one hand clapping

There are some times when everything goes so horribly wrong that you can’t even cry because you’re too stressed to. BT - as I had rather foreseen, given their unspeakable inefficiency and disregard for customer service - stood me up today after I’d taken a day off work to stay home and wait for their engineer to finally set my phone line up. This is after I’d very patiently waited around for two whole weeks since moving to London. Without any foreseeable date when my phone line can finally be set up, I remain stranded indefinitely sans internet at home. Without a phone line to call BT on, I have to ring them on my mobile, and rage silently as I wait on the end of their inevitably, impossibly long hold queue.

The York city council is after my landlady to pay council tax for last year, from which I should be exempt on account of my being a student, except they claim I have to fork out for the period of time when I straddled undergrad and postgrad and was very, very briefly not techically a student. She’s naturally panicking about receiving letters threatening court action, and it falls on me to deal with it. Except that the council refuse to speak to me any further, for confidentiality purposes, as the account is in my landlady’s name! And I can’t talk to my uni welfare adviser over the phone because they don’t dispense advice that way. So I have to email her and await a reply. Did I mention my lack of internet or phone line at home? Or that the sum in question is somewhere in the region of £300, which is by no means an expense I can easily afford?

I’ve been yelling on the phone a lot this afternoon, for various reasons, and none of the above are anywhere nearer to being properly sorted out. On top of that I’ve cut two days of work so far, within a week of starting, because I had to wait at home for boxes to arrive on Friday and today I blew it all waiting for BT. I know I have perfectly good reasons for skipping out on work but I don’t like doing it; I feel lazy, I feel ashamed. I haven’t spoken to my family in eons, I haven’t spoken to so, so many people. Most of the time I feel fine. When I don’t, though, I really, really don’t.

I know this will all pass and I won’t even remember this turmoil, many months later. For now, though, this is one of those times, and I’m gritting my teeth as best as I can through the profound frustration and disconnectedness. Days like this when I can’t cry no matter how much it’s welling up inside me, I want to go out, buy a massively expensive tub of Haagen Dazs, and eat it all - but it’s been raining and hailing all day and the weather is at odds with my ice cream therapy. So it has to be hot chocolate, and I guess I should be grateful after all that I still have hot chocolate in my cupboard to turn to in a pinch. Some things, unlike others, don’t fail you.

brixton oval

I am sitting in Brixton library with 3 minutes left before the library closes to use their free internet and no time no time no time to write everything I want to - but in a tiny nutshell, my first week in London has been rife with ups and downs, my first day of work was slow but enjoyable, and I have been so amazingly and unstintingly supported by friends and family who have called, texted, emailed, walled, come down to London for me; ♥ particularly to Wee Zi and Kevin, and thank you, thank you all so much!

looking up?

Got a 4-month internship offer today from a youth musical theatre company in London. It’s unpaid (lunch+travel expenses only), but the work sounds very exciting and I can see myself getting really into it if I take it up.

There are a million and one things to think about right now. I’m still waiting on the results of another job interview, and there’s one more scheduled for next week (though that, I can do alongside the London internship I think); I have to think of where to stay, how to move all my stuff down, when to move, how much I can afford to pay for rent. I’m not quite on my last legs financially, but I’m getting there. It’s a whole other world of stress.

But I am grateful for little things, for Nic and Jake who are so kindly letting me stay at theirs, for Steffy who furnished me a whole plethora of makeup tips before my interviews last week, for En Qi who has been unstintingly and generously helping me search for a room in London, for my dad who talked me through interview preparations, for Louis who told me it was okay to keep trying for what I want even if I hit some snags along the way, for Wee Zi who’s always believed in me and kept me company via phone calls, and - for this job offer, which I thought would never come!

One thing, one thing at a time…

the folly of youth

World Cosplay Summit Australia preliminaries: finalists
L-R: Misa-Misa and Rem from Death Note, Touya and Yukito from Tsubasa, Al (grownup human form) from FMA, Ryuk from Death Note, and the One Piece ship!

*

My siblings and I dragged ourselves out of the house at 9 am today to attend Animania ‘08, Australia’s biggest and bestest anime and manga convention, and upon arriving we were presented with a little guidebook that had something called the Animania Passport Tour at the back. It involved checking in with six different info desks, doing tasks at each of them to collect stamps, and then collecting a special limited edition freebie! (with exclamation mark!) after all six stamps had been acquired.

So feeling unusually gung-ho (and egged on by having spied a table labelled “PRIZES” with rows of very lovely and expensive dolls on them), we embarked on a quest for stamps that grew, over the next couple of hours, progressively more horrifying; we started from deceptively tame tasks like drawing pictures and striking anime poses to walking round and round the ginormous hall twice over to count the number of sunglasses hanging about, to singing Naruto and Doraemon theme songs in front of a crowd, and finally to the pinnacle of humiliating super-special last tasks, wearing chocobo suits on the dance floor (I kid you not; no, there are no pictures, thank goodness).

