Archive for the ‘Diary’ Category
Quick thoughts after getting back to Sheffield
I’m due a post on events for the rest of term and plans for the vac in detail but now I’ve got back home and I’m at my desk I thought I’d write a few thoughts down. Right now I’m waiting for my e-mail to sync up to my desktop, after syncing all my files and configs and doing a system upgrade. It’ll be interesting to see if I have X after a reboot, or indeed a window manager, since I found this one on a different one on arrival which is disconcerting when I had my laptop and desktop on at the same time; the new one’s installation process is a pain so I don’t know if much will be working after a reboot. I’ve had the odd experience of looking over at my shelf of stuff and not really caring about most of it. All the reading backlogs and bits and pieces don’t seem very important because the philosophical works I have with me are more important (more on this later too — the real world (i.e. current affairs and popular intellectualism) just doesn’t seem important to me at all anymore, which is probably a bit worrying). This is one thing I will try and bring out soon: my enthusiasm for and commitment to Philosophy has gone through the roof in the past three weeks or so (though my ability to do it is still greatly hampered by the ongoing adversary I have described at length before). All I care about (materially!) is the stuff I’ve brought with me: the data on my laptop, the paper in my folders and the piles of books. This is a nice feeling and an encouraging one.
Tomorrow I’m taking the day off to finish unpacking and to clear my organisational backlogs so that everything is clear and ready to go before me for the next five and a half weeks (time in France and time in Oxford after that before full term starts a whopping eight weeks away) and the nice thing is that I know that I will get it done. I’ll make a quick list when I get up of the various backlogs that I am to clear, get them cleared and then I will feel legitimately free for the rest of the day. Perhaps I’ll write on here. I’ll try to get my diary filled in (got four days-worth of rough notes that lose meaning every hour I delay writing them up). And on Tuesday one of the hardest tasks I have ever faced will be before me, as I will write about properly. But this evening I am contented. I am concerned about how much I have to motivate myself to do, and I am guilty that during my insane 8th week of many conflicting academic and social pressures I have neglected my contact with people I care about; I’ve got to try to fix this, but it’s okay for now. Because I’ve got Blame’s Essential Mix on and Nu:Tone’s Balaclava is incoming, and I feel the challenges I face are solidifying into things I can hack at, and I’m starting to really believe my frequently proferred views of what’s important in how I am to spend my life.
Come on offlineimap…
The worst cycle of the cycle I’ve ever cycled through
The Balliol 2nd year Maths and Maths & Philosophy contingent are not very good at doing our degrees. It’s a horrible cycle. I’ve spent the past four days doing mad quantities of terrible work to meet deadlines, neglecting everything else; for the next couple of days I will attempt to catch up on everything else in my life (centered around my inbox — it’s been at inbox zero for four weeks until the past couple of days). But then I’ll be back in the same place again because of spending that time on other things. Round and round we go. I’m writing about this because the past four days have perhaps been the worst instance of this cycle. Monday morning was our pure Maths deadline so we met in the JCR the night before to get help from each other on questions we couldn’t do. At least, that’s the idea; the tutors encourage us to meet up and exchange tips for the harder questions rather than coming to the class clueless. And even if you need a lot of help to do a question, it’s okay because writing it out in your own words is still a valuable learning experience, since a decent part of this degree is writing the stuff out. You don’t have to be amazing at Maths if you can get good at that. But this is not what happened on Sunday night, and it’s not what’s happened on Sunday nights all term or whatever the deadline night was last term. We got it right in first year and learnt from each other and it was good but now, it’s essentially a copy-fest. We have a progidy in our year who has generally done the questions or at least he’s done enough that he can do the rest while the rest of us work through the ones he’s done so far, but the reason that this particular Sunday was so awful was that our genius had a pile of Probability to do (applied Maths, so only relevant for about 40% of the people there) before he got onto Topology. So we all slotted into our roles. I giggled and panicked more and more as time went on, complaining about the futility of it all; it’s a deeply unpleasant and shameful experience to be doing this every single week/fortnight. Our genius sat there quietely writing away. The ‘cool’ Math/Phils exchanged ‘banter’ on uninteresting banal student topics as a form of procrastination. I interspersed their comments with my usual outlandish opinions and moaned about my degree. It’s always the same.
