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After much delay I finally got the results from the MA course I did last year,
ie. 'merit', with marks high enough to do be considered for a PhD if I want to.
Much relief.

Major shifts are happening in the office. Most of the content division is moving
to my end of the office (we have an open-plan, big spacious office where
everyone shares desk with others. Very dot-commie), and there is much
tumultousness.
 
Happily I can remain in the corner with my back to the wall. I'd hate to have to
be constantly on the alert for people sneaking up on me.
 
The tectonic shifts are far short of earthquakes, though. I'm losing the nice
guy in front of me and gaining a huge table on my right-hand side, and the chief
editor's moving down to the far end of the office. Alas. :-)
 
Plans for tonight: drown my sorrows and feelings of abandonment. Going for a
drink with a friend of mine and some of her friends, and then on to a birthday
party for another friend. Just like last week-end, and just like last week-end
I'll be absolutely shattered by the end of it.
 
Happily I got paid today, so I'll finish off the furniture-buying over the
week-end. Planning a huge, monstrous dresser-shelf-beast in dark mahogany, £70,
and a nice cheap ex-office-desk. Need to sort out my ceilnig as well, and set up
that website I was planning to provide my girlfriend with.

My girlfriend left this morning for Trinidad and Tobago.
 
She's staying there for three months to make a film with a big prestigious film
producer.
 
Very good for her, very exciting, but I'm depressed that I'm going to spend the
winter by myself. Bleak and lonely.

Sheesh. My friend just came back from 16 months of zipping around the world
('zipping' is my favourite word at the moment. Seem to use it for anything
involving movement from one place to the other, or action... Maybe it
sub-consciously reflects the fact that I feel like events in my life are
happening in accelerated motion at the moment).
 
Loaded with anecdotes and musings on all conceivable topics, centering around
his idea that 'borders are bad'. Loaded also with a dubious and hopefully
uncontagious internal parasite (yeah right...), some white wiggly two inch-thing
that contorted itself around his stools one day in a public toilet in the Middle
East.
 
Parasites being my fear, obsession and morbid pleasure (ever thought that you
might have one, lodged in your brain, growing steadily, like an obscene,
wriggling brain tumour? Or eating your brain-mass and burrowing through your
grey substance, making tunnels and holes in it, entire colonies of white grey
slime life eating your very being,,,*yew*...), I seriously, seriously hope never
to witness what he saw in that bus-stop...
 
Except for that I'm fine, and he's fine. He's worried about having to get a
job/suit/steady income, but he reckons with an Oxbridge degree in maths and
philosophy he can probably get one, if the stoops to shaving and getting himself
a tie...
 
Scoring weed has been prominent on his mind since he got back, which in turn has
led my caner friends into an orgy of indulgence and
'taking-another-day-off-work' scenarios. Happily they're computer programmers,
which means they can fall off their chairs as much as they want, as long as they
work from home. Probably in the office too, come to think of it. Weird hi-tech
priests are touched with divinity, holy fools of cyberspace, and can do much as
they want because without them nothing would function. The cogwheels of the
company.
 
Anyway. Got to get back to work.

It's the end of my workday, and I'm looking forward to a well-deserved (I think)
holiday tomorrow: a time to rest, sleep as long as I want, hang around the flat
and get used to it, put my new bed together (if it comes), look around for a
washing-machine-for-hire, check out the local market, shop for second-hand
furniture, buy a book, hang out with my girlfriend, head over to the British
Library to research *that* paper, play Tekken 3, buy some nice food, get some
extension cords, call BT to see whether we can get a proper ADSL connection or
have to settle for a crummy phone line, get the electric shower sorted out...
 
My god, I have plans! So many plans! I don't know what is happening to me, I'm
becoming an engine of efficiency...
 
*That* paper is a thing my father wants me to write for a conference, it might
get published if it's good enough: the working title is 'From Kali to Keynes: a
brief genealogy of the idea of creative destruction' (suggested to me by a
friend who's a bit too witty for her own good, really...). Briefly stated, the
idea is to reclaim Schumpeter's ideas from the sweaty grasping hands of
Neo-Classical Economics, de-mathematicise them and link them to Hindu ideas of
cyclicity and non-linear conceptions of time.
 
Sounds like quite a mouthful, come to think of it. Not quite sure how to go
about it at the moment, though the historical link through Nietzsche is (kind
of)clear:
 
Hindu ideas--> Schopenhauer--> Germany--> Nietzsche--> back to Germany---> Schumpeter
 
Actually, that's crap. The real situation is much more complex than that, but I
have to abstract clear and most of all *useful* lines in the general morass of
things. Any ideas?
 