The karaoke bit was particularly annoying - there was a list of 10 songs and they’d randomly assign you one, and among them, coincidence of coincidences, was “Ikenai Taiyou”! Which my sister and I were really hoping to get (my brother had been assigned Naruto’s GO!! earlier), but we got a song from Suzumiya Haruhi which we both didn’t know… and in the end, thanks to time constraints, we were chucked in together with a group doing, of all songs, Doraemon. After we’d practised the Suzumiya Haruhi song to perfection too. Pffft.

So after all that effort, we received… a limited edition yellow Animania 2008 wristband, of which there are only 100! In the world!

et voila - I apologise for crappy webcam quality

(Apparently the dolls were for the other competitions. Go figure.)

“And now,” said the guy who gave us our wristbands, obviously dying of laughter at our dumbfounded horrorstruck faces, “you have to ask yourself: was it worth it? Say yes! Say yes!”

It was a massive facepalm moment. Yet thinking back, I have to say, this harebrained Passport game was what turned your everyday run-of-the-mill convention - where I’d normally just stroll round, watch the Karaoke (but not sing), watch the dancing (but not dance) and watch the art desk (but not draw) - into something really special for my brother, my sister and me… and we’re probably never going to let each other forget it. (”Remember when we all wore chocobo suits? Most embarrassing moment of our lives!”)

I’m still wearing this lousy yellow wristband as I type. It’s not even very nice, but it has been one hell of a memorable day.

hush

On Tuesday, one of my sister’s friends rang for her while she was out. I asked if I could take a message, and after giving me a name, she hesitated briefly and asked if I was Cuilan’s older sister.

“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but - ”
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”

Surprised - pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented - to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.

“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”

It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most - do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.

Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.

So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.

I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.

hubristic

There really isn’t anything for deflating pride quite like receiving your dissertation draft back from your supervisor, with “rubbish” scrawled in the margin next to one of your paragraphs. It wasn’t all bad; there were some ticks, some “good”s, but still. Even when you know that bit was kind of rubbish, that’s just harsh. And heartbreaking. And shattering. Ah, the time-honoured slap in the face tactic…

Courage, a trawl through JSTOR, a thorough reread of Alice and a visit to the USyd library - all long, long overdue. I really have to get it together.

back where it’s cold

…or not, really. It isn’t that cold here in Sydney - an average of 12 to 14°C during the daytime, dipping down to maybe 9°C or so during the night; significantly colder than currently-summery York but nowhere near the frigid depths of northern English winters, and nothing I can’t take (wait a couple of weeks and I’ll be complaining about not being able to type my dissertation because my fingers are freezing off).

The last couple of weeks in York were whirlwind - drinks, pub quizzing and suffering random harrassment from a creepy American chap with Mander; Red Chilli with Susanna, where we had to order fish to share because she doesn’t take any other meat and I discovered for the first time that York sometimes does have very decent fish indeed; Eleena’s visit and the first proper cooked breakfast I’ve had in York all year, with scrambled eggs, baked potato and bacon; a frenzy of Railway Children activity at the Theatre Royal which involved the filing of a million press clippings and reviews and 1.5 hours of standing at the National Railway Museum giving out flyers; yummy Garden of India takeout and plenty of random chitchat with Kevin and Rokey, thinking this might be the last time for a long time that I see either of them boys; lots and lots and lots of packing and moving, and of course the dissertation final draft (here a misleading term which actually means only about half the thing has been written, and mostly crappily).

All of that, plus passing through Singapore and meeting up with my lovely, lovely friends there, and finally touching down here after two solid days of travelling has stirred up in me that old feeling of being pulled in a million different directions, that question of… how do I balance all this? How do I portion out my time and myself for all these different places and people when I love them all, when I don’t want to leave any of them, when I just wish foolishly that I could pack everything and everyone with me in a bottomless suitcase, have it all in one place? Just when I thought I had it sorted, I find again that I haven’t a clue, I don’t have any answers. I know something’s got to

Now that I’m finally here with my family after nearly 10 months of being away, all I really want to do is catch a breather, sleep in for a week and recover properly from jetlag… but I know I’ve not done anything for a week, dissertation-wise, and if I want to knock out another 10,000 words before September 22nd I have to hustle soon.

breathe, just breathe, I keep telling myself.

hello to high and dry

…and what a whirlwind June it’s been. I know no less an authority than T. S. Eliot tells me April is the cruellest month, but June always seems to go by so quickly - it fairly flies - and then what’s left but the second half, the winding down to twilight, the end of yet another year?

