Thinking about the future

I’ve been reading through the Wordpress.com Post-a-day prompts, and I have noticed that there is some repetition. This isn’t totally surprising, as it would be very difficult to come up with 365 completely unique post ideas. It is often said that there are no truly original ideas - just adaptations and original ways of portraying them - and that is what I’ve noticed among these prompts. It also helps that the vaguely repetitive ideas are spaced out quite a lot, so, if you were doing these prompts in a timely manner, you might not notice. Certainly there’s possibility for wide variation in the treatment of the prompts: later prompts about protesting, for example, pull in reactions to the Occupy movement where earlier ones might be less specific and more philosophical.

One of the trends I noticed among the prompts is thinking about the future.  Write a letter to yourself to be read in a year. Or ten years. Where do you want to be in ten years. Come up with a bucket list. Or a list of life goals. Is 2011 anything like you’d thought it would be in 2001, and what do you think 2021 will be like.

I sometimes think about doing these prompts, but I run into problems. I write a bucket list, but then realise that there’s nothing preventing me from accomplishing some of these things apart from spending my time writing a bucket list (or surfing the internet or watching TV) instead of getting started on things like learning Japanese/French/Arabic or revising my novel. I have a list of books I want to read, and there’s nothing actively preventing me from reading them except my own relative apathy and procrastination.

The other problem I have is just thinking about the future. I learned very quickly that the future rarely turns out like you expect it to. I certainly didn’t expect to end up in Slovakia. I didn’t expect that the only full-time work I’d be able to find with a Master’s degree would be as a barista. I didn’t expect to find Jon. It’s good to have goals, of course, but I have found that setting those goals too far in the future almost guarantees that something will come up to change them.

I can’t think about the future. At this point, I can’t see past February, when my current visa runs out. (Goal for today: at least one job application and compiling the paperwork for the next visa.) I can’t even fathom what my 31st birthday will be like. I certainly can’t think as far ahead as 2021. Will we be married? Have kids? Still be in Nottingham? Still working? I have no idea. It’s completely dark to me. And this isn’t a depression-based thing, either - I don’t think that I’ll be dead or anything. I just don’t have an image for what it will be.

I have goals, of course. I want to stay in the UK, get a non-minimum-wage job, stay with Jon. But those are all either short-term or continual goals, not ticks on a long-term list.

Ponderings

I just started reading Bess of Hardwick by Mary S. Lovell. It’s been on my TBR list for literally years, and last year I picked up a copy at Oxfam, and now I’m finally getting to it.

One problem I have, as a confirmed book addict, is that everything I read makes me want to read more. Reading Blink, which I finished this afternoon, made me want to read The Tipping Point and other sociological/psychological things. But Bess is insidious. Even after just reading the introduction, I want to read a ton of stuff.

None of it’s really related to the Tudors, though – they’re a little bit out of my period. No, what the introduction to Bess did is make me want to get back to my own research: music in Middle English literature. I have over 200 articles and many, many poems saved on their own hard drive, just waiting for my attention. And they’re always at the back of my mind, but what the introduction to Bess has done is bring them to the front.

Blink aided and abetted this as well, with all its talk of experts being able to hone their snap judgment ability. I found myself wanting to be an expert in something – and what am I an expert in? Middle English poetry and its connection to music. I also had lunch today with a PhD-student friend of mine, and that helped the motivation as well.

I have been telling myself that I will keep collecting and reading articles and poems (thank goodness for TEAMS) so that when I am financially able to do a PhD, I won’t be completely out of the loop. Maybe it’s time that I make a dedicated study plan and actually do it.

Entering my 30th year

364 days to get my “before I’m 30” list done. And instead of doing anything productive on the list, I’m lying on the couch, ill, and watching DVDs. It’s really not that different from what I do during the day, except that I’m slightly feverish and coughing, and therefore allowing myself not to feel guilty about not working on my books and stories. I’m also allowing myself to stay inside all day – normally I force myself outside at least once a day. I did answer the door earlier, so that counts as my fresh air for the day. It’s really too bad, because it was beautiful and warm today. But I am staying in bed until I am well, or at least better.

Overall, it was a pretty good birthday. Apart from the being ill thing, of course. I got lots of birthday wishes on facebook. Some were expected, some were unexpected. All were welcome. I had nice long conversations with some people and watched The Princess Bride with my housemates, who’d never seen it.

The best part about my birthday was that I hadn’t really missed out on any celebrations. My housemates and I all have birthdays within about six weeks of each other, and this year our combined ages add up to 100. So last weekend we had a joint birthday party for the four of us. The theme was 100 Years Under the Sea, because of our birthdays and the Dolphin Paradise. Of course, being a party that my housemate planned, it was a costume/fancy dress party. I just wore a pretty dress and called myself a water nymph. Among the others were a mermaid (housemate), the Titanic (housemate), a scuba diver (friend, won prize for best costume), a mob informer (friend), a sailor (friend), and a disguised merman (friend, won prize for best excuse). It was a great party. Some people got very drunk (not me, I don’t drink to excess anymore if I can avoid it), and I stayed up until half past five talking to one of my housemates. (This is one of the reasons that I am sick.)

Looking back on the last year, it’s been very eventful. I got an MA, I had a fairly active social life, I moved house (from the dorms to an actual house), I had a minor breakdown and actually sought help for it (and got help for it, also unusual), I went back to the States for whirlwind events (my sister’s M.Ed. and my grandfather’s funeral), I won a short story contest, and I continued my almost decade-long quarter-life crisis. I still don’t know what I want to be “when I grow up”, at least not what I want to do to make a living. I still want to write, I still do write, but I need something to keep paying the bills, and teaching is on hold until I get myself mentally stable again.

