In keeping with my entirely non-existent claim to be an expert on well, pretty much everything, I am going to publish another rant (hopefully briefer than my previous ones, I hear you pant. We just can't keep up with these marathon spewings! Why, my pretties, I do apologise. I've been staying up too late and eating badly, and these are the pungent results... :-D).
So, here's the deal, as the Genie says in Disney's Aladdin while dressed as a sort of weird blue teddy-boy. Tradition is something I militate against quite frequently. Not in the fashion of a D.H. Lawrence or a Marinetti. I do go off on one about the importance of art to life, but I'm not kidding myself. I am more in line with the likes of Forster and Proust, as already stated, in that I believe we can't just break off from the past.
However, we really mustn't enshrine it either. LESSON NUMBER ONE!
We have our individual pasts, and then there is also the 'collective' past, generally expressed (or seen to be) through popular culture. We tend to see our individual pasts as branching off from the 'collective' past, often through our experiences of popular culture. In short, everyone often feels a need to watch the 'It' programme, or listen to the 'It' band of the moment, even though they might not be aware of what this entails. (I always felt very left out for not being able to watch Trigger Happy TV, but now it doesn't seem to me that I really missed out...).
Humans are social beings, innit, and that's why the collective past is important to us. It gives our lives meaning in a small way, and it gives them meaning in a much easier way than the painfully grown-up notion of our responsibility to the world as inhabitants of it that we get slapped with later on.
I mean, think of how beautifully simple it is when you can discuss Eastenders with somebody. For that brief period of time, you exist fully and purely in your satisfying and simple interaction with another person. Nothing tangible has been created, but a connection has flared, flickered and thrown the whole, creaking framework of your drudging life into a sort of glorious perspective for a while. Equally, this is a moment of real freedom, because you are not being forced to produce, nor are you at the mercy of a biological drive which demands that you compare yourself to another being, or procreate with them. 'Survival of the fittest,' 'the rat race' and 'the daily grind' all fall away for a minute and do you know what the best thing is? It's a secular connection. This is not some out-of-yourself moment of transcendance; you are fully conscious of what occurs. Now, ain't that almost spiritual?
We need to stop behaving as if this disappears altogether when we grow up, because it doesn't. Life is undoubtedly harder in adulthood than it is in childhood, but at least now we can appreciate these little moments of connection. People forget how much time you spend being bored and whiny when you're a kid... because you take all that shit for granted. Everything is easy, we are taught to expect... and therein lies the key-phrase. Taught to expect. We are also taught to expect adulthood a certain way. Can we not just get a grip, please? Not everyone's past is that amazing. I loved the books I read, but I'm pretty happy to be who I am now.
These days, because people limply accept that they will have to work forever to afford all the things they want and the lifestyle they think they deserve, we seem to be losing sight more and more of that very infantile luxury: the luxury of taking stock. That poem about how we don't have time to just exist, sums it up for me. Why on Earth can people not just drop their standards a little? You don't HAVE to have a 36-inch TV. If need be, surely you could just use your laptop instead of buying a DVD player. And just how many sofas do you need, really?
I hate to sound all poncey and spiritual, but it's true - those things won't go with you when you die. Knowing that you finally managed to get that Mercedes-Benz is REALLY going to make that passage to the Other Side so much easier, isn't it? What the fuck is wrong with people?
This is where people go badly wrong. In the hopes of having something which will defy human mortality, they cling to tradition. The idea, if you think about it, being that traditions are passed down from generation to generation. In short, they are another manifestation of the human ego's frantic need to circumvent death.
Let me put it to you people straight: YOU WILL DIE AND STOP EXISTING. Unappealing as that sounds, that's just how it is. Get it through your heads. God may or may not exist, who fuckin' KNOWS if we have an afterlife, but we are born and we die. Clinging to tradition does NOT mean you escape.
A lot of diasporans have this real anxiety about mortality, you will notice, if you speak to them about their children becoming 'Westernised' and 'losing their culture.'
Permit me to be outrageous. Mummy, Daddy, I'm afraid that Indian culture is NOT MY CULTURE. I do enjoy elements of it, but I grew up in this country. I have internalised a different set of norms, I plan on living within the social mores which I am used to, and your grief, while understandable and upsetting, is entirely deluded. I personally believe that many 1st-generation Asians are actually projecting their own insecurities onto their children. Many of them are well aware of the fact that their 'homeland' has changed almost beyond belief and that even if they were to return, they wouldn't be able to hack it. To put it bluntly, the India they knew is long dead and they have not been able to grieve and move on because they are stuck in the denial stage.
