anywhere in the country, without one.

If I moved back to the States, I would have to find somewhere to live. It is possible that I could find a place with an (unknown) roommate, or a sublet, which would be mildly affordable. I would probably need furniture. It is difficult to find a furnished place to rent in the States. At the moment, I don’t own much furniture. I have a few antique things that I have inherited from various relations, but I don’t have things like a bed and mattress. No matter where I went, I would have to buy them. If I stay here, I can (and have) found a furnished place to live.

If I moved back to the States, I would probably have to live in a city where I don’t know anyone, or at best I would only know one or two people. I would have to form an entirely new social group without any of the constructs that normally help people form an entirely new social group. I am an introvert. This would be exceptionally difficult for me. If I stay here, I can stay near my social group and support network.

If I moved back to the States, I would have to buy health insurance. It is possible that I would be able to get a job with a company that provided health insurance of some kind. Even with company health insurance, health care in the US is expensive. If I stay here, I can still use the NHS.

If I moved back to the States, I would have to find a job. No matter where I am in the world, this is going to be difficult. I have degrees in literature. This qualifies me for essentially nothing. I have teaching experience, but no teaching qualifications. If I were to try to become a teacher in the US, I would have to deal with what I consider one of the most misguided, poorly written, and poorly executed forms of education legislation in No Child Left Behind. I would also have to get teaching qualifications, which would also cost money. If I stay here, even though I need a visa in order to stay, I have figured out what I need to do.

Those are most of the reasons why I don’t want to go back to the States right now. But the most important reason is also the hardest to define. I don’t feel like I fit in the US. I fit here. I feel comfortable here. I feel happy here. I have been happier here than I have been anywhere else in the world. My life makes sense here in a way that it never did in the States, and that it only approached in Slovakia.

I just really wish that people would stop treating my decision to stay here as if it were completely incomprehensible. I have reasons. They are good reasons. They work for me. If I wanted to go back to the States, I would have done so after my job in Slovakia. Why is this so hard for other people to accept?

I have tested my limits, and they are here.

Empirical, non-scientific, totally subjective evidence that my headaches are stress-related: I went for a walk today to try and wake up, etc. My headache decreased the further away from my place that I got and increased when I came home. It’s mostly gone now, although the light-headedness and exhaustion is back.

I have been incredibly stressed for the last week or so, which is where the lightheadedness and exhaustion comes from. It turns out that the amount of stress I can handle before having a minor breakdown is just this much. Unfortunately, the stress hasn’t eased (much) and most of the stressful situations aren’t resolved yet. (Two of them have; at least five are ongoing.)

“Afternoon” is not sufficient detail when making plans with me for the next day. Just something to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is that I hate, hate, hate waiting for people. I get stuck in a state of limbo where I can’t do anything, and then I feel like I’ve wasted time, and then I get angry and frustrated.

I haven’t done much of anything today. I will probably regret that later.

Beating my own path

My facebook status right now reads, “in the middle of things, and can’t quite see the path to the end yet.” It’s a feeling that I have a lot. Sometimes it’s reassuring. I try to tell myself that I’m in the middle of, say, a novel, and the (happy) ending is still coming. Right now it’s just overwhelming.

I’m in the middle of the job search. I have applied to nearly twenty different places (mostly schools, for jobs that don’t require teaching qualifications) but haven’t heard back from anywhere, except for a few acknowledgements that they have received my application. I have several websites that I check every couple of days to try to find more places to apply, but everything I’m finding either has an immediate start or is something I’m not qualified to do yet. I can’t do something with an immediate start, since I’m working on my dissertation this summer and working part-time for the International Office as well. I may have to scale back the job applications – or at least the emotional stress of them – until it gets closer to September and I actually can do something with an immediate start. By then, I may need something with an immediate start. I just hope that the things I’m seeing now are still around then.

I’m in the middle of my dissertation research. Objectively, I have plenty of time. The paper’s not due until September. But if I don’t start writing something, I will lose momentum and get distracted by other aspects of the paper and other things in my life. But I keep running across more things that might be relevant, and take a break to find them and think about reading them. This is a normal stage for me of the paper-researching and paper-writing process. I just need to buckle down and get through it.

I’m in the middle of house-hunting. My housemates and I applied two and a half weeks ago for this house that we had totally fallen in love with. The estate agent said they’d be in touch ‘soon.’ We haven’t heard anything yet. My housemates’ lease is up in a month, and we need something we can move into in about three weeks. Things are getting a touch frustrating.

I’m in the middle of planning and writing a presentation for the International Office on student travel in the UK. This is another thing that I just need to sit down and do. I keep getting distracted by the websites and looking up my own stuff. I don’t have the money or the time for a trip somewhere (other than the ones I have already factored in). It shouldn’t take me too long to write the presentation. I just need to do it.

Any one of these things would be manageable if it were on its own. It's all of them happening at the same time - and all being at approximately the same chaotic stage - that is affecting me right now.

'Twitterature' is coming...