And I have 364 days to finish my list.

Are you a megalosaurus?

Today has been a book day for me. I am slowly making my way through my saved items on Google Reader, and this morning I read through some of the book items. Most of them were book reviews (there's a biography of Chopin that looks interesting; the new Elizabeth Kostova got panned).

The topic of interest over the last few months, and especially yesterday, has been e-readers. Yesterday, as everyone who has turned on a computer probably knows, Apple revealed the iPad. And most of the immediate online reaction has been to the name. (What hasn't been to the name has been "So....it's a bigger iPhone. That's not a phone.") Personally, I'm a little disappointed that Apple didn't go with iTablet or iSlate - I especially liked iSlate, and I think that iPad is too similar to iPod to really distinguish it effectively. But, really, couldn't they have foreseen the jokes? The jokes that I've seen are mostly feminine-product-related (the iPad will come in Mini, Regular, and Maxi, etc.) with a few Star Trek (iPadd, Paramount should sue) ones thrown in. But, like I said to a friend online, in a few weeks the name will be normal and worth nothing more than a wry smile (if that). So if you're going to mock it, do it now.

I also sought out a new second-hand bookstore today; I'd heard about it on Tuesday when I was volunteering at Oxfam. It's just up the street from the town square, so about a fifteen-minute walk at most from my house. It also seems to be staffed by volunteers, so no chance for a job, but any bookstore is a good thing in my mind (although sad: no income means an absolute moratorium on book buying, and I need to get through the books that I already own and haven't read anyway). I met a sweet but loopy woman who declared her love for the Sweet Valley High books, and who also gave me job advice. It took me about ten minutes to extract myself from the conversation.

There's also a couple of book articles from the last few days that I think I want to either keep around or talk more about; I'll try to work those up tonight and post them on the other blog sometime soon.

Randomness:

I found a flowchart online detailing whether you should eat food that has been dropped on the floor. It is very comprehensive - including questions such as "Are you a megalosaurus?"

A friend also posted a pun - I don't think it's originally his but it's very funny.

I sent off my final assessment for my proofreading course; now I need to start on the copy-editing part of it. I've also been doing some stuff (volunteer, of course. I need to get into a field that pays me) on the proofreading site for Project Gutenberg. I'm still a beginner on that site, but it's pretty addicting. I have actually been limiting my time on it because I'm supposed to be looking for jobs and things....

My sleeping patterns are totally screwed up. It's almost like I'm jetlagged, except I haven't been out of the UK since October, and haven't even been out of Nottingham since New Year's. I'm hoping that I can stay awake all day today (no napping!) and fall asleep at and stay asleep for a reasonable time. It seems to be going pretty well so far.

I should probably get back to working on something. Focus on one of my writing projects and get at least a few hundred words written.

Jasper Fforde is awesome, and random encounters

Last night I went to hear Jasper Fforde speak about his new book, Shades of Grey. It was fantastic. I'd also let one of my friends know; we didn't exactly go together, but there was still an empty seat next to me when he arrived, so we hung out during and after.

The book's been on sale this week at Waterstone's - half-price - and the ticket price for the event could go toward the book, so I only paid six quid on the night for the book. Which I was very excited about, because (a) I don't have an income right now, and (b) I doubt that it'll even be that cheap in a year or so when it comes out in paperback.

Jasper Fforde was very personable and funny. He talked about his path to becoming a writer, about the book (including a few passages), and answered questions. Some paraphrased quotations:

"After stealing - sorry, paying homage - to other people's ideas, I decided to write my own story with my own characters."

"Writing is a series of challenges or dares - a bit like Scottish cuisine."

"Because I'm the author, and I can do whatever I want, I generally do."

"Writing is never finished, only abandoned."

He also mentioned his publication schedule, which is a book every year for at least the next three. He didn't say a lot about the sequel to Shades of Grey, but the next Thursday Next book and especially the next Nursery Crimes Division book (which isn't scheduled until 2013) sound fascinating. The most recent NCD book, The Fourth Bear, also sounds fascinating ("How is the porridge different temperatures when it was poured at the same time?"), and it's the only other one of his that I haven't read yet.

He signed books afterwards. James and I started off in what turned out to be the buying line, but switched to the signing line once we realized. We were chatting when one of the three girls in front of us asked if I was American. I said I was, and asked where they were from. Minnesota, Chicago....are you the Luther group? And they were. We talked the whole rest of the way to the front of the line.

Jasper Fforde in person was very friendly and cheerful, even after almost an hour of signing. I can't wait to read this book (I got to chapter three before the talk started).....and everything else that he ever writes.

My goals

They're not "New Year's Resolutions," because it's already January 17th. They're not deadlines, because I have a problems sticking to self-imposed deadlines. They're goals. Goals that will hopefully not be too onerous to meet, that are flexible enough to allow for my current schedule and social life (ha), and that should eventually lead to the ever-elusive income. And they are "at least" goals, so I can exceed them if I want to and can.

They are to apply for at least two jobs every day, and to write at least 500 words on something that is not a blog every day. I'm getting better about getting in the habit of writing, and the words are coming more easily, but it's far too easy to blather on for 1100 words about football or something and not make any progress on my long-term plans.

So, those are my goals.

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.