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…

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.

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.

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 n^th 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.

I had my meeting with our combined Dean & Chaplain yesterday, as planned since December, and the gears of Oxford welfare have been put into play around me, as he ran through various things. Within ten minutes some strings had been pulled (probably not really but it felt like that, with him picking up the phone and making calls) and I had my first appointment with the doctor for about ten years, to be checked out on two fronts: first to go through a standardised “depression test” in order to rule that out, and then to see if my inability to focus and concentrate might possibly be due to some kind of deficiency. So I went off to the appointment and it was a strange experience, because that particular doctor’s manner made it hard to take anything about the process seriously. He said “I’ll e-mail you the test and you can fill it in at home, laugh at it, and e-mail it back to me”, and then I’m to have a blood test next week, but I’m feeling that perhaps I should have listened to the Dean more carefully to be sure that I got what the Dean wanted out of the appointment, since it was nothing by surreally comic from my perspective.

The Dean asked me various questions and also asked my permission to speak to the Senior Tutor (who loves me anyway), just to get a word in in advance in case the dreaded Tutorial Board or even public exam-related procedures later in the year start to arise. We have both written to both sets of tutors (Maths & Philosophy) to let them know what to expect of me and that I’m trying to deal with it. But any kind of concrete advice on what I might actually do in practical terms to make some progress was absent, and I pointed this out, and was only offered the suggestion to do some scheduling, and to try and rise above myself and not get worked up about it. I think perhaps he is very aware that coming back to Oxford makes a difference in itself and also that a huge part of the problem is just me worrying about it, and every measure just described helps to counter-act this, so it would definitely be a good place to start. Still, I am left uneasy by the fact that while I might be able to be happy for the next nine weeks, I absolutely have to be in a position to work very hard over Easter – or, at least, much harder than I did over Christmas, and the thing is that right now I still have no roadmap for getting to anything like this.

So this morning I’m making my plans, making myself a tick sheet for them, trying to take advantage of start-of-term-ness. This double life we all lead is so very weird – when in Sheffield Oxford is forever away, and when in Oxford Sheffield is the same, and yet on return to either it’s as if I’ve never been away. Everyone is the same and not in any way bothered by the gap of time and neither am I, in both places; it was still nice to see friends yesterday. We’ll see what I can make of it. I do have nine weeks and perhaps for the next three, at least, I can forget about what comes after that.

When I wrote that previous post I said to myself that I could have a couple of weeks to try and fix things, but if I failed, I said, I’d contact the college authorities for help, admit defeat, and become one of the failing students of Balliol. It took a lot for me to actually do this, as I now have, because for the past year I’ve been mentally separating myself off from this grouping. I’ve been advocating college’s welfare systems and regularly saying things like “well, look, none of us in this room will ever have to get any welfare as we have each other to go to, but…” and so on, but I feel like I’ve exhausted other possibilities, however hard it is in my foolishness to admit this. My parents, for example, don’t understand how I can love my subjects and get so much out of learning them in a lecture or tutorial yet, even with the pressure of deadlines and tests, can’t make myself do the hard work part. I never expected anything from them though as they have always had a policy of not getting involved in my education at all, throughout school, thinking that it has to be independent motivation. Well I’ve run out of that. None of my friends seem to have any ideas either. And I’ve been unable to draw it from myself. So I’ve admitted defeat, though of course that’s not a very helpful word to bandy about my mind, I suppose.

So now I’m to go back to my tutors and tell them that I’ve done almost nothing, that I’m trying to do things about it on my own and with the help of the various welfare figures around the place, but that I’m not making much progress so far. And all after a term where, at long last, Maths appears surmountable. I know that for the first time since coming to Oxford that I can do this, I can get on top of it, but that requires work that I seem incapable of doing. In one of the e-mails from College I was told that “don’t worry this is common and especially in your subject area”. I didn’t pay it much attention until a few hours later when I realised suddenly that it was a reference to the many, many Maths students (and esp. Math/Phils like me) who have dropped back years and got terrible grades and been refused entry to the fourth year. That’s the camp I now inhabit.

To the title of this post, then, and a lighter tone. While I’ve tried every one of my own faculties against this and failed, one thing I am managing to succeed on is my New Years’ Resolution to get up at 6:30 every day and have several uninterrupted hours of work in the morning when I definitely work best. It’s hopeless in the afternoon, but I do seem capable of achieving something at that time. So far, two days in, I’ve had no problems getting up but I’ve managed to lose what little focus I had both times, getting almost three hours of work on the first day but only one and a half today. But it’s progress so I’m pleased that I’ve got somewhere here. On Sunday I go back to Oxford and on Monday morning I go and talk about this in person, and we see what can be done. Balliol’s Chaplain tells me to have courage. But I’d most certainly be lying if I had much hope right now, though I suppose that being at home does that to you.

