The Smallest Torrent of Bitterness...

I would like to think that I am not altogether unaware of the ways of the world. Having lived abroad, travelled somewhat (not extensively, but I have been to at least four other countries!) and had a not inconsiderable share of eye-opening experiences (both positive and negative), I must admit something now.

I have said this repeatedly - but I feel at an absolute loss at the moment. It is half-past one in the morning, and my Advanced Oral Competence class looms over me in the morning. I read through the homework sheet, feeling as always, a heavy sheet of dread settle and line the bottom of my stomach. Transcribe a clip on 'youth speak', it crowed. Go on the France 5 website and find news topics which:

a) interest you
b) are of a suitably elevated linguistic register
c) could be discussed in a parliamentary debate in Strasbourg...

Then: Looking to use an interesting context, write complete sentences using the 16 action words we used today and which were attached to the last homework. And finally, Edit your oral presentation which you had to give today in class.

I forgot to mention that we were supposed to look up every word of the aforementioned list of 'action words' and translate them, for last week. There were oh, I don't know, over 100 of them? This too while having to transcribe 3 clips on the writer Georges Simenon (which I think took me about an hour and a half at least) and writing this stupid oral presentation in order to sell ourselves to an employer using our Year Abroad experience, while using as many of the action words as we possibly could.

This is a course which is supposed to develop our oral competence in French. Why don't we do something useful and interesting, such as have regular debates on political issues? Why the FUCK am I being forced to transcribe a list of fucking ACTION WORDS which I will never use in real life and most of which are synonyms of each other, while having to read Women In Love by D.H. Lawrence, his essay on Democracy, plan a commentary on an article about 'Happiness in medication?' and write a 'dissertation' on whether or not justice exists?

I am a hard worker. The term constantly applied to me in secondary school was 'conscientious.' I know I can be plenty flaky, I am changeable and moody and sometimes I will set things in motion and then struggle to maintain them, but by God. Last year abroad has made it difficult for me. Ending a five-and-a-half-year relationship with a man I thought I was going to marry has made it hard for me. Having the torrent of imminent graduation and entry into the professional world has made it hard for me. The death of my cousin and the drama of starting a new relationship HAVE - MADE - IT - HARD - FOR ME.

I am trying. I am striving. Constant lack of sleep through trying to get it done only slows me down. Brief naps revive me for a short while, and then soon I am drooping again. I will throw my hands up and confess that I end up wasting time because:

- often, very little goes into my head when I am so tired, and
- in the haze of utter isolation that develops when I have been stuck in my room for so long, the allure of MSN, Facebook and Google Chat is oh-so-inevitable. I am hungry and desperate for human contact, being as I am without any TV or radio (and without the time to watch/listen), no books of my own and all my friends in the same position as me, working non-stop or glumly job-seeking, I will talk to anyone.


Of course, such a cocktail is only going to inculculate anger and frustration. The sheer, fucking futility of it all hurts me. The reason we are doing all this stuff for AOC is to better prepare us for the world of work, while in French III, the seminar leaders obsess over our translating huge bits of text with utterly obsolete language and teaching us to write an essay French-style. Apparently, our two-hour sessions are meant to prepare us for the exam. Real nice interactivity between courses you got going there, especially considering the prof in the former is also one of the main seminar leaders in the latter! Again: the sheer, fucking futility.

If they want to help us get on in the world of work, why don't they give us more business and economics-oriented translations? How about teaching us some idioms, so that we can become more suitably 'native' in the language? A structured revision of grammar would be nice too, instead of this vague laxity that occurs with correcting translations in class. For fuck's sake, a translation is subjective at the end of the day. It's a set of choices. With literary translations especially, there's going to be myriad interpretations that fit. I'm not too sure how that is meant to help us - when we're 'out in the real world', we'll more often than not be forced to translate on the spot, and that involves going for what's simplest. What use will knowing how to say 'She hosed it up and down with her eyes' be then?! And why are we being driven to insane amounts of stress 'preparing for the exam' when:

a) the exam will be stressful enough
b) normal standards will be considerably relaxed, thus making it much easier for us to do well, and effectively making all this bollocks pointless?

Also, I think we know how to write essays by now, bitches!


