Hello Out There

I've been done with my degree for a little more than a month now and while I have been reading everyone else's blogs, I haven't written anything myself.  This is because I am planning to bring this blog to an end.  I'm going to be cleaning it up over the next week or so and I plan to leave the blog itself up for now, anyway. 

I started Intermittently Rational almost two years ago when I was trying to finish my undergraduate degree and I was still in the middle of making a recovery from a very bad episode of depression.  I put the emphasis on my experiences as a student with mental disorder.  Now, many months later on, I seem to have recovered from mental disorder and it doesn't seem like it's going to come back anytime soon.  I haven't been cured, mind: I take my lamotrigine, I have bad days and mini-mood swings, I'm obsessively careful about keeping stress, late nights and alcohol to a reasonable minimum.  It has, however, remained all sub-clinical and hasn't interfered with me doing what I want and living my life.  I have a mental disorder but I'm not suffering from it anymore.

Because of this, I feel that what I have to offer on a blog doesn't fit into the nature of this blog anymore.  I still have things to say about mental disorder that are - at least in my opinion - interesting and I'm pretty sure that I will occasionally add something on this blog in the future.  I will not, however, be doing so regularly.  I plan to start a new blog (I like having one) with my real name (!) and a broader emphasis over the next month and I plan to continue to use this google account to read and comment on the blogs I've been reading, so I'll still be reachable at this address. 

Starting Intermittently Rational is one of the best decisions I've made.  I cannot thank all of you who have read and commented over the years enough for all the support.  It was a real and tangible help to me as I put my life back together (again).  While I'll miss being here, I hope some of you will come follow my new blog (I'll send out an e-mail with the address once I have one) and whatever happens, I'll still be following. 

Stuck on Repeat

Life is the thing that repeats itself.  I think that I have been broken, blown and burned but there I am, doing the exact same thing over again but thinking it to be different until it turns out not to be, again.  And again, and again.

Have I ever mentioned that women are confusing?  And that they distract one from one's work?  Bother.

I hate the month of July.

No More Exams!

I cannot tell you how good it feels to be done with exams! I haven't been in this good a mood for ages. It really is a good mood, too, not a scary good mood.

I took all the rest of last week off from pretty much everything. I slept (a lot) and ate real food and took some walks in the sun and read a bunch of novels and called friends in the States and went to some parties and just generally enjoyed myself. The fun has continued into this week - I'm off to Oxbridge later on and have a picnic and a garden party coming up - but I'm back at work on the dissertation.

I have been learning a lot about mental disorder from my dissertation research. I'm actually really quite excited about it - so much so, that I have decided to subject all of you to the best bits of it. My aim, for the next month or so, is to put up one or two posts a week on the things I've found out or that I'm thinking about that I consider to be the most interesting. Hopefully, this will have the double effect of preserving this blog from a slow death and keeping me going in my work.

I hope that everyone's having a good month!

Argh!

Exams - Tories - Queue-bargers - Argh!

That is all. Just needed to get that off my chest.

Exams

All is quiet on the Intermittently Rational front at the moment because I am revising for exams! It's horrible and wonderful and I can't wait for it to be over. My first one is on the seventh of June and the last is on the fourteenth. Wish me luck!

Thanks for being patient with the long silence. It started when my computer broke (horrible! inconvenient! expensive!) and by the time I had it back, study season had started in earnest. Things will go back to normal(er) on the fifteenth.

Appropos of Absolutely Nothing

I was looking at facebook this evening when this tryptich of advertisements caught my eye:



Just about sums it up, doesn't it?

It's March Already

So, where have I been? Of late, my days have been:

Get up (6.30)
Drink coffee and read the Guardian (I've got it down to 40 minutes now)
Avoid getting dressed for as long as possible because it's so cold
Bus and Central line to Holborn (also takes 40 minutes: it would be great to combine it with the paper but often there doesn't seem to be enough room for my elbows even so no broadsheet reading on the train) (8.30)
Library
More coffee
Seminar (10.00)
Lunch with philosophers who haven't stopped even though the seminar has
Walk twice around Lincoln's Inn Fields (or similar - there are many squares nearby)
Library
Tea in the Common Room and more reading
Write an essay
Lecture (15.00)
Drinking with philosophers who are not able to wait until the seminar to discuss the lecture
Central line and bus home
Put something in the oven, switch on the water heater (20.00 - 21.00)
Sit on the couch, take shoes off and groan for a while
Read
Eat
Wash dishes, fill hot water bottle and have a bath
Read something that isn't a newspaper or philosophy while my hair dries out some
Finish drying hair
Watch whichever inane yet bearable programme I can find on the telly (anything too interesting ends with me staying up too late)
Go to sleep (23.00)

Repeat.

Term ends on Friday.

Regularly Scheduled

I have a mouse that comes to visit my flat and run (not very sneakily) across the sitting room floor every Thursday around 10.30pm*. The mouse is rather cute - a brown field-mouse sort of mouse - and over the weeks I have grown used to the mouse's visitations and I no longer shriek at it. I have named it Thursday Mouse because I'm a very original denominator**. I haven't the heart to set out mouse traps though I would rather that Thursday Mouse did not visit and the whole situation makes me miss my cat still more. I wonder if there is something that can be done to discourage him***. Mouse-discouragement powder or similar.

How does Thursday Mouse know that it's Thursday? How does Thursday Mouse know that it's 10.30pm? And how does Thursday Mouse know that that means it is time to visit me? I haven't been able to find a mouse hole and so I wonder how Thursday Mouse gets here but I really would rather know how a mouse manages to keep so regularly to a schedule. I long to bring this up in a Phil of Science seminar but I would be embarrassed for everyone to know that not only do I leave the library before midnight but I also have a mouse in my flat.


*There may be other visits about which I am unaware in addition to the Thursday night but there has been a Thursday night visit every week for the past nine weeks, which I think puts this statistically past the post of random.
**A few years ago my subconscious mind started offering automatic internal corrections to the endings/plurals of Latin words in English. In this instance it is calling out that it ought to be 'denominatrix', as indeed it should; however, I think that that would probably bring up unwonted connotations. I'm childish enough that it made me laugh.
***Beyond the obvious - I am not as careless a housekeeper as all that. My untidiness consists in books and newspapers and shoes and scarves strewn perpetually about+ but none of these things is a particular mouse-attractant.

+My couch is currently occupied by myself, my computer, four scarves, two hats, three pairs of shoes (technically on the floor beside the couch but close enough), two newspapers, six books and an article for my dissertation. This is why I can never find anything - I am usually sitting on the scarf I want and the book I need for the day is trapped inside the quilt. Thursday Mouse's hole is probably better organised than my flat. What can I expect, however? My footnotes have footnotes and this accurately represents my internal organisational principles.

Now What?

I'm feeling pretty good these days on the whole (hurray!) but I don't quite know what to do with myself. Every time my mood changes in the larger sense (not just from having a bad day or a good day) the edges of various solipsistic information about the world show up. It's something like having a piece of paper that has been folded over places, then had the surface written on and then unfolded again, showing blank spots that were always there but previously unseen. It's simultaneously expanding and contracting - there's more paper but there