Except that we’re not usually sitting there for eight hours. We started at 5 and I got there at around 5:30. At 6:30 we decided to go and eat in Hall, none of us expecting to get back home in time. In Hall people spoke of how much nicer Hall food was than our own but of course we all know it’s an illusion and one gets sick of it after a few weeks of eating it every day. We returned to the JCR and did another hour or something, and then all went to the bar for a pint of cola each for caffeine. It seemed to work — a little — and so we continued to scribble away, slowly caring less and less as time went by but not wanting to give up. Once we decided to do up to a certain question as a group, none of us wanted to give up early, despite how little we were achieving as time slipped by. At 12:30 I gave up and headed home, with two questions I’d aimed to do not done. A few remained but I don’t think they stayed too long.
This plus lectures plus mindless classes is my Maths degree at the moment. Subtract the lectures and add a smidgen more class engagement and you have the Maths degree of most of the others in the second year here at Balliol. The psychology is so weird. Our tutors are ridiculously laid back compared to other subjects in Balliol and Maths tutors at other colleges, and they are not actually going to do anything if we don’t hand the work in. As I said, they encourage us to work together to some extent because this stuff is hard and our actual exams are always easier; these questions are to deepen/give us an understanding of the material. And as I’ve noted, we don’t learn too much once we’re past a certain time in the evening. So why do we put ourselves through this, desperate to finish? As I said the chat is always the same. “What are we doing up to?” “We think question five is where the lectures have got to.” “Well I might just do up to three then,” and inevitably this person won’t be able to tear themselves away from the almost entirely pointless activity after question three. We have one guy who is supremely confident in his ability to revise and doesn’t care that much about problem sheets and always remains very relaxed.
So that’s Sunday night, but then most of us had Philosophy due in on Monday. The deadline for my essay was, I believe, 9am Tuesday but the tutor didn’t really set one; everyone else had 5pm Monday. We had classes 9-11 and 5-6 so immediately after the Topology class, with minimal reading done, the 5pm crew trekked off to the computer room to start typing. I headed to the library, hoping to get some more reading done first, and of course here my problems start. Two and a half hours in the Rad Cam later and I’ve got comfortableish with a twelve page article. I sat down to write the essay after the 5pm class and after having eaten. Of course by now it’s 8pm, and I’d just had solid work plus a small portion of sleeping for about 36 hours; there was no way I was going to be successful. I e-mailed my tutor to say that I wasn’t going to get it in and went to bed at 9pm. The following day (so, yesterday) I headed back to the library and did four hours on a twenty page article, and then I started writing. I left the library at 7pm, ate, start writing again at about 9pm, was finished a couple of hours later. Tutor doesn’t seem to care that much but while I appreciate his flexibility it concerns me that we’re going to run out of term before we’ve had the number of essays and tutorials we’re supposed to… And so now I’m out of the cycle for another ten days or so. In which I’ll achieve precious little with all these stupid lectures getting in the way, and with it being easier to give up when my present difficulties stop me from getting through reading and spreading Maths out, as I should.
That’s how it should be. I might have to work a bit harder closer to deadlines but this is after days of trying problem sheet questions and with a good deal of reading already under my belt. We’re second years and we ought to be good at this by now. This part of our degree should be the most fun because we’re adept at spreading out work, we don’t actually have that much of it this term and we can let thinks sink in gradually because it’s all a part of our lives every single day. With a good schedule, all the other things I need to do can happen in the evenings after a good day of work. Yet it just never seems to work. I am one of the most organised people yet it just never seems to work. A good part of this is my present handicap to studying, which replaces the laziness and poor sleeping habits of everyone else in the above description, but it’s not all of it. Hopefully we’ll figure things out before exams but I’m not so sure, and it makes studying here unpleasant. As I’ve said before you basically need to get things perfect in order to cope with joint honours Oxford degree workloads. So now I’ve got a new Essential Mix on to listen to while I dig myself out of the mountain of little tasks and e-mails sitting all over the place, ready to make yet another attempt I don’t expect to succeed.