I am of two minds about this (not that anyone’s asked me, or would).

On one hand, it’s kind of intriguing. It’s always a good idea to at least experiment with new forms of production and new types of media. It may be a colossal failure, it may end up being a very short-lived success, or it may end up creating a new format for literature. Japan already has text-message novels, so what’s really the difference between that and Twitter lit? (Twit-lit? I shudder.) Also, the idea of compressing ‘classics’ into a more ‘manageable’ size is not exactly a new one. SparkNotes, Cliff’s Notes, and my personal favourite from a humour/entertainment perspective, Book-a-Minute . Really, this idea doesn’t sound that different from book-a-minute, at least right now.

But it remains to be seen what they’ll do with (or to) the books that they adapt. Is it just going to be plot summaries, in twenty tweets? Is it going to be twenty selected 140-character passages? Because classics aren’t classics merely because of the story they tell. They’re classics because of the way that they tell it. A writer’s style – the way s/he uses words, constructs sentences, lays out the paragraphs on the page, and so on – is so much a part of what makes a book a ‘classic’. Are these students going to maintain the authors’ styles, or is it going to be story reductions only?

When ‘Twitterature’ is released, I expect there will be howls of outrage over people who will read ‘Twitterature’ instead of reading the ‘classics’ that they condense. And there will be plenty of them. Just like there are lots of students who read SparkNotes or Cliff’s Notes or Wikipedia pages about books instead of reading the books that they’re based on, not to mention the people who watch the movie and think that qualifies as knowing the book. People forget that the plot of a book is not the same as the book itself. Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary have the exact same plot, but they’re not the same book. (Persuasion and The Edge of Reason are an even closer connection, plot- and pacing-wise. Still not the same book.)

If ‘Twitterature’ is a way to reduce books while still maintaining a sense of the author’s style, then more power to them. If it becomes a gateway for people to get some exposure to a ‘classic’ and then read the full thing, then again, more power to them. If it is just a quirky way to summarize books that were on a high school reading list, then it’s not nearly as innovative or ambitious as they want it to be.

Interesting things from my RSS feeds the last few days

“At the same time, however, it's hard not to wonder why a government that is confident it won fair and square would authorize police to beat citizens with abandon, shut down opposition headquarters and various news and social networking outlets, and arrest over 100 reformist politicians.” [Huffington Post article about the current situation in Iran]

NPR Monkey See Blog: The Shelf of Constant Reproach
For a long time, I didn’t have a shelf of constant reproach. Almost every book on my bookshelves was a book that I’d read, most of them several times. Now, of course, I have a bit of reproach staring at me. It’s not too bad yet; it’s only been in the last semester that I’ve gotten behind on my reading for pleasure, and I was even able to cull out the books that I knew I wasn’t going to get to and take them to the bookcrossing site on campus.

What I do have is a list of constant reproach. There are so many lists out there of ‘books you should read’ or ‘books that changed the world’ or ‘best books of xxxx’. And I’ve read a lot of them, but not all of them. And some of them I know I won’t read (anything by Joyce or Faulkner…really, anything experimentally modernist) but a lot of them I want to. And then there are all the books that have been published in the last, say, ten or fifteen years that I hear about and want to read. My list of ‘books I want to read’ is so freakishly long, and gets longer every day. I need a better filtering system for it.

APOD
I found this via Twitter. It’s gorgeous. And the archive goes back to 1995! I so do not have enough time these days to go back through it all but what I’ve seen so far is gorgeous.

Music and Emotion
Music and Neuroscience

Living Abroad
HAHAHAHA!!! I win.

Tips for 20-somethings
I still have problems with more than a few of these.

Crazy talk

At what point in a new relationship should romantic history be brought up? And how?

Of course you don’t want to start off a new relationship by comparing it to your previous ones. But past experience informs – sometimes to a large extent – present behavior. And knowledge of someone’s past experience can explain their present behavior – not necessarily excuse it, but make it more understandable. (“Oh, thaaat’s why she does that…. She needs to get over it.”) So telling a new boy/girl friend a bit about your past might be useful for explaining seemingly crazy behavior and getting through those first tenuous weeks/months.

For example, and this is a minor example in my personal arsenal of crazy, when my guy and I go dancing, I tend to watch him and be aware of where he is as much as I can. Part of it is that I really like watching him dance – he’s a good dancer and very fun to watch – but the other night I was watching him and thinking about it and realized that a part of the reason that I watch him so much is because of the time that I was abandoned at a dance by a date who left with someone else. [People who have ever talked to me about my love life may remember this story as “the date who brought a date to our date”.] Obviously that is not the full reason (he’s really fun to watch!) but it is a part of the reason.

And that’s not the only example. I have any number of paranoias – and I say paranoias deliberately because intellectually I know that they are irrational – about relationships. I know exactly where they come from – almost to the day in some cases. I can recognize their effect on my thought patterns and I am sure that they affect my actual behavior to an extent. Being trapped in them, I can’t objectively evaluate their impact on my behavior, but I’m sure it’s there. And I feel like it might help if people involved with me know about these paranoias and the triggers for them, so that they know that I’m not trying to act like a lunatic. I just don’t know what the best way to bring it up would be.

