Friday, October 20, 2006


On Idling and Writing
Yesterday I drove to Tottenham from Edgware through morning rush hour hell, to work in a pharmacy for the day. It was 12 miles, on the meter, and on the RAC routemaster website, but it took one and a half hours. Through Totteridge, Southgate, Bounds Green, Wood Green, and then I was probably stuck less than 1 mile away from my final destination for a good 15 minutes, where the traffic mysteriously refused to move any quicker than 0.1 mile per minute. I was half an hour late for work. The whole time driving there I kept thinking wasn't there some other way for all these other people to go to work?! Couldn't they somehow just all use the bus? Look at them! One selfish person per car! What was I doing here?
I had waited for months for work in London to turn up, and then moments like this make me think why do I want to stay here anyway? But then, after having thought about it, I have to admit it. There's no place in England like it, it is just fabulous. All the fun courses, all the fun classes, theatre, movies, clubs, social groups, on gumtree.com the London section is the biggest and most happening, the best restaurants, variety of food.

But still, no work. In a mark of what I would consider near desperation, I agreed to work in this Tottenham pharmacy, which took the 1.5 hours to drive to in London traffic hell, for 3 weeks. £20 an hour, the going rate, I think, but it's funny, it never feels enough.
I woke up early this morning, before the pre-dawn, and found myself calculating my theoretical year's salary if I worked 5 days a week at £20 an hour. About £800 a week pre-tax, 800 times 52 is... well look at that, my calculator calculated 41600. In my semi-awake state I kept on rounding down and calculated just over £30k which I felt quite depressed about because I had been so certain it would be more around the £50k mark. I don't know why I care, I hate working and hardly ever do it, so my yearly income is more like £16k. I think in my depressed states I look for validation in my life and try to find it in how much I could earn.
I think I get depressed at times particularly when I've been idle for awhile. I have been reading Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle, and I applaud it, it's given me a whole new perspective on loafing. But nevertheless, I find myself getting restless. I've been leading this idling lifestyle, all my life now, I realise. Recently though, when I find my CVs being rejected because they look weak, and I struggle when people ask me for references, I can't help wondering at the options I've chosen, and how they will affect my future, something I honestly didn't think about when I was in my 20s. But I have chosen, even if I've chosen in my own annoying, wishy-washy, I can't make up my mind way. I've chosen not to do the 9-5 job structure, and besides which, the jobs which involve the real money definitively do not work anywhere within this time frame. If I'd really wanted to, Really Wanted to, I could have applied for a real job the minute I finished my training. And even when I was rejected, which I usually was, would have kept persevering, until it would inevitably have happened. What I Really Wanted to do was a PhD, which was another 3.5 years of blissful idling (I guess I might not have been one of my supervisors most shining gold star students). Considering I've mostly had rejections in my job applications, to have gotten the PhD was almost like divine providence. But yet again, when I finished it, if I'd Really Wanted to, I could have pestered my supervisor to getting me a job, stay in academia, wear brown shoes and head bands over a frumpy hair style. But I did not. So why do I complain about my life now? All the choices I made myself to get me to this point, why can't I just be happy?
My current effort to validate my life is a writing project (there's something about the word project, just sounds so much better than hobby). The only actual thing I have ever Really Wanted to do is write. I actually always thought I was good at writing - until I was shot down quite a bit at a job interview for a writing job for the Pharmaceutical Journal. Not only that, I really can't seem to come up with stories. When I was younger, I started one story after another, then inevitably abandoned them as soon as I got bored with them, usually when I couldn't think of how to continue or end them. But even that hasn't deterred me, as now I am embarking on a travel journal, an account of my travels around Australia. Now that, that I actually have a chance of seeing to the end. I started it over a year ago, and has been very prone to fits and starts. A few times I hadn't worked, or looked at it for weeks, months, and I've honestly thought I would probably never return to it. But funnily enough, this time it's been different. This time this manuscript has been sitting there on my computer, waiting for me to come back to it. Always. Sometimes it feels like a job, sometimes it feels like a comfort blanket. It definitely fulfills a certain requirement in my mind which needs itching time to time.
But then again, not always.

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