That form of hesitation now defines me, and the evidence for this is so very clear about me. A schoolfriend berated me some months ago for never actually doing/reading all these things I was doing to do/read. A tutor I’ve had this term echoed him, imploring me to read and explore. Two things have now come together: the student I have become in the latter half of this term, and my realisation that the comments of this tutor and of my friend and of other factors are one and the same. I’ve stopped, and I’m starting to fall backwards and to fall behind, intellectually. A task requiring effort that doesn’t absolutely have to be done now is always postponed. I don’t develop because I don’t put in the initial effort, because I hesitate and then never do it. Each of my four essays this term has been at the last minute, and each has been much poorer than they could have been. Problem sheets the same. And this is the very worst thing: as a direct result of this, I’m wasting my teaching here. On both the Maths and Philosophy sides I’ve had some absolutely fantastic tutors this term, and I’ve been inspired on both sides, but then I’ve let that flame of inspiration die before it’s really got going. I’m permanently failing to fan the flames. Perhaps it’s a problem of procrastination, but I dislike using a technical term like that without much of an understanding of what it means outside of popular parlance, where it’s rarely a serious issue. If you know more about this sort of thing then do say.

It’s not like I haven’t written about this before, but I think I have my finger on it now, with these factors that I’ve listed coming together. People will likely be saying “finally Sean’s realised what I keep telling him” – I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. The big thing that separates this post from my post at the end of the summer in terms of severity is that all this is now the very same problem during term. I’m not able to pull myself together in Oxford, of all places. This has got to stop before there is nothing left to salvage.

What’s it been replaced with? What’s dominating my thoughts (as well as worrying about this of course…) instead of what used to? A lot of the time it’s nothing. A lot of time-wasting, a lot of messing about with computers and silly videos. But also busy-bodying. While neglecting my actual duties, the amount of scheming and gossiping and politicising that I’ve been doing relating to the various student politics I’ve been involved in this term has been staggering. I’ve been so ashamed at watching myself. Firstly, the stuff is mostly insignificant, but it’s not even significant to me! It’s all self-created and it feels so stupid to write it. Politics is all about people and it’s all about that with me now too. I’m worrying about the fact that my friends are all third years who are about to leave. I’m comparing myself to others while refusing to allow myself to be positively inspired. I’m getting saddened by the subconscious and blameless yeargroup divide that will always keep me separated from everyone else around here. I’m using all this as an excuse not to break free and return to where I was. I can have friends, but at the end of the day, with what I want to devote myself to, I’m always going to be left in solitude. Once I was okay with that, but now I seem to spend a lot of time (fruitlessly, I might add, for it is my nature) trying to escape it.

Further, I’ve let the sapping of enthusiasm that often accompanies intense study here seep into me and further sap my reserves of interest. Someone e-mailed me recently, having followed the link to my blog in my e-mail signatures (which went out to about 500 people multiple times a week for the past three terms while I was JCR Secretary; I sometimes wonder how many people follow the link and find this site); she’s just started at Balliol and commented on how her willingness to start discussing things with people in a non-academic context had ebbed away. You start up conversations with the usual people to find hanging around College, and it’s always the same. For them, they can be proud of (one particular story here) getting in at 3 in the morning, going to bed, and then getting up at 5ish to write an essay for a 10am tute, or something, then trying to snatch some more sleep and still doing well. But this is not a life I am suited to nor is it a life I want. Yet as shown by all these last-minute essays and problem sheets this term, it seems to be what I’m left with and it doesn’t suit me and I am left unhappy, and worse, severely unfulfilled as expressed in this post.

But now I’ve got six weeks free from all that. I shall turn away from others until my scholarship is restored, until I take the plunge immediately and with gusto, like I once did. I’m going to forcefully throw all else from my mind. When I flag, I will accept mental fatigue from a mind unused to turning itself forcefully to its studies; I will take a break, I won’t give in. What is it hope to achieve? Firstly, I need to fix the lack of efforts in the latter half of this term. If I really work at it, it’s quite achievable that I’ll get on top of the term’s work: it doesn’t feel as out of reach as last year (this feeling is another source of regret for wasting teaching time this term to actualise this new-found confidence). Further, I want to read all that stuff I said I would. Or just read something, anything, and write about it a bit perhaps, so I have something concrete in order to wean myself off my need for quick results and easy insight. There are other projects: I have my website to fix, the JCR’s website to write lots of code for, I have some changes to my computing environment that I think will help me to deal with some of the organisational difficulties and inefficiencies I’ve had lately. I have lots of lists; I need to spend a little time bringing these together. I don’t know right now where I’m going to find the enthusiasm for these things. The bottom line is that it has to come from me. The balance of myself as an individual and as a cog in a social system is way out from where it should be.