That's why I consider patriotism - the full-blown emotional strain of it that borders on chauvinism and nationalism - to be really fucking dumb. Nations are composed of people, and people change. Pretty simple, I'd think. And yet, when it's only when talking to family friends, that my mum remarks how 'They have become modern and we are old-fashioned now.' Yes. Well done. Now write it down and learn it by heart.
To return to what I was saying: Indian culture is not 'mine' and it never was. That's tantamount to throwing a book at somebody and shouting 'Why haven't you read it? It's yours!' What utter cack. If you value the dissemination of tradition above all, if the mortality of your memories and the loss of your emotional world is something that you are not adult enough to handle, then please do everyone a favour and fuck off back to where you came from. I would say, in fatalistic fashion 'Raise your kids there if it bothers you that much!' but that would contravene my beliefs about parenthood being a process of nurturing rather than of ownership.
Traditions are a big lie, because, like everything else in the world spawned of humanity, they are subject to perversion and misinterpretation. Bitch please, they do not all carry on being the same after you die. I mean, is child-marriage as common in India as it used to be? Thank Gawd, no! I am stressing this because the lie of tradition is that you are 'investing' in something that you consider to be yours, and effectively trying to overcome death in the process.
I find it really funny that people give so much prominence to tradition when all it is, is habit. I could make a 'tradition' out of only bathing once a week if I wanted to... but I don't because it would be disgusting. That's why, similarly, 'traditions' based around, for example, the wearing of a certain religious symbol, or dressing in a particular manner, are often pretty stupid. Most people won't be aware of the original meaning, and many of them won't necessarily even agree, but the force of habit will hold them tight nonetheless.
Sometimes I wonder why we humans are so desperately keen to latch onto abstract notions when, much of the time, we can't be arsed to invest the time and effort to fully comprehend those abstract notions. Fucking idiots, so we are. Or are we geniuses? The whole point of making something that is so utterly abstract as to be verging on incomprehensible, is that people find it that much harder to question!
I'll finish by fielding a perhaps scandalous suggestion: maybe, oh 1st-gens, maybe your cultures are 'dying' (or so it seems to you) because you yourselves do not have sufficient awareness to teach the yoot about them properly. Or maybe they are dying because that is the natural order of things? Did I not speak earlier of 'survival of the fittest'? It can apply to the world of culture too, you know.
Personally, I believe that saying cultures are 'dying' is bullshit, especially if a lot of people are aware of their existence. A tiny mountain tribe which goes unchronicled and whose inhabitants all move away and convert to Christianity - perhaps that could be called a 'death,' but c'mon, how often does that really happen?
Another reason why I think clinging fervently to traditions is to be avoided at best is because it leads to things like the Partition of India, which involved horrific behaviour by people of all religions in the name of religion and tradition (oh, how cosily synonymous are the two on most occasions! *grimaces*). People can level all sorts of names and accusations at me, but I kind of agree with Nietzsche on this one: the world needs to indulge in a little more 'active forgetting' at times. (OBVIOUSLY some things, like the Holocaust, and indeed Partition, must never be forgotten, but they must also be remembered for the right reasons). We need to learn to let the tide of change come sweeping in, because it's always going to, whether we like it or not. Don't be making yourself look as foolish as ol' Canute did (although he did it intentionally...)!
Showing posts with label marcel proust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marcel proust. Show all posts
Monday, December 29, 2008
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Headscarves and Turbans
Quite some time ago, I said that I would reveal what I thought about girls who wear headscarves (at my university). I'm not going to focus just on the laydeez though - the menz will also be getting a bit of a rollicking.
It must be said that I am not targeting all girls in headscarves either. Just a lot of them.
It has struck me recently that there is so much fundamental dishonesty in the world. That sounds really naive, but I don't mean it in some 'child-opening-eyes-to-harsh-reality' way. I mean it in the sense that it is stunning how much of human existence can essentially be boiled down to power struggles - people trying to claim authority over each other. Yet a lot of the time the subject of the power struggles is often misunderstood or misrepresented, and hence those arguing over it are, if you will, arguing over something that does not actually exist. They are trying to generate authenticity out of inauthenticity, and in the process basing themselves and what they stand for - their identities - around a lie.