French is not useless at all, but the near-desperate way that things like 'action words' and that stupid YA presentation (there was a meeting before that too!) are being shoehorned in feels like a tacit admission from the SLLF: 'Yes, what we are teaching you is bollocks. Here's some box-ticking, quota-filling claptrap so that you too can go and work for a call-centre... in French, of course.' The fact remains that unless you have a directly saleable skill that happens to be always in demand - like being an accountant or doctor - you're going to struggle somewhat, especially at a belt-tightening time like this. In all these initiatives, I see very little point; ultimately the things most desired of us - leadership, commercial awareness and risk-taking - can only really be demonstrably gained outside of your degree. I mean sure, if you're one of those super-people who is head of everything, or you have a management role at work or something, you can show evidence of that sooner than others. However, I don't think everyone is that precocious (I sure as hell hope not...!).

Meanwhile, in English, my Modernism & Democracy course continues to introduce me to books full of Big Ideas, books so invariably long and provocative that they bring me to a mental breakdown almost every week. I am not stupid and I am not a particularly slow reader, but I have spent the last two weeks (or so it feels) reading Women In Love. It took 4 days of non-stop reading to finish Howards End before that, with the result that I was weak-brained and could barely remember where certain key passages were afterwards. I never even got round to finishing Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morals, and I'm probably going to end up writing on him, so that means yet more steaming shit piled upon me for Reading Week. Oh, joy.

Back to French. I do actually love the Proust module, being taught as it is by the most gently-eccentric, mildly sardonic Irishman there is in Professor Hughes, who often pauses - as if for effect - just a little too long, while the class watch him uneasily. (I don't know how old he is, but I bet he doesn't look it). Then, blue eyes shining with a downright childlike joy, he will articulate the remainder of his half-completed thought, bringing the sudden tension out of the class in a chuckle.

Proust himself isn't bad either, although if I had to read all the volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, he would be added to the 'shake-n-slap' list, methinks. In my fatalist manner, I am always seeking connections between texts (that's what makes me such a good English student!) and my strangely powerful recollection of literary texts means I can often trace the unembroidered lines in the great tapestry that is Literature to me, seeing the intertextuality that isn't always overtly stated. Proust is the major influence on many early 20th-C writers... yep, that means most of 'em on my Modernism & Democracy course - and I realised today that much of what Lawrence is doing in Women In Love and later works is rebelling quite furiously against this influence. Sorry, I know not everyone else finds the previously-unseen links between formerly completely different ideas and authors interesting like I do. :-D

I love to think on things. It is ironic, since I have just complained about how my degree is apparently unsuitable for the 'world of work', but this year, it is readying us for the world of work in the bleakest possible way. It is teaching us how to slave, slave without having the time to actually stop and reflect properly on what exactly it is we are accomplishing. I asked the most diligent student I know, a fella by the name of Tom N-, how he was finding his workload. 'Mad,' he replied succinctly, his big brown eyes earnest and slightly innocent. 'I'm doing so much work, but I find I don't actually have the time to think about what I'm doing!'

'Do you feel like you're just churning things out?' I asked, feeling horribly like a 'detached observer' (especially since my work turned me into a hermit with faltering social skills).
'Yes,' he nodded definitively and graciously, like one conclusively approving a military inspection of his own conciseness. Satisfied, I turned away, staring awkwardly into space. Yet D.H. Lawrence's terrifying 'visionaryness' in Women In Love has rattled me. All the talk of selling oneself, of the 'job market', of deciding one's future now - even as we wrestle with our work, like crocodiles struggling with ostriches, unwieldy and ferocious - all of it has made me realise a few things.

I am not cut out for the 'job market'. I can work in a team of people, and I have the barest administrative skills. I am not a thief or particularly aggressive. Hell, I can be decisive and pragmatic, even! What I hate is the naked submission of it all. For every job I apply to, no matter how lowly the post, I will have to abase myself, simulating being a person who is sunny and personable and non-existent. I will focus tightly on saying the right thing, projecting the right image and essentially pretending to be of a kind with my brother. Inside, I will feel myself twisting with impotent rage and resentment. Why do I have to lick this person's arse repeatedly just to prove (not even that I am worthy, since that is often decided in advance), but that I am likable? How has it got to the stage that employers are more impressed by your use of buzzwords than by your plain, no-nonsense English?

Why must I break myself up over the most arbitrary of decisions that more often than not, will hang upon a tiny, unpredictable caprice? People can take whatever reason they fancy to reject you, and unless you ask specifically for feedback, you will never be certain why. Yet even that in itself irks me - why should you ask for feedback, as if you are somehow wrong as a human being? And why is ambition always taken as some sort of evidence of vitality, why is the ruthless desire for power something to emulate? Having direction is one thing. Having ambition is quite another. I think people can do as they wish, but why the hell do we all have to come up to their level, just because they scare us and they're pushy?