On feeling and serenity
I have to write this right now before the armour comes back. When I speak to someone, however much I feel I can trust them, about things that I would otherwise only write on here, the armour chokes off my words before I can get them out and it sanitises them and it detachs me in a dishonest and inaccurate way. It’s here too, only lessar: it wanted me to put ‘feel I’ after the first word of this post. Wherever I try to form sentences, be it for writing/typing or speaking, it comes up around me and messes them up. Well, right now I’m not wearing it and I am going to take advantage of this brief interlude. This afternoon I read the better part of my favourite book again and I listened to some songs. I linked some thoughts from a couple of days together. And then I was just very very sad for longer than I’ve ever been sad for for as long as I can remember. Not a worried, panicky sadness from the crushing burden of my academic issues at the moment, which has been so frequently a companion for me recently, but a real and undirected sadness. At least that’s what it became after the direction the book gave it originally (below) faded. Then there was hope. My tutor-come-psychotherapist says I have some sadness to feel. So maybe I’m getting somewhere. I’m going to write about this afternoon’s sadness, and I’m going to write a bit about the earlier thoughts.
The book was more beautiful than I ever remembered it to be. Not anything about the book itself, or perhaps even the story much. The prose is pretty straightforward. There’s a good poem about halfway through, and some of the conversations made me smile but it’s generally quite average and there are even facets of the story that I don’t think contribute very much at all, as I’ve said before, such as the stuff about Bill and Charlie’s intelligence. The characters themselves, aside from Charlie, aren’t especially endearing, and they’re not hugely inspirational – or, not in a way that stands out compared to the significant thing I’m about to mention. It’s nice how they live their youths out in the early nineties and how much better off they seem to be without our apathy and our technology, but again, I take in all this stuff in a different way to how I take in what made this book more beautiful for me this afternoon than it has ever been before. The upcoming sentence takes more resolve to type than anything else that takes resolve that I could do at the moment. I’d sooner ask out a hypothetical ‘perfect’ girl than write this (hope that makes my point but it doesn’t sound right to me). What makes the book so beautiful is the relationships between the characters and the network of experience-sharing they form; heck, let’s go all out: their love for each other. Maybe that’s not specific enough. Their closeness, perhaps. I feel like I haven’t used enough words for something as big as this but perhaps ‘love’ is sufficient after all.
The elements (the characters) don’t matter up to isomorphism and you find that Maths is more about the maps/functions between the objects rather than the objects themselves. A nice Maths joke to relieve the tension I just amassed in myself with that. I appreciate that it’s going to be hard for your average reader to get why what I just wrote was such a big deal for me. It won’t be for certain others. I might be the type to be conceited but any family member reading this will have the biggest ever ‘I told you so’ ready to serve up to me. Well, I’ll figure that bit out later because I don’t think my conception is quite in line with yours just yet; I’ve not given in entirely. But this is not relevant right now and I need to go on and keep writing.
As I was realising the above account of why I was getting so much from the book this afternoon, I was also getting pretty close to the end. Which makes sense, given what happens towards (but not at) the end. I started moving around the room. I sat in the two chairs. I kneeled on the window seat. I read the epilogue leaning against the wardrobe, but nowhere was right. After I closed the book I went and kneeled on the edge of the bed and covered my eyes up and got angry at people in the street and the rest of the flat breaking into my solitude with their everyday noises. For some reason I was okay like that. So then I did my usual thing and started writing this post in my head, as I went through my thoughts. Here’s the specific sadness. I do not feel like I am or have ever been close to anyone in the way that Charlie, Patrick and Sam are close. And (ulp — here comes another deeply difficult to write sentence) I want it so much whence I felt so sad. Again, this is not the crushing weight of circumstance but the melancholy of some strange kind of solipsism. This needs some explaining. I do not want to hurt anyone. I have a few very close friends, but I don’t have what Charlie has. I don’t know. I feel the need to excuse myself because of what I just wrote because I don’t see how it is true but it feels like it is. In Oxford it’s a worse situation perhaps. I know an awful lot of people and am well-liked, but manage to somehow keep myself from ever getting anywhere near any of them. And while my respect for my family members grows more and more as time goes on, and I love them and appreciate their support with things, we are not and don’t see how we could ever be close.
Maybe I’m completely unable to put things into perspective because I’ve not had the right experiences to match up with the amount of growing up I’ve done so far. Maybe I’m feeling lonely in a way that only romantic/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-to-distinguish-from-friendship relationships can fulfill. I have no idea; these are just possibilities that occur to me.