Let us invoke a 'trendy' example here: Islam and the arguments between Sunnis and Shias, or between Wahabbis and pretty much every other type of Muslim (:-D). It's not just Islam though that has this problem - pretty much every religion based around a text of some sort has this problem to some extent.
If you haven't already, look at my blog header. It is a quote from that wonderfully disturbed man, Franz Kafka. I am not, and did not, choose that in order to come across as intellectual (ffs, I read the book for a university course... I'm not the sort of person who reads 'classics' for fun unless they're relatively humorous. Yes, yes, I know. Sacrilege!). I chose it because it struck me as so very true. Thanks to ol' man Nietzsche and others of his ilk, I've come to rethink what that means. Now, when I think something is 'true,' what I really mean, I suppose is that for me, it is very applicable.
'The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.' I would gladly renounce all hope of ever being a real writer if I could produce such a phrase. Staggeringly obvious, but like the most accurate observations, it needs to be pointed out to us. I can't help thinking that if only more people kept this in mind, the world could well become a more sensible place. I'm not a fucking 'punk rocker with flowers in my hair' nor am I wishing for 'world peace' like a beauty pageant contestant, I just wish for a little more pensiveness, please.
Once something has been printed/published - that is IT. It takes on a life of its own. To borrow a Freudian term, it becomes 'uncanny.' I was thinking about it and I surmised at first that perhaps at the heart of our power struggles lies the desire to 'be or beat' the author. Maybe the power struggles are nothing but an expression of collective frustration at the fact that the author has 'got one' over us and an unconscious acknowledgement that we would like to be in their position. I mean, look at the way educational progress works. We do not learn and learn - the aim of accumulating knowledge is to reach the position of knowledge-provider ourselves in most instances. Think of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and how much it applies to all of humanity; all our learning is but an attempt to take a swipe at God.
However, the printed text will survive after its author's death. It will outlive them, and even in their own lifetime, it will defy them. All their manicured intent will not be able to forge a 'pure' work that has only one understanding to it. Some critics and reviewers will see what they were aiming to do in their work; others will draw entirely new strains of meaning from it. It is their legacy; much as other people have children.
People like to think that their children, sharing their genetic matter as they do, will turn out to be, if not carbon copies, at least startling likenesses of the originals. Not so! as anyone with half a brain knows. Works of art are no less wayward. They must be as receptive to the egos of others as they are to the ego of their creator; otherwise they will not survive over time.
Therein lies an irony: you work and work and create yourself a monument, yet after all your efforts it defies you. It refuses to behave as told, to conform exactly. It is 'uncanny,' because as soon as it leaves your mind and becomes apparent, it takes on an authority of its own and perhaps even robs you of your authorial authority. You can't tell it what to do. Nobody can tell it what to do - and then the problems start because it tells others what to do.
People are base, lowly creatures fashioned out of clay who fail to do justice to that glorious organ in their heads that rules them. If ever there was a 'God,' it ought to be the human brain. Look at what the human brain can do! However, if we can't even respect the capacities of our own brains, then we haven't got much chance of remembering that texts are living things. They don't belong to the author any more than they belong to the reader; they live in the middle ground between intent and interpretation and we would do well to remember this and get the hell over ourselves.
So. Intro over.
What with this insecurity that surrounds texts, religious and otherwise, people need SOMETHING to cling to. Enter ritual and symbolism. What yuman beans really like, is habit and routine. I think it is hardwired into our biology, but I'm not certain. Even those who seek variety need this to some extent in order to be less aware of the passage of time and our mortality.
I don't really approve of the laziness that induces us to cling to things out of sentimentality in such a way, but I understand why people do and I understand how terrifying it can be to suddenly let slip a whole set of beliefs, no matter how half-baked, and have to start again with a blank canvas on the world. I'd venture to say here that while liberation is generally good, it definitely ain't easy yo.