I know I have far too much pride and arrogance, to be challenging something so monolithic and long-established. I know too that not all situations are like this. It's more retail positions and part-time work that's like that - but please, can we get a grip on ourselves already? It appears that work has become so fundamental to our very existence - we are such 'self-alienated' figures now - that any kind of work is preferable to not working. So even doing something that leaves you numb with monotony, that kills any spiritual, philosophical or creative tendencies you have with its sheer, exhausting repetitiveness, is preferable to doing nothing.

Yet 'doing nothing' leaves you some time to actually live. This is what I want, and this is why I'm thinking of taking a year to do some rubbish job and allow myself to write and reflect a bit, instead of diving straight into the stream of Professional Ambition. I do not have any major professional ambition! I do not want to boss anyone else around, show off my achievements or accept the false god of labour-routine.

Lawrence brilliantly diagnoses our current present in Women In Love, in the chapter 'The Industrial Magnate'. He presents the character Gerald as a kind of uber-capitalist before we even had people like Tim Parker, people known for ruthlessly reforming companies and systems to cut costs and make themselves rich. The whole chapter is a frankly disturbing premonition of Thatcherism and the whole destructive 'greed-is-good' philosophy of the '80s that we are still suffering from, but all seen about 60 years in advance (I have linked to the specific chapter in Google Books for anyone who's even remotely interested...).

You can infer that Lawrence feels, in a way, that work is coming to occupy the role of religion. And I think this has become all too true. People always love religion for the organised little rituals that it provides them with, to frame their life and their time with a sense of 'higher purpose' and rightness. Now, though, if you don't automatically love the (very similar) structure that comes with having a full-time job (or jobs!), you're wrong. And the punishment has shifted from going to hell to dying of hunger. Really, though, we work really long hours and at the end of it, what is the point? We tell ourselves it is just to survive, just to get by, but there must be a cheaper way to survive without being in that position.

Working all the time is deadening. You take yourself and everything around you for granted. Thus families and marriages disintegrate, and we get talk of 'broken societies' and the like. I think that a certain amount of work is good, no doubt. Yet, I do not understand why there is so much pressure on me to get into work straight away after I graduate, to start going to fairs now, to apply for work experience placements a year in advance... No! I don't need that. I admit, that as a fairly middle-class child, it is easier for me than it is for others - and what? I am going to take the time out to work out what exactly my strengths are, to reconcile myself with my 'poor' future (c'mon, you knew it as well as I did - somebody like me's never going to be commanding a lot!) and trying to balance want and need. All I need is the time and freedom to be able to think and write.

It must be said though, that much to my horror, I am afraid I may end up being a lecturer in English (although French is an option I am forced to consider also). I don't know what it is that has made me reconsider this. Maybe it's the fact that I am such a painfully academic personality, patently made for the ivory tower. Maybe it's the growing realisation that I'm actually far more in tune with my lecturers than my fellow students (and have been even since my first year...). I don't know. If any of ye faithful remains among my readers - if you have made it this far - can you tell me what you think, please? You probably just think I am a child who doesn't want to enter the adult world, and you wouldn't be wrong there.

It doesn't help that I find myself shaking off the old, dusty moth-eaten blanket of love that surrounds my ex in my memory, while being almost fatally drawn to the adult who is currently deigning to 'take me out' :-D. The development of feelings between myself and him was quite steadily surreal as it was, without the ex-messiness turning my life into a Truffaut film. My sweetheart is like a vision sprung from the pages of a romance novel, but with a very healthy sense of humour and a kindness that frequently almost either moves me to tears, or makes me fulminate and gape like some chicken/goldfish hybrid. He keeps threatening to move into my head permanently (I see him twice a week), and I constantly find myself spread-eagled, frightened, within the drawer that reads 'Head over heels'. What should I do? See him less? See him more? How can I resolve this feeling that doesn't want to be resolved, so that I may train myself more freely on work?

A little note to anyone I haven't yet replied to, i.e. Fabien and Andy: I am v. sorry but as you can see, I have been losing my mind. So please, bear with me. As of about 2 a.m., your dear authoress decided to strike a blow for truancy and is, rather unwillingly, it must be said, skipping Advanced Oral Competence tomorrow in the hopes of getting ahead with work and getting a full night's sleep.Wish me luck...