scattered
Wednesday was gonna be My Day. I had nowhere to be: just me, my Diet Coke, and a pile of books I got out from the astounding Cambridge University Library. It’s now quarter past five, all six of the books are sitting open to various pages around me, and I have three things on the brain:
1. The historiographical review with which I’ve been charged, and which these half-dozen books are in aid of.
2. The revisions to my novel that my agent has suggested, and that will take time, thought, and more blood from the eyes;
3. My new external hard drive, which I’m hoping will unclutter my computer and make it work like it used to.
I can’t decide what to concentrate on.
In a world full of deadlines one sets oneself - or worse, very long deadlines that pose no immediate threat - or worse yet, deadlines whose deadlines one is not yet aware of - this confusion often occurs. Things that come up in these books make me think of my novel, but not in any constructive way. When it all gets to be too much I figure it’s time for a thoughtful cigarette, and off to the balcony I go, but the cigarette is not thoughtful at all as I end up looking at the striations in the leaves of the trees in the court and come back into the flat even less enlightened than before.
Yesterday it was all clear. Today would be a School Day, and tomorrow, following a meeting with my supervisor, would be a Writing Day. I found out that as a PhD candidate I’m entitled to 1,500 pages of free printing per term, so I was going to go to the Graduate History Resource Room or whatever it’s called, print off a clean copy of the novel, and splay it out in front of me for a good long Think. It was all very tidy. And now I’m thinking of downloading the free trial of Digital Post-It Notes, as if that’s going to make any difference.
I’m also terrified by these books. I read them and suddenly my dissertation topic seems banal and done-done-done. I’m terrified too that the dissertation and the novel have taken on binary qualities in my subconscious - one is Academic; one is Creative. For the most part this is true, but it conspires to make my dissertation akin to chewing cardboard if I’m not careful. But these are problems for Another Day. Part of the reason for the historiographical review is day-terrors that hopefully lead one to a storyboard for a piece of Original and Meaningful Scholarship. If Laura Gowing is more eloquent and insightful than I am, can I help that? She’s gone and done it - on to something else.
I was talking to a friend the other day about how great and terrible happenings so quickly absorb into the status quo, become accepted, become commonplace. A short evaluation of me one year ago: 270-odd pages into my novel, realising that England is really great until you need money, looking vainly for a job that wouldn’t catapult me straight back into the tying pool (which, reader, is exactly what happened), just recovering from a top-to-toe outbreak of mysterious spots. How heartened I would have been if I could have told myself, definitively, that in one year, I would be working on a PhD at Cambridge, have representation for a complete-if-imperfect novel, and live in a flat with two floors, two bedrooms, a bathtub and its own washing machine!
I mean, it doesn’t really get any fucking better than this, does it?
But this is endemic with me. The closer I get to a goal, the closer I get to what I define as requisite for my happiness, the more antsy I get. Because what if I was wrong? Wouldn’t it be more peaceful to stay in the typing pool, balming my soul with the notion that if I’d only been given the chance I could be great, really great?
Here’s my chance, and now I can’t seem to uncross my eyes. So I’m going to do what I always do in these situations: scrub down the kitchen. Wash the dishes, make a stir-fry, take a couple of vintage Simpsons episodes, and do-it-do-it again in about ninety minutes.
Ooh, maybe a load of laundry, too.
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
ETA: I got the Digital Post-It Notes. I can’t believe myself.
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