All this is why, when I see girls at my uni wafting about in their hijabs, I feel... ambiguous. Depending on what they look like, my thoughts tend to run thus: either 'Oh' or 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame.' Quite often the former runs into the latter. If the girl in question looks like a fully-paid up devout Muslim: baggily covered, has a hint of a moustache (sorry ladies, but if you do, you do) and is bare-faced (and quite often looks dead-eyed, although I'm sure I do too), I think to myself that I don't really know how much of a believer she is. Maybe she wants to do her eyebrows and wear lipgloss, but maybe she can't. Maybe she really DOES believe that she is the Satan-sin of Temptation personified and/or see the gaze of others as a threat - if so, that's a damn shame.
However, when I see what my friend Ala (and others) have described as 'muhajababes' (oh go on, read Ala's post, it's short, concisely-written and well-explained!), I just think: 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame' because it is a stupid shame. They are a visual lie to me. Here are girls who want to be regular girls, wearing make-up and tight clothes and accessorising fit to outshine even the scantiest-clad girl - and suddenly a hijab obscures their hair and neck. The pointlessness of it is what always astounds me. Human sexuality cannot be regulated. People always try and do so; in some respects (i.e. paedophilia, incest, etc.) this is laudable. In many ways, it's also quite a hopeless exercise, like trying to rid the world of all its rats. Purge in one place, and there will be an upsurge elsewhere.
When I see these girls, or boys with turbans which hide their cut hair - or they have carefully shaved and groomed beards - I find it stupid and dishonest. Some of them will perhaps want to continue as they are, no doubt. However, I want to shake a lot of these people and ask them to think and sleep on it a bit. What kind of ludicrousness is that? Evidently they are doing it so that their parents and relatives can look upon them and see the symbol, see the visual affirmation of faith.
(I once saw a woman on the Tube who had short hair - neck-length, tons of make-up on and I don't know whether her eyebrows were partially drawn on or what, but I noticed she had a very fucking big tattoo of a khanda on her forearm. I have no idea whether she was wearing a kara or not, but I don't remember seeing one...)
Yet, like texts, the person may well be trapped in the middle - caught between the symbol and those that demand it. They may think the symbol is a concession to their parents/relatives; in fact, the parents/relatives tend to see it as a promise and a testimony. It tells them that you have faith and locks you in to their system of belief, and if you don't, it's a lie - once again - that everything is hinging on. Take a stand! Don't let yourself be suffocated by something that you thought you were in control of!
Then again, some people are so unable to handle the abstract as the abstract that they will literalise everything. They are people with no imagination and no inquisitivity, and they will not accept the view of sexuality I have just mentioned. They will cry vermin and keep stamping until there is blood. Their failure to accept the fact of sexuality's omnipresence will result in them turning, like so many desperately unimaginative bastards, to murdering their children in that most well-known of rituals, the 'honour' killing. The term 'control killing' as has been proposed, is much better. See, 'control killing' makes me think of Rentokil, which makes me think of vermin, which leads me back to my metaphor. Such bastards - being as they are, probably consumed with personal guilt and shame for whatever reasons - will seize upon the separate existence and snuff out its life in a pathetic and futile attempt to protect their lie.
Lo, we have returned to the power struggles of which I spoke at the beginning, and so it is that books are burned and women are killed for the sake of people's authority. Shame on you. Grow the fuck up. If you were truly people of religion and honour, you would accept that all things belong to God, and that ultimately it is only God's decision to exercise judgement. Monica Ali - an author who faced the threat of book-burning in this day and age - helped in the production of this post, pointing out as she did via Brick Lane that it really is not just fear, but also laziness, that drives people to stay with a certain ideology. I mean, ferChrissakes, the main character is not afraid to have an affair, even though she hasn't guts enough to stop praying despite not really seeming to believe in religion! A special mention must also go to Marcel Proust, upon whom I had to write a 2, 500 word essay, which I did 2, 000 words of in one day. Thank you.Thank you very fucking much.
The moral of the rant may be that art of all kinds and children are much more alike than you ever wanted to realise, and that you don't own nuttin'. Don't let this capitalist, property-appropriating world fool you, y'hear? ;-D As if the recent recession and allegations of fraud didn't make that clear enough already. As an absolute genius of a man once said: 'Money ain't got no owners; only spenders.'
To finish in an Omar-ian vein: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR, YO!
It must be said that I am not targeting all girls in headscarves either. Just a lot of them.