Anyway: going back to the real world to log off and head back. My turn to cook
today, i think.

another day. feeling better today, less confused. though very tired.
 
girlfriend's mother kept me and her two daughters up til 4 am this morning,
recounting the incredible story of her abusive and violent marriage, which ended
in a dramatic flight and divorce almost 20 years ago. terrible to see a grown
and mature woman cry uncontrollably, but I imagine it must have been healthy for
her to get these things off her chest (?): not talk them to bits, but just get
to share them with some close confidantes (her daughters). she told us things
she had never told anyone before, not even her analyst.
 
about an hour into it, she seemed to 'pick up momentum', to gather energy. her
speech got more animated, and she was laughing with us at the crazy and neurotic
f**kuped antics of her husband's family (don't know if I'm allowed to use
swearwords in this diary, but they seem to be the only words which can carry
what I mean across: I'm talking serious pathology here), until suddenly she was
over the cusp and had told the story of how she was attacked with a knife one
night. then for a few seconds she sat there, still and quiet, as though without
knowing it she had just let go of an incredibly heavy weight and was floating
free, or punched through a barrier, looking a bit sad, and forlorn, and then she
started crying as I have never seen her (or anyone else) cry before. wailing.
 
which was incredible, because she is a woman I have always respected, who always
is in charge and sorted and ready to provide advice. a bastion of sorts. and to
see her cry, to see a person like her cry like that made you realize how
profoundly she was damaged and hurt by the events she was recounting...

First thing: it's ridiculously cold outside. It gets dark at 4.30pm, and it's
going to keep getting darker and darker, earlier and earlier for another month.
When I get up in the morning I feel weak and frail, and I huddle inside my long
dark coat like a wizened old man standing up against the elements, as I scuttle
my way to work. Why can't we hibernate? It seems men were cursed to stay awake
during the long night of the planet...
 
Second, I'm still feeling confused and weird from the week-end. Didn't sleep too
well <and I had way too many cigarettes,> which screws up my brain somehow.
Tired and absent.
 
Third: The death-count continues. A friend of mine was in a bar toilet while a
random guy he didn't know was stabbed in the temple in another stall. My
brother's friend lost both her parents last month. My girlfriend's grandfather
died, just after their grandmother died a couple of months ago (also my
girlfriend's grandmother). My girlfriend nearly died in a traffic accident last
month, and her friend died of a heart attack immediately after, at the ripe old
age of 23. There's about twice as many I don't remember at the moment, but I'm
starting to feel really unnerved.
 
Then again, maybe this was all happening before, only I didn't notice it. When
your mind fixates on something you start noticing it everywhere. Can't remember
the RAW quote that bears on the subject at the moment, but it's something along
the lines that the vast and growing death count I perceive reflects only the
vast and growing power and obsessiveness of my imagination...
 
I try to purge myself of the sly anxiety that this deathtoll links to the
millennium, that a slow and semi-visible process is taking place whereby some
individuals are dying, vacating the earth for other pastures, as part of some
incomprehensibly engineered global scheme... But again, that is only an attempt
to read meaning into apparent chaos and entropy, isn't it? The bottom line is
it's probably entirely senseless, the whole thing. As the existentialists would
have it, we're doomed to be free...
 
Fact: I don't know *that* many people, and too many of them seem to have friends
and relatives who die at the moment. And yet, I haven't been struck yet... I
keep expecting someone I know and love to keel over dead for some random reason.
'I walk in the valley of the shadow of death', as the Xtians would say it...
 
Maybe it's just the sudden onset of the consciousness of death hitting me. Never
thought much about it before, but at some point I suppose the feeling of
immortality (which I never really experienced) gives way to an awareness of
impermanence. You never notice you felt immortal until you no longer feel it. My
parents seem a little bit older and frailer every time I see them, and so do
many of my older friends. I myself sometimes feel acutely aware of the fragility
of the vessels that pump blood through my brain, my heart, my organs... I am
embodied in an incredibly frail (yet somehow resilient) machinery, in which a
thousand things could go fatally wrong at any time...
 
*brrr*... Sounding increasingly depressive at this point. Have to remind myself
(and any readers) that I'm actually of a reasonably cheerful disposition, but at
the moment I just harbour a number of depressive thoughts. What do you expect,
trying to survive winter in this city?!?

Finished at work for the week-end, two days of blissful peace, buying beds,
sorting out things, and ultimately *reading* undisturbed. Funny thing that,
since I left academia (finished my MA in September) and entered working life
I've come to appreciate fully the blessing of being able to take your time and
read, get up luxuriously late in the mortning, all the things you take for
granted until you can't afford them anymore.
 
So much time I used to waste as a student! Sit around endlessly watching
EastEnders, or Richard Whitely coquettishly making his dreadful silly little
puns and flirting with Carol. Staying up all night to watch the learning zone on
BBC2.
 
Faffing.
 
I never faff these days. Always, even at rest, there is a purpose, a future
goal: I recharge my batteries for the coming week, or I do things I can't do
during the week (office hours including travel easily span the entire day, from
morning til 8 or 9 or 10 at night...). Shopping, buying food, cooking, cleaning,
packing, unpacking, going to funerals, hanging out with friends, staying up in
hospitals, holding ailing hands and telling stories, and you name it...
 
Anyway: two of my friends are having a birthday bash this evening, a girl I used
to live with a couple of years ago and a guy who did my course when we were
doing our BAs. Before that I meet another girl for a drink, and after that I
entertain guests in our fashionable hip and fashionable modern derelict
no-central-heating but we're-so-cool-it-HURTS flat.
 
