For 22nd January 2012
by sequinnedmannequin
As I write this title I realise that I have just incorrectly named all of my January photo albums ’2011′. Please, no, god, no, do not make me repeat that odious year.
I’m going to start using this ‘more’ code to condense the main blog page a bit more. If you followed a link directly to this entry you will have no idea what I’m talking about because you can already see everything like an omnipotent god of wondrousness. If you are on the front page its very self, please click the link to see the rest of this entry – there are photographs, the usual quantity of unnecessary complaining, and a song for the day all contained within its bounds…
Essay panic and job stress aside, I am feeling hopeful today. Conducting my usual Sunday cemetery ritual, I observed real live flowers sprouting from the actual ground. Mostly it’s just crazily green crocus shoots but a few of them have burst forth enthusiastically (and somewhat foolishly, one might argue, being as it’s only January) and in a couple of weeks there are going to be hundreds and hundreds of them. I can’t wait. Seeing all that fresh new fecundity getting ready to explode into livingness reminded me that, unless Game of Thrones is a presentiment of what is to come, it will not in fact be winter forever. Now I’m not one of those winter haters – I have a very large space in my heart for crisp frosty days and walks in the tingly air ending with roasts and pubs and pints of ale and I do indeed love to cosy up inside without feeling guilty about it – but there is definitely a limit to how much cold wet nonsense I can accommodate. With the added joy of working for all the hours that it’s light (and having colleagues who never open the blinds, evidently preferring to toil away in a hopeless cave of misery) and spending millions of pounds on the central heating, I lose patience with winter quite rapidly. We’ve done Christmas, the need for festive snow has passed, and I think we can safely move on to warmer climes now. C’mon croci!
The essay is coming along. By ‘coming along’, I mean I have pages and pages of quotes to use and a less vague idea of what I’m writing about. I’m not one of these writing in stages people, I just sit down four days before the deadlines and attempt to bash my notes and quotes into the form of something vaguely academic – so strictly speaking I haven’t even started the essay proper yet, but I’m over the ‘what the fuck am I going to even say?’ hump which is something. Just hoping quite strenuously that I don’t fall foul of some heinous illness or some other incapacitating disaster or I will have nothing but a bibliography to hand in.
Work is not coming along. I have more to do than I can humanly achieve in the allocated time, so I seem to just be staying later every day to try and make progress. I’ve been taking annual leave in order to do essay work, but this is proving counter-productive as it simply means I have twice as much work the day after; I had thought perhaps one of my team might answer the group email in my absence but no, apparently if I’m not in the office all enquirers should use the telephone if they would like an actual response. There are some things that we as a section aren’t on top of that are causing problems in other things that we do as a result. I’ve done the things that directly affect my workload – as in the things that the section is responsible for that have an impact on things that I am individually responsible for – but I don’t have time even to just do my own things, let alone the section’s things too. In short, I work at double-speed and come home from work feeling like I’ve been on a drug-enforced high, having achieved a lot but feeling completely wrung-out as a result, good only for sitting in front of the TV watching the prime minister fuck a pig (see Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror if that last comment seems to have come out of left field). I’m fighting myself here really – I should just go to my managers and explain the situation but I’m both wary of sounding like I’m accusing my colleagues of not doing enough and making it sound like I can’t cope. Which I can, but I must keep reminding myself that it doesn’t mean I should… I always do this in jobs; take on more responsibilities to prove that I can (and partly, if I’m honest, in the spirit of ‘if you want a job doing properly…’) and then put myself at danger of cardiac arrest by juggling them so furiously I look like that Buddha with the million arms. Or however many arms it is. A lot of arms. Then I refuse to let go of the responsibilities even when it’s detrimental to my health to keep up the circus act because my status as a hard-working-but-resentful team member comes to define me (in my own eyes) and I’m afraid of the mediocrity that comes with just doing an average workload in an average amount of time. To say it’s too much is to say I can’t cope which is to say I’m incapable which is to say I’m weak. I know it’s not really quite like that, but that’s the way it translates in my head. Also probably there’s an element of pushing myself into work work to avoid essay work and to provide a nice little failure cushion should I not do as well as I like academically. Evidence suggests that I engineer my life in such a way as for it to be constantly difficult as there’s always an excuse for my lack of success. Sometimes I wonder if I even am really bipolar or if my brain just manufactured an illness so it has a perfect get-out clause when everything goes wrong. Having said that, in this case I sometimes wonder if I take on more and more in the hope that at some point someone will bloody well notice it. I honestly feel like I could either literally or metaphorically stand on my desk juggling every piece of stationery equipment in the office into the juggling orbit until the whole College was spinning around my head and no-one would bat an eye. In contrast, I could sit on my chair spinning only myself around and staring at the ceiling every day for a week and I doubt anyone would pay much attention to that either (well, aside from my team mates). It’s nice having bosses with a hands-off approach and everything, but when it leads to being genuinely unsure whether they’d even notice if I spent my entire day on Facebook or whether they turn a blind eye to the amount of work I do because it’s easier if I just carry on doing it until I spontaneously combust it’s probably going a bit far.
Anyway, must try and get my thoughts off that. It being Sunday I’ve spent most of the day feeling so tense about going back to work that I’ve got no essay work done because I can’t focus. Think crocus, think crocus…
Your song for today is a bit of an old flame but it came on shuffle last night and I thought Gosh, yes, I really do love this song you know. I rarely listen to Tori these days, and try even harder not to look at her weird stretched face full of silicone and botox, but she still occupies that place in my heart usually reserved for one’s first love, or the recipient of one’s virginity.
Tori Amos – Bliss
