Here We Go Again Then

Who would have thought it - I made it to the start of my Master's year? When I was growing up, particularly in my teenage years, one of the things that I considered to be an inevitability in my future would be the acquisition of a degree. The astonishing effort to get this far was not something that I remember featuring in this prophecy, and the exhaustion which it has generated was more than a little surprising and deflating. I am thus looking forward to my final year with mixed feelings. In principle, University has been fantastic, the majority of my units over the last few years have been things that, had I been in better health, would have been of great interest to me, and so I should be tremendously excited... There is, however, also the increased sense of trepidation which has been steadily growing since I was told that I had passed last year's exams, and is in fact only the latest, almost seamlessly transferred, incarnation of fear which has engulfed me for a number of years. Basically, my anxiety seems to have more lives than the Master - every time I think it's dead, it glows a little and returns in a newly regenerated form of madness.

This time next week I will have had my first day at Uni. I say day, but I think that it will be one lecture only on Monday. In fact, before Christmas I believe I have an average of 8.6 contact hours a week. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is one of those degrees where you have a couple of lectures a week and then spend the rest of the time drinking and sleeping - I will study 8 units and write a thesis (with accompanying website and poster design) in the course of this academic year, and I can quite easily envisage putting in a lot of 60 hour weeks before I am through. If anybody is reading this and happens to be interested in the work I do, I plan to maintain an online chronicle of what a final year in Engineering Mathematics entails, hopefully at a level accessible even to the sciencephobic.

The hope is that this year will progress in a smoother fashion than those preceding it, but as I am not renowned for my optimism, I am not going to lay odds on it. As usual - and based on everyone insisting that it's the healthy thing to do - I will attempt, during term-time, to assign more recreational activities to my schedule, which probably means I will try and reinstate my Word of the Week hobby, and perhaps begin writing and taking photos again. The likelihood of renewed panic seems to be quite high, and as this site has been designed as a venting place, I imagine numerous dark and/or inane ramblings will appear here in the near future.

Trawling through old material...

... because work and life were getting too much.

I write a lot of random (and quite weird) stuff. Currently I'm writing an exposition about why you shouldn't pretend to be an expert on things which you really don't understand, but that will probably be a bit heavy-going, so before that I thought I'd give you something a little less moody.

This is an introduction to a piece of fiction which I have planned and may or may not write (I have numerous plans for different stories in various stages of development)... It's not very good, but it's certainly not as unpleasant as the essay that's on the go at the minute.

I'd value people's opinions on this as I don't normally share prose (in fact, it's fairly rare for it not to be burned upon completion).

Story Beginnings...

(This links to a Google Docs page, please follow it and take a look)

This is me, getting a life.

I've decided that if I want to get out of this rut in my life, I need to take some affirmative action. So for starters I am making a list (in itself something I like to do) of things that I feel I should/would like to do sometime in the near future.

Doing more stuff that you like and trying new stuff is generally acknowledged to help improve the way people feel and although everyone knows that I am a neophobe, I've got to the stage where I'm willing to try anything.

Now, you may be asking why I'm bothering to post this, but I would like to ask you lovely people to take a look at the list and maybe suggest either things to add, or ways to do stuff that's on there.

Here goes:

Stuff I have let lapse and would like to start up again:

* Enjoy Maths

* Photographs

Take

Edit

* Poetry/Prose

Read

Write

* Recreational walks

* Origami/crafting

New Stuff I would like to try/do:

* Buy and watch Guys and Dolls

* Buy a CoolBoard (If staying at Uni)

* Start to enjoy Programming

* Get properly and catastrophically hammered

* Go Bowling

* Go Ice Skating (?)

* Dye Hair

* Henna Tattoos

* Go to the Gym more

* Lose some weight

* Listen to more music (New Stuff?)

* Eat better/more (New Stuff?)

* Learn to drive

* Write comic for Mark to draw

* Get more sleep

* Find a new hobby

This list is in no particular order, and I would really appreciate any suggestions for prioritising the list, adding new ideas, or psyching myself up to actually do some of this stuff! Thanks peeps, love ya all.

Deadline

I am giving myself 5 weeks, starting Monday 18th Jan, to sort stuff out, particularly my grades. If nothing improves, I plan to quit Uni and end this chapter of a somewhat unfulfilled and unsatisfactory life.

I really don't want to do this, but it is important to be realistic; I have found that looking back, as pragmatically as possible, over the last two years, and assessing the pros and cons of remaining a student, the negative feelings and outcomes of my time at Uni are outweighing the positive ones. This is particularly true of the last 6 weeks, and I feel that setting out a deadline of 5 weeks is a sensible period of time in which to try and straighten things out before making any sort of decision.

I should point out that this is not one of the negative cycles that I find myself in on a semi-regular basis, and I am in fact being as objective as possible about this. I intend to keep some sort of record of how each day passes so that when it comes to making the decision I will have a decently sized continuous data set to consider, as well as the general view of things up to the start of this period.

The Clock's ticking, I hope very much that things will be better by the end of February.