Why am I being caustic? I genuinely love my flat. After four months of endless
trouble, cheating estate agents infused with the spirit of Satan, working their
evil deeds on our deposit money. Rotting houses. Holes in the floors that filled
up with infernal sludge and stinking earth-water. Heinous plastic bedrooms with
no space, no charm and aesthetic meaning.
 
The flat we have at the moment is a breath of hope in a world gone crazy, the
one thing which underlies all the other dull, sad and pointless events, making
them bearable.
 
[...]
 
God, can't imagine anyone could possibly want to read this boring, pointless
stuff. Suppose the art of writing for an invisible audience is something to be
honed and perfected, not assumed. Who am I writing for, anyway? Partly for
myself, partly for my girlfriend, though I might just never tell her about this
now: I'm embarassed at the conceit and ponderous, unnecessary
self-reflectiveness of this.
 
By nature I'm post-modern and reflexive, but in the sense that I paralyse
myself, rather than gain any insight into myself. Questioning my motives
ceaselessly, wondering what I should do and could and would do, how people would
take what I did, what it would mean, what consequences it would have... And more
often than not in a kind of weird, self-blind way which obscures more than it
reveals. Neurotic, at heart, though not clever enough for it to assume the
dimensions of a Kafka...
 
The main audience, though, must be others, and the main purpose to exhibit
myself and have myself reflected in others. To see what others think of me,
basically. How pathetic. Deep-rooted insecurity.

Writing for a living seems to be inspiring me with the desire to write for
myself, not write about dictated things... finding it difficult to muster great
enthusiasm for what I do... Hopefully, this will only be a temporary lapse, part
of growing up means conquering the drive to indulge oneself and drift around
life... I suppose.
 
I'm having my lunch-break at the moment, which as usual consists of a
nutrient-charged extra-strong Frappuccino from the coffee-shop downstairs.
Trying to focus on what I'm writing (I write content and edit for a website),
but my mind seems constantly to drift to other things. Too little sleep
(girlfriend going away to to Trinidad to make a film from next week til February
means I spend little time sleeping at night), and having moved into a new flat I
still haven't secured a bed for myself... Sleeping semi-rough on a mattress on
the floor. Which doesn't bother me, but it prevents the mind from settling.
Always things to do and sort out 'before...'. Before I can settle and chill,
relax and get on with my life.
 
The last few months have been quite stressful, on most levels, and most of all I
feel like hibernating. Winter settles in and my bloods slows and turns sluggish
in my veins... Don't understand what drove those crazy idiots who first settled
this country to cross the English Channel from the mainland. Had humanity
possessed but an ounce of wisdom it would have stayed in a fairly narrow belt on
both sides of the equator, maybe with a couple of universities thrown 'up north'
(in the case of Europe, around the latitude of Northern Italy; not past the
Alps, certainly...).

My life is really, really weird these days. The last six months, in fact the entire year has been shaped by a punitive streak of ocurrences. I feel like traumatic and disruptive events follow each other according to an inexplicable geometrical logic.

People have died around me, had bad accidents and illnesses, problems of all kinds. My girlfriend of two years is going away for a long, long time, unexpectedly and just as we were emerging from a six-month spell of alienation from each other and were getting along fine for once...

And just as I had finally found a decent flat in this godforsaken hellhole of a city. After four months of living in the back rooms of friends, with borrowed keys and all my earthly goods packed away in bags and threatening to disintegrate for lack of air (I was afraid that when I opened some of my bags the contents would turn to dust, like a sealed Roman crypt when exposed to the air again...), I finally found a beautiful, beautiful warehouse conversion which I'm now sharing with three (soon-to-be-four) good friends.

Considering whether to take up a belief in karma: at least I would feel more in control of what was happening (it's all because of me, even if I don't realise why or how or for what...).

On the other hand, there is an unhealthy megalomania to the belief that everything that happens around you is determined by your own actions. What about the actions of others?

And how on earth (or in heaven) does all the karma add up neatly in the end? If everything that happens to everyone is determined by their actions in past lives (or in the past of this present one): I commit a terrible, criminal act in a previous life, and when the punishment comes round many others close to me are implicated, and suffer. Who works out the logistics of these equations, and who balances the incredibly complicated moral mathematics of it? According to Hindu doctrines it's not a 'who', it's a 'how': it's part of the order of the universe, a natural thermodynamics of morality... It's all beyond my poor head...

Yup: sometimes it seems that there is an underlying pattern to the events, a progression or logic to them which just escapes my understanding, because I can't step back from them to get the whole picture. What if there is something at work, connecting all these apparently unrelated events: one person dies, then a traffic accident and an illness, then another person dies, all unrelated but all of them happening in strict linear succession: first one, then then the next, and when that one finishes another one...

I speculate wildly, though. It's strange but I feel quite comfortable rambling about these topics, with the implicit goal in mind that they be read by other people, complete strangers. I have to imagine a hypothetical reader who is completely unfamiliar with any of my circumstances, yet at the same time consider that many of my friends may come to read it, even possibly my girlfriend, who is the reason why I started writing this in the first place: I hope that maybe she can keep in touch with me and how I think by reading my diary from that far-away country where she is going...