Decision-making

I have problems with decisions. These problems fall into a couple of different categories:

1. Day-to-day decisions such as where/what/when to eat, what to do for fun, et cetera.
2. Life decisions such as where/what/when to study, live, work, et cetera.

Decisions in category 1 are difficult to make because they're not essential, at all. Most of the time I don't have strong opinions on them either way. Pizza instead of Indian? Sure, why not? Eat at home instead of going out? Sure, why not? I don't care either way, 99.9% of the time. I won't be offended by any choice; in fact, I will be happy and content with any choice. When I say, "I don't make decisions" these are the kind of decisions I mean. Usually someone else has much stronger feelings about whatever the situation is than I do, and I'd rather let someone who cares make that decision.

Decisions in category 2 are difficult to make because they are essential. These are the ones I tend to make after long, long, long self-debate. I am usually okay with these decisions, and want them to take effect quickly. (See also: my feelings about my own hypothetical wedding.)

Recently, though, I've been second-guessing my category 2 decisions. I don't question my decision to come to Nottingham, but I question my choice of field of study both here (I should have done linguistics and medieval lit instead of modern lit and medieval lit) and at Luther (I should have done a math, communications, education, or business/finance degree instead of or in addition to my English degree).

I also have a decision to make in the next few weeks that falls into both category 1 and category 2. I have to decide where I want to live and look for a job for this next year. I don't really care where in the UK I live (category 1) - I think I could be happy in either Nottingham or London. London will be better for job availability, but Nottingham is better for cost of living. (There are other factors involved as well, but those won't be determined for a while yet themselves....) However, if I want to stay in Nottingham and share a house with my good friends, I have to decide very soon (category 2). It's a bit nerve-wracking at the moment. I swing back and forth from one to the other on a nearly hourly basis.

It's hard having to make decisions about one part of your future when the decisions about other parts of your future cannot be made yet. It seems a bit backwards in some ways. I wouldn't mind moving to London if I find a good job there. I wouldn't mind staying in Nottingham if I find a good job here. But most of the jobs that I am qualified for that would start at the right time for me (September) aren't being advertised yet. So I have to make a decision before I have all the information to make the decision.

A new try

This last week when I was in Minneapolis, I had a couple of conversations about blogs. I know a few people who have blogs, but who don’t update very often (like me), and we talked about how we get writer’s block, basically, about being profound and/or witty and that keeps us from posting anything. (We also talked about how we essentially write blog posts in our heads, and then by the time we sit down at the computer, we don’t feel the necessity of typing it all out because we’ve already dealt with whatever it was by writing it in our heads.) However, I find that the blogs that I enjoy reading the most are not necessarily the witty or profound ones, but the ones that present snapshots of daily life. And yet I can’t bring myself to write about “what I did today” most of the time. I’d like to change that, so today I present for you: what I did today.

I’m still trying to get over jetlag and get back on a normal sleeping schedule. It’s going better than it did in January, probably because I’m actually trying now. I still didn’t fall asleep until 3am yesterday. I had my alarm set for 9:30, so that I could get up and run some errands in the morning. Yeah, that didn’t so much happen. But I was up and showered before noon, so that’s a sort of progress, I suppose.

I walked into Beeston to the stationer’s so that I could get a plastic organizer box for my kitchen cupboard (perfect size for the Easy Mac and microwave Hamburger Helper packets that I brought back from the States) and an expanding file for things like bank statements in a probably futile attempt to keep myself organized. We’ll see how well that works. I’m trying to treat this summer term as a sort of reset for me, organization/work –wise. I am hopeful that my dissertation will be a little bit easier than this last essay writing session because of it. Hey, there’s always hope. The expanding file was the last main thing I needed to finish my room clean-up/organization of yesterday. There’s still a few little things, but that was the main thing. I still need to redo my makeup drawer and sort my books. (The Arts Graduate Centre on campus is now an official bookcrossing point, so any of the books that I have that I know I’m not going to get around to reading or don’t want anymore might as well go there.)

Then this afternoon I met a friend for a wander. She’s headed back to the States for her Ph.D. in less than a month, so we’re running out of time that we can spend together. We walked around Wollaton Park – the first time in years I’ve been in the park and the first time I’ve ever really walked around it. We went into the house, too - another first for me. I wouldn’t mind going back sometime (especially since it’s free). Then we came back here and transferred files - I have some movies on my hard drive that she wanted, and vice versa.

By the time I got back inside after walking her to the exit(where I live is kind of a maze, and all the buildings look alike), my flatmates had gotten the TV in our kitchen working for the first time since January. So I actually made some dinner and ate in the kitchen with my flatmates for once. It was good, but our kitchen is really too small to make that feasible for very long. Other than that, I’ve just been overly checking the internet (as usual) and watching American sitcoms on E4.