It has struck me recently that there is so much fundamental dishonesty in the world. That sounds really naive, but I don't mean it in some 'child-opening-eyes-to-harsh-reality' way. I mean it in the sense that it is stunning how much of human existence can essentially be boiled down to power struggles - people trying to claim authority over each other. Yet a lot of the time the subject of the power struggles is often misunderstood or misrepresented, and hence those arguing over it are, if you will, arguing over something that does not actually exist. They are trying to generate authenticity out of inauthenticity, and in the process basing themselves and what they stand for - their identities - around a lie.
Let us invoke a 'trendy' example here: Islam and the arguments between Sunnis and Shias, or between Wahabbis and pretty much every other type of Muslim (:-D). It's not just Islam though that has this problem - pretty much every religion based around a text of some sort has this problem to some extent.
If you haven't already, look at my blog header. It is a quote from that wonderfully disturbed man, Franz Kafka. I am not, and did not, choose that in order to come across as intellectual (ffs, I read the book for a university course... I'm not the sort of person who reads 'classics' for fun unless they're relatively humorous. Yes, yes, I know. Sacrilege!). I chose it because it struck me as so very true. Thanks to ol' man Nietzsche and others of his ilk, I've come to rethink what that means. Now, when I think something is 'true,' what I really mean, I suppose is that for me, it is very applicable.
'The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.' I would gladly renounce all hope of ever being a real writer if I could produce such a phrase. Staggeringly obvious, but like the most accurate observations, it needs to be pointed out to us. I can't help thinking that if only more people kept this in mind, the world could well become a more sensible place. I'm not a fucking 'punk rocker with flowers in my hair' nor am I wishing for 'world peace' like a beauty pageant contestant, I just wish for a little more pensiveness, please.
Once something has been printed/published - that is IT. It takes on a life of its own. To borrow a Freudian term, it becomes 'uncanny.' I was thinking about it and I surmised at first that perhaps at the heart of our power struggles lies the desire to 'be or beat' the author. Maybe the power struggles are nothing but an expression of collective frustration at the fact that the author has 'got one' over us and an unconscious acknowledgement that we would like to be in their position. I mean, look at the way educational progress works. We do not learn and learn - the aim of accumulating knowledge is to reach the position of knowledge-provider ourselves in most instances. Think of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and how much it applies to all of humanity; all our learning is but an attempt to take a swipe at God.
However, the printed text will survive after its author's death. It will outlive them, and even in their own lifetime, it will defy them. All their manicured intent will not be able to forge a 'pure' work that has only one understanding to it. Some critics and reviewers will see what they were aiming to do in their work; others will draw entirely new strains of meaning from it. It is their legacy; much as other people have children.
People like to think that their children, sharing their genetic matter as they do, will turn out to be, if not carbon copies, at least startling likenesses of the originals. Not so! as anyone with half a brain knows. Works of art are no less wayward. They must be as receptive to the egos of others as they are to the ego of their creator; otherwise they will not survive over time.
Therein lies an irony: you work and work and create yourself a monument, yet after all your efforts it defies you. It refuses to behave as told, to conform exactly. It is 'uncanny,' because as soon as it leaves your mind and becomes apparent, it takes on an authority of its own and perhaps even robs you of your authorial authority. You can't tell it what to do. Nobody can tell it what to do - and then the problems start because it tells others what to do.
People are base, lowly creatures fashioned out of clay who fail to do justice to that glorious organ in their heads that rules them. If ever there was a 'God,' it ought to be the human brain. Look at what the human brain can do! However, if we can't even respect the capacities of our own brains, then we haven't got much chance of remembering that texts are living things. They don't belong to the author any more than they belong to the reader; they live in the middle ground between intent and interpretation and we would do well to remember this and get the hell over ourselves.
So. Intro over.
What with this insecurity that surrounds texts, religious and otherwise, people need SOMETHING to cling to. Enter ritual and symbolism. What yuman beans really like, is habit and routine. I think it is hardwired into our biology, but I'm not certain. Even those who seek variety need this to some extent in order to be less aware of the passage of time and our mortality.
I don't really approve of the laziness that induces us to cling to things out of sentimentality in such a way, but I understand why people do and I understand how terrifying it can be to suddenly let slip a whole set of beliefs, no matter how half-baked, and have to start again with a blank canvas on the world. I'd venture to say here that while liberation is generally good, it definitely ain't easy yo.
