Meaningless, meaningless

Just about to set off for Greenbelt.  Yayayayayayayay!

 

Will be back in cyberspace in a week or so.  Behave yourselves while I'm gone. :-) 

Ra! Just booked coach tickets to Cheltenham for Greenbelt festival, ready for departure on Thursday. As before, will be volunteering for Ru and Ben in the shop and ticket office, and therefore will get free entry and meal vouchers in exchange for 4 hours of daily tedium. Ra!

 

As usual, have heard of very few of the acts and speakers. However, I will be camping with Ship people so that should provide adequate entertainment. And there's always the bar. I'm hoping the occasion will be akin to Summer Sundae in its chilledness.

 

Moved virtually all my possessions to my folks' house yesterday, so am presently camping in my old house. My room feels like a hotel room, except without the telly, and with slightly tattier interior decor. The Big Move is imminent... will probably go up to Sheff on the 11th/12th of September to find a house. I'm getting nervous now - much as I want my own island of order and tidiness, I'm not sure I'm up to living alone. Present plan is to get a 2 bedroom terrace then if I'm depressingly lonely I can always advertise for a housemate.

 

Worried that I will cry all through my leaving do. :-(

Not in the mood for work today. Spent a fabulous weekend getting pissed and pissed on at Summer Sundae, Leicester's very own mini-Glastonbury. Oh yes.

Bands you may have heard of: Idlewild (disappointingly mediocre), The Wedding Present (quite good actually), Patti Smith (feisty), British Sea Power (slightly surreal)

Bands you won't have heard of but should watch out for: Art Brut, Ist

And that was it. A total dearth of originality or inventiveness otherwise. Still good fun, as went with the physics crew and saw several old acquaintances (more about that later).

Interesting things:

• ART BRUT. I am in love - they rocked my socks off! Funny, clever, endearingly self-deprecating. First song was "Look at us - we formed a band!". Charmingly post-modern. Also sang, "My little brother's just discovered rock'n'roll", which I enjoyed since I was watching with my dear little brother, and "Fine art makes me wanna rock out." Graham, of course, liked the one about the singer not being able to get it up for his girlfriend - "It doesn't mean that I don't love you..." And they all have fantastic made-up surnames. Go see!
• Wandered indoors to check out a band, sat down at a table at the back with the others, then glanced across it and realised we were sitting next to Chris Chinchilla, Art Brut's guitarist. Sweet-faced, bespectacled, skinny... so of course I had to say hello. Proceeded to grill him about the band, then asked his name and shook his hand. Then he asked me mine and thought I said Verity. Found out they're playing in Sheffield next month. I'm there!
• British Sea Power - Graham wouldn't stop singing their praises so went down the front to watch them with him and Oz. Not bad tunes, but wasn't really listening as my attention was on the large bear that they spent the second half of their set fighting (whilst still playing). And the bassist.
• My brother had come up from Cardiff for the weekend expecting sunshine and so had only brought shorts. He turned up wearing my dad's jeans and the cheesiest dad jumper possible.
• Ist. We like.
  
• Walking out of the indoor stage, thought, "That girl looks like someone from my physics class at school." Then she recognised me and came up to say hello. Was there on her own so she joined us for the rest of the evening. Only I wasn't sure what to introduce her as, since back then she was a he.
• Saw Alwyn, who blatantly still likes me. Got depressed as I didn't really want to talk but went out of my way to be nice to him, then thought that's probably what Dean does for me. Then joined our group again and got un-depressed as I realised it isn't.

Today I spent all morning reading Art Brut reviews and listening to Clare drool over Compact when I should have been working on my thesis. I finished my first draft on Friday so the worry has gone, but it's making me slack off. Not long now if I get on with it...

And just remembered this. This is the photo I will print off and take away to remind me of my time as a PhD student in Leicester. The perfect student-supervisor relationship:

How about you and I get together and make gravitational waves?

" " " " " " " " " a rapidly varying quadrupolar mass distribution?

The way you move perturbs my metric, baby.

Is that a laser interferometer in your pocket...?

Hmm, bit lame. Any more offers? Subject is gravitational waves.