I have so much to say, about Christie and Kevin’s much anticipated visit, about the unexpected melancholy I felt after watching the surprisingly bittersweet Prince Caspian today, about the fabulous Euro (Spain all the way - go Casillas and Fabregas!), about the amazing beach at Alicante and all the Gaudi in Barcelona that I missed out on last time through cheapo-ness; so many thoughts to spill out about the looming end of an era in York and a farewell to this house, about the continuing job-hunt, about going home, wherever home is -

- but I have still so, so much more to do yet: 1000 words and an outline to churn out (because I really can’t push it any further and I don’t want to, it makes me sick), unpacking my travel stuff, packing all the rest of my stuff, a mountain of accumulated correspondence, photos to upload, books to collect, books to read, sleep to catch up on…

One thing at a time, and the latter first, for now.

winds

It’s been an oddly melancholy week, and I can’t put my finger on why. Have I - horrors - prematurely reached the plodding, weary phase of my dissertation, having spent the past few days mired in an excellently written but extremely long biography? (Next up, >1200 pages’ worth of letters… joy.) Is it the end-of-term syndrome, where everyone around is either done, very near done, or leaving for good already, and the thought of home and family just beckons so enticingly? Is it the ridiculously indecisive weather, which has been seesawing back and forth between lovely and abysmal with almost daily regularity? Is it my continued deficit of money and employment, and a frightening dearth of further prospects to apply to?

Actually, I suspect it isn’t really any of the above. I’m probably just trying to find excuses to justify the vague, moody miasma that’s been hanging round me lately… and more likely than not, it’s just one of those inexplicably emo things that will go away on its own with time.

The RJ lit trip made a stop at York last Wednesday, and I was very happily assigned to the campus tour group which had Mr Purvis in it And it dawned on me, really dawned on me, how much I have changed since I was the shy silent girl in the back of TS2. I found myself strangely able to have a real conversation with him where in the past I would have been too terrified to do anything other than nod and smile; we had a very thought-provoking chat about literature and life after university as we walked round the campus, and it might just be the very first time I’ve really understood the human side of this teacher who was such a prominent figure in my JC days. He told me about how he was glad I’d kept the faith with English, and that he really regrets not doing a Masters after getting his first degree - and how, now, thinking about it, he’s afraid he’s not good enough for an MA and that his BA was really a fluke.

Hearing that, just that one line, from someone who was almost singlehandedly responsible for igniting my obsession with lit and pushing me towards the path I’ve taken… it was heartbreaking. I felt there were so many things I wanted to say to him: I wanted to tell him he was good enough, that it wasn’t just luck, that he’s been inspirational not just to me but to a lot of other students, and how could someone like that be a fluke of the system?

But I couldn’t find the words. I struggled with what sounded, to my ears, like hollow reassurances; I don’t even remember what I said in the end. We moved on to talk about how beautiful the campus is in spring, my mind trailed off and I started wondering if I should tell them that the lake is really toxic, actually, and I forgot all about it for the moment.

Thinking back, I wish I could have said everything I was feeling. I wish I could have poured it out, I wish I could have found a way to show it. But there will never be a way, when words just aren’t enough, and it will always be one of those increasingly frequent instances where the empty signifiers of everyday language are just sorely, sorely inadequate to the occasion.

a string of farewells

Yesterday I bumped into Kevin, my very very lovely Popular Romanticism tutor from last term, on my way home from town. He was listening to his iPod and shuffling along the street just like any other random middle-aged man, and I almost walked right past him, but then I saw a widening grin on his face as he waved at me and took his headphones out. And I couldn’t help this huge smile creeping up on me too.

We paused for a short chat; I told him about my dissertation and he told me about the undergrads he was taking this term for the Romantics module, we discussed the merits of Red Chilli (”easily the best Chinese in town,” he says, I’m inclined to agree), he asked if I was going anywhere for reading week before we both laughingly recalled the fact that reading week is somewhat irrelevant when one doesn’t have lessons any more to start with.

And then he wished me well for the rest of the term, I thanked him, and we waved farewell with the parting sentiment that hopefully we’ll run into each other again sometime. Walking our different ways, I thought of so many other things I’d wanted to ask and say - like how was your Easter break, did you like Paris and was it warm when you went, is your family doing well, and thank you for the good grade you gave me on my essay last term.

But by then we were many many footsteps apart. And so I walked on, back towards home, mulling over our little by-the-wayside conversation in my head - thinking, wondering, when I’d next get to see him, or my other muchly loved professors - Bill and John especially - and slowly slowly realising, maybe this is the beginning of the end, when I don’t see any of them very much anymore. Maybe it’s the start of letting go, of saying goodbye, of your life here winding to a close, when you wonder if this will be the last run-in you ever have with your favourite prof, and you start relentlessly dwelling on all the things you could have said to him…

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