As I mentioned before this faded after a little while and I was just sad, and the hope I mentioned earlier started to rise when previous hypotheses from that tutor reoccured to me. And that’s all there is say because it’s really that simple to me. Or it’s not — because nothing is — and I don’t know myself well enough to explain it any further. And the couple that everyone else thinks are shallow and angry and I think have rather more to them when you get to know them are shouting and complaining about stuff in the kitchen and I’m struggling to concentrate. So I’ll go on. It is about this point that I realised that I needed to write right now before I lost what might just be me losing my grip on something one should not lose one’s grip on, but something that might also be something more significant. So I closed the curtains, turned the light off, locked the door, had a glass of water and started to type.
I haven’t long left before the armour’ll be back and I’ll start making excuses. Some of them will be real or legitimate and not really excuses at all but some of them won’t be like that and the worst thing is that I won’t be able to tell the difference. So as I said I would I’ll do the thoughts I’ve been having, now I’ve done the feelings. Back on familiar territory, you’ll forgive me if I lose the thing I might have had when writing the above if indeed I had something. This stuff is where the title for this post comes from. This messy, disjointed post with long running sentences that I would usually edit to death before hitting ‘Publish’; not today.
The first thing is of the relativity of feeling and of how the people around me in Balliol have an absolute view instead, and how I think this has infected me to the extreme and harmed me and all those others around me. I do not mean to imply that this is something unique to Balliol at all, but this is the first place I’ve personally been in that has made me see it clearly. Towards the end of the book, Charlie tells us how he won’t tell his children that some people are starving when they won’t eat their greens; he tells us how he his sister, about to start university, visits him in hospital to express how foolish she feels for being worried about starting university when his situation is that much worse, and Charlie doesn’t think she should feel foolish at all. Yes, there is a point when we must pull ourselves together and get on with things, and it is good when those around us who care for us are honest, and point out when we need to snap out of it. But the modern world microcosmed in Balliol, takes this from honesty to stony coldness. Excitement or enthusiasm is not only not cool, it has very little worth at all. Not everyone thinks this, but there are elements who do (I do have a particular Balliolite or two in mind; maybe others can guess who), and it infects me. We are not allowed to feel anything but mirth. Seriousness is forbidden, torn down by banal student humour. And I bring it home with me and deride friends who are only a tiny bit younger than me in the same my enthusiasm and seriousness can get derided here. As an aside — I reckon that this probably has a lot to do with fact that people in Balliol are so utterly useless at relationships. They’re so deeply afraid of being honest with each other. It upsets me to watch them make such a mess of things over and over.
I haven’t done a very good job there and this is a subject on which I would like to expand upon and elucidate more clearly in the future. The addition that has come from today’s thinking is that feelings are relative. If we attempt to consider seriousness or other types of feeling out of context in an absolute manner then we’re only going to end up throwing it all out. Maybe, then, there is a place for privacy with one’s thoughts; maybe I am wrong in my policy of being willing to put pretty much anything up on here. We must watch ourselves. It is too easy to forget this. We must consider others and their reactions to things more carefully. Very, very little is worth throwing out or deriding. Perhaps I am too judgemental after all.
One final thought that, as I say, I’ve had recently and have had reinforced and enriched from my reading this afternoon and evening. All Charlie wants is for life to be enough. And I have a new word for this, based on how I was feeling around midday yesterday in the sun: he wants serenity. Yesterday I had serenity when a figure I see as having authority cleared my name of some stuff that has dogged me and I felt that I could be okay with everything. This deserves writing about properly, something I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and I will soon enough. But the trick is to not live off temporary boosts of serenity from external sources. The trick is to get it out of ourselves somehow. I’m starting to really appreciate stock phrases like “be happy with yourself” in this new light, and as I say it’s a series of thoughts that I will come back to.
I think that’s all I’m going to be able to get past the defenses. I’m feeling more and more normal. Better quit while I’m ahead. I’ve just spend roughly six hours in self-indulgent (bwahahaa it’s back, here I go!) reading and writing. Now I have reading and essays and problem sheets that, as per usual, I’m not really in a position to do much with, but that’s the same as ever, so I don’t want this seeming like an overtly negative end to this post. Just reading it all through. Bitty and childish and whatever. But I wrote it so I’m posting it, bah.
Oscillations between quantity and quality
I’ve had three weeks of term now and a series of events and oscillations that I haven’t written about yet. I’m not going to go and read all my notes; I’ll just write a little about them to avoid wasting any reader’s time. If I’d written about this more regularly on here then there’d be a lot more but I’m not sure there’d be much more of much interest. My blood test results came back as in every way normal except for an underactive liver due to the fact that I don’t drink, which is interesting; my mother who is a nurse by background took a look at the other numbers which don’t mean anything to me and tells me that it means I probably have a pretty healthy diet which was good to know. So that’s the medical side over.