All this is why, when I see girls at my uni wafting about in their hijabs, I feel... ambiguous. Depending on what they look like, my thoughts tend to run thus: either 'Oh' or 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame.' Quite often the former runs into the latter. If the girl in question looks like a fully-paid up devout Muslim: baggily covered, has a hint of a moustache (sorry ladies, but if you do, you do) and is bare-faced (and quite often looks dead-eyed, although I'm sure I do too), I think to myself that I don't really know how much of a believer she is. Maybe she wants to do her eyebrows and wear lipgloss, but maybe she can't. Maybe she really DOES believe that she is the Satan-sin of Temptation personified and/or see the gaze of others as a threat - if so, that's a damn shame.
However, when I see what my friend Ala (and others) have described as 'muhajababes' (oh go on, read Ala's post, it's short, concisely-written and well-explained!), I just think: 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame' because it is a stupid shame. They are a visual lie to me. Here are girls who want to be regular girls, wearing make-up and tight clothes and accessorising fit to outshine even the scantiest-clad girl - and suddenly a hijab obscures their hair and neck. The pointlessness of it is what always astounds me. Human sexuality cannot be regulated. People always try and do so; in some respects (i.e. paedophilia, incest, etc.) this is laudable. In many ways, it's also quite a hopeless exercise, like trying to rid the world of all its rats. Purge in one place, and there will be an upsurge elsewhere.
When I see these girls, or boys with turbans which hide their cut hair - or they have carefully shaved and groomed beards - I find it stupid and dishonest. Some of them will perhaps want to continue as they are, no doubt. However, I want to shake a lot of these people and ask them to think and sleep on it a bit. What kind of ludicrousness is that? Evidently they are doing it so that their parents and relatives can look upon them and see the symbol, see the visual affirmation of faith.
(I once saw a woman on the Tube who had short hair - neck-length, tons of make-up on and I don't know whether her eyebrows were partially drawn on or what, but I noticed she had a very fucking big tattoo of a khanda on her forearm. I have no idea whether she was wearing a kara or not, but I don't remember seeing one...)
Yet, like texts, the person may well be trapped in the middle - caught between the symbol and those that demand it. They may think the symbol is a concession to their parents/relatives; in fact, the parents/relatives tend to see it as a promise and a testimony. It tells them that you have faith and locks you in to their system of belief, and if you don't, it's a lie - once again - that everything is hinging on. Take a stand! Don't let yourself be suffocated by something that you thought you were in control of!
Then again, some people are so unable to handle the abstract as the abstract that they will literalise everything. They are people with no imagination and no inquisitivity, and they will not accept the view of sexuality I have just mentioned. They will cry vermin and keep stamping until there is blood. Their failure to accept the fact of sexuality's omnipresence will result in them turning, like so many desperately unimaginative bastards, to murdering their children in that most well-known of rituals, the 'honour' killing. The term 'control killing' as has been proposed, is much better. See, 'control killing' makes me think of Rentokil, which makes me think of vermin, which leads me back to my metaphor. Such bastards - being as they are, probably consumed with personal guilt and shame for whatever reasons - will seize upon the separate existence and snuff out its life in a pathetic and futile attempt to protect their lie.
Lo, we have returned to the power struggles of which I spoke at the beginning, and so it is that books are burned and women are killed for the sake of people's authority. Shame on you. Grow the fuck up. If you were truly people of religion and honour, you would accept that all things belong to God, and that ultimately it is only God's decision to exercise judgement. Monica Ali - an author who faced the threat of book-burning in this day and age - helped in the production of this post, pointing out as she did via Brick Lane that it really is not just fear, but also laziness, that drives people to stay with a certain ideology. I mean, ferChrissakes, the main character is not afraid to have an affair, even though she hasn't guts enough to stop praying despite not really seeming to believe in religion! A special mention must also go to Marcel Proust, upon whom I had to write a 2, 500 word essay, which I did 2, 000 words of in one day. Thank you.Thank you very fucking much.
The moral of the rant may be that art of all kinds and children are much more alike than you ever wanted to realise, and that you don't own nuttin'. Don't let this capitalist, property-appropriating world fool you, y'hear? ;-D As if the recent recession and allegations of fraud didn't make that clear enough already. As an absolute genius of a man once said: 'Money ain't got no owners; only spenders.'
To finish in an Omar-ian vein: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR, YO!
Monday, October 20, 2008
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...
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...
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