Not you lot.  Please carry on being nice (in a non-insipid way).  It's Dean.  He just won't stop being nice to me.  Surely, knowing my feelings for him, he should at least be acting a bit weird with me, if not avoiding me completely.  It's all terribly frustrating, knowing that however friendly he's being it's just him being friendly.

His latest transgressions:

• carrying my beer back from the pub quiz for me after we won last week and no one else wanted it
• of his own free will, coming to sit next to me to do a Sudoku when I went to coffee early on Firday
  
• buying me a drink in the Marquis then not letting me buy him one back since Graham had bought my round
• coming with me to get drinks for the others at the Caribbean carnival
• coming with me to help carry when I offered to get corn on the cob for everyone at the Caribbean carnival (which also led to the titillation of the corn cob man referring to him as my husband)
• coming round to watch Donnie Darko with me and finding great amusement in our house's fridge poetry.  And appearing to like the John Hegley poems I showed him.

Surely the man has an unpleasant side.  Where is it?  I must see it, if I am ever to purge myself of this schoolgirl crush.

I find it ironic that the people who criticize "organised religion" for telling people what to think tend to be the ones who enjoy telling people how to be.

Of course, praying is a waste of time.  Especially for those people for whom it prevents worry and provokes action by freeing them from fear of failure.  They're obviously just not thinking positively enough.

 (Actually, churches can be real bastions of the "Positive Thinking" mentality.  Joy is from Jesus - how could you possibly be unhappy?  Leads to a lot of folk feeling guilty for feeling unhappy.  Double whammy.)

 I *do* like the idea that it's possible to not worry about something you're worried about.  I'll have to try that sometime.  Maybe if I drink enough the nagging feeling of unsolved problems will stop.  Of course, I could just solve them, but that would involve being worried enough to identify them and confront them, and may cause some pain and difficulty.  Ouch -  better avoid that.

And my heart bleeds for those who can't afford to eat due to their expenditure on luxury items.

Physician, heal thyself.

I am in the process of writing my thesis. It's now up to 173 pages, including figures. I am working on a subject which no one in my department knows anything about, no group in the country is working on and my supervisor has so far failed to read any of what I've written. I haven't slept properly for about a month. I'm also trying to sort out handing over the running of a football club that has been awarded £1700 in grant money and wants to join the church league to a group of youths who haven't even mastered saying "please" and "thank you".

 

I could cope with that. I am coping with it. Mostly by being sweary, antisocial, self-absorbed, not seeing my friends and not wasting effort thinking about anything other than thesis and football (and Dean, who refuses get out of my head, the git). So when people mindlessly tell me to "think positive" and that I would be happy if I only thought that life is good, then perhaps you can appreciate my annoyance.

 

Because the self-fulfilling prophecy, the victim mentality, thinking positive, has precious little to do with it. Of course looking on the bright side of things is generally helpful in life. We have an in-built need to be happy. But it has its limits. I can think positively until the cows come home but I still have to write the damn thing. I can not worry about it, but if I don't worry about it, I won't write it. That's what worry's for, it forces you to seek a satisfactory outcome. So while I can derive some comfort from the thoughts of freedom and all the fun to come after I've submitted and to some degree can anticipate those happy feelings, right now I have to face the difficulty, the frustration (I've become a master of crying silently at my desk), the mental challenge, the tedium, the shit and the worry that it's too late to make my shit results good.

 

Of course, it was my choice to do a PhD, my choice of what to fix and how hard to work all the way through and in the grand scheme of things it's not all that important. But to say that thinking "Life is good" will make it so is hopelessly deluded, of the same mindset of faith healers-- "You're not healed? Then you obviously don't believe enough!" Or like singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" when you're hung on a cross.

 

Life is neither good nor bad, but a fair mix of both. And some people get dealt a pretty shit hand. And the miracle is that some of these people don't become victims. And some people get dealt a good hand, but it doesn't mean that when they feel unhappy their feelings are unjustified or insignificant. And most people are to some degree told what to think and to some degree believe it, through no fault but being human, as we are social animals and need to identify with each other. And some people are stupid and some are clever, and some are kind and some are hateful. And life goes on, much as it always has.

 

Here endeth the lesson.

Won't somebody put me out of my misery?