Then I’ve had meetings with the tutors on the Maths and Philosophy sides who know me best; one is Italian and wasn’t sure she could get a very good impression of the issue in e-mail form, and the other I bumped into late at night in the quad. Anyone from home who I’ve spoken to about Balliol will probably know who this last one is. On the Maths side my tutor thinks that I am probably over-blowing the issue in terms of holiday work because without the immediate pressure of exams that matter that’s what happens, and she’s given me an idea of what she wants me to focus on this term in order to make Easter revision more doable, which is good. On the Philosophy side, it turns out that this tutor has ten years of psychotherapy training so after discussing things with him for a while he decided to give me a diagnosis of sorts; he reckons that I have some sadness in me that I am trying to block out; I can’t do this blocking out when studying so it pops up (this is the image I have of what he was saying) and just stops me from getting anywhere.
I can explain what he’s trying to get at a bit more I think if I describe how things are actually going from day-to-day. Essentially I am oscillating on a weekly basis (not much of a sample to go on right now I admit) between having problems with quantity and quality of work. One week, I’ll do loads and loads. I’ll monopolise the hours in between lectures and classes well and by the end of each day I’ve had so many hours in the library or in classes that I’m very ready to go to bed. But actually if I then consider what I’ve achieved, it’s pretty tiny. It’s the amount I might have expected to do in a third of the time I’ve actually spent. I am a slow studier, esp. in Philosophy, and this is fine and probably a good thing in fact but this extreme is not. So the next week I’ll have no motivation to go and sit in the library as it just looks like I won’t achieve anything; I’ll go to all my lectures and perhaps have a few library sessions but it’s half-hearted. Then suddenly I have deadlines and I switch back to the other week. Oscillations between quantity and quality.
The next step recommended by this tutor, the Dean/Chaplain and my GP after the blood test results came back (oh yeah — I’m not depressed either, as expected; got those results back too) is the University Counselling Service, so that’s where I went on Friday morning for an appointment with a psyhotherapist. Yup: I can now refer to “my therapist” in that cliched fashion. We’re meeting weekly. Her school of thought is different to my tutor’s but she asked me about what he’d said and we’re actually running with that. So our meeting on Friday consisted of her getting me to give her masses and masses of information about my home life; we didn’t even have time to get onto Oxford. This immediately seems weird to me because after the first week or so I don’t think about home at all; parents and siblings get annoyed with me not contacting them because they are clearly thinking about me, yet I am just busying away in the Oxford bubble. And of course I’m sceptical of all this. But I’m trying to keep an open mind and since the meta-ethics lecture I am missing each Friday for this is not by a particularly good lecturer I don’t really mind. At the end of our meeting on Friday she asked me how I was feeling after all that, and I just felt like I’d given a sociological (sociologists, forgive me) account or analysis of a group of people that I’m not part of and that have little relevance to me, because that’s how I felt, but we’ll see. I’m quite willing to be wrong. If there are some answers here then they’ll be very welcome.
The most interesting thing that has arisen so far is not directly related to this. I was on her in a shot when she started by referring to ‘my file’ and I was continually second-guessing her “reading into things” by reading into them myself on her behalf, often when she had no intention of commenting at all. Why am I so paranoid here when the only things I’m not willing to write up on here are those relating to individuals, for obvious reasons? I have one possible answer which is something I’ve been meaning to write about on here for a long time so I’ll present that to her next week. One explanation I was able to offer this week was that I think about everything to the nth degree and I didn’t want her thinking that there was any significance in my comments on subject x being quite developed and complex, because there are a huge number of banal things on which I have a lot to say. See blog archives.
Just one further comment about Oxford’s support network, if you like: the number of people in this or similar situations is sufficiently large that you’ll find sympathy and understanding from almost anyone here which one doesn’t get at home, because everyone either has had milder problems themselves or knows someone who has. My mother, for example, is supportive but finds it very hard to understand how I can like my subjects, want to do well yet not do it; not so here. For example a former Balliol Maths/Phil who heard part of the conversation I had with my Philosophy tutor, who I barely know, e-mailed me a set of remarks that evening after finding out my name. At least one other person who I don’t spend a great deal of time with has found my blog and written to me too. Which is nice.