The Great Man … is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without respect … If he cannot lead, he goes alone … There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

source, emphasis mine

How is it that I’ve lost all interest in setting out opinions in a calm and reflective yet detailed manner – I seem to have lost interest, so to speak, in having interests. Post after post contained – and I know I’ve got rose-tinted spectacles to at least some extent here – interesting and well-organised thoughts on politics, philosophy, my own approach to these and then just things like reviews of games. I’ve become incredibly introverted and selfishly concerned. I write and write and write – the amount of text that I pour into my diary text file is pretty insane – yet almost none of it is worth sharing. It feels like I have degraded, and that going to university has degraded me, which is incredibly sad.

Not sure what the point of posting this was, other than to note my experience tonight with reading those old posts. I really hope that I can regain my interest in the link between my theoretical ethics and politics and the rest of the world, and worry just a little less about myself.

Perhaps most notably there is the number of positive, constructive and pragmatic things that I’ve been involved with or de facto in charge of. Various things within Freshers’ Week are the obvious example. Throughout the week I was always there, popping up and getting things done that needed to be done. Having not yet started academic work, my enthusiasm knew no bounds: I got excited by every new face, every aspect of Oxford that I introduced them too and every room that I hauled their suitcases into. And then when the enthusiasm of other Committee members faltered, I ended up making sure that things happened that might not have otherwise happened. There’s absolutely no reward for this sort of thing, of course – no-one seems to notice half the time (except the freshers who asked if I was being paid at one point…) but to me the opportunity to both express my enthusiasm for Oxford and Balliol and then further to make myself useful in this way to others is all the reward I needed.

I’ve realised that the position I’ve been in through all this is the same position as those JCR figures who I looked up to and spent all my time with last year; the third years who I ate in Hall with, the second years who I formed the new Committee with as Secretary. When we stood on that stage on Tuesday morning and went round all the different Committee members introducing ourselves to the freshers, I realised that I was doing the things I admired others doing last year. But it’s very hard to believe that all that was only a year ago. This thought is further evidenced by the hero-worship shown by the freshers towards the likes of me (though admittedly it’s mostly worn off now): you’d be making conversation, spouting some little story about the porters or about an unusual tutor or some silly Oxford tradition and then suddenly you realise that ten faces are staring at you in rapture and there is absolute silence. Very odd – and mostly undeserved!

Once term got back into full swing though it’s back to the solitary life of someone who really isn’t cut out for his degree. As a more encouraging way of looking at it, I’ve got this thought that I could be described as “punching above my weight” – half of the degree I’m doing is something I’m not really cut out for but that I’m doggedly pursuing anyway. What is frustrating me though is that it is so easy to be thrown off kilter with each week’s work when one makes the smallest of misjudgements into how to spend one’s time. Make an error of time management one day, and you’ll still be feeling it three days later – or at least I will with the amount of time I have to sit in the library, hacking away at the mathematical salt mines. So I still don’t feel, almost half way through the term, that I’ve had a successful week despite being by far one of the most organised of students.

The academic problems I’ve been having have been mostly the same as ever. My reading speed in Philosophy continues to decline; last year I was on about twenty pages an hour (still too slow) and now I’m down to ten. This is completely impractical and it’s making my overall work suffer. Is it lack of focus? No idea what I can do about it. Maths is the same as ever, of course. I think I can be successful at Maths if I really try to spread it out more. If I interleave my Philosophy and Maths in hourly intervals (made longer when I’m stuck into something for once) then I can achieve more, and this is of course the best way to work. But as already noted this can only be successful with a great deal of luck and no misjudgements because once you make a mistake, all these nice ideas of constructive study habits go down the drain.

But now onto the positive academic stuff. I’ve got some fantastic Philosophy lectures this term, and my new technique of taking notes on my laptop instead of by hand means I gather huge amounts of well-organised information while still taking in the interesting parts of what the lecturer is saying. And I’ve been having some great tutorials in Philosophy and in Algebra, which I feel I’ve got a lot out of. So my tuition has been better than it was at many points last year.

That’s a hastily slammed out summary of the most recurring and important themes of the past month. I’m going to keep trying different work strategies to try and get over my problems academically – or rather, to try and make it so that I’ve done all I can and can therefore be happy about it. This next week I’m going to try going to bed earlier, to see if my tiredness is caused by lack of sleep or simply the fact that Oxford is very tiring, and I’m also going to try and work in the 8-9am slot instead of spending that time on administration/e-mails; I plan to move these to around 11 because that’s the time when the day’s flood of messages mostly come in – this is about making most of the time when I have most focus. Perhaps I’ll let you know how it goes.

It’s been a nice evening eating pizza with Committee and early arrivals of freshers. I’ve forgotten most of the names I learnt already. All of my friends are just the same – no fresh start, just as worked up over work already; it genuinely doesn’t feel like we’ve been apart for the ridiculous long time that we have. Tomorrow I start bright and early to get some shopping done before I go set up the room where we’ll be giving out keys to freshers. We’ve got walkie-talkies and call signs, it’s all pretty exciting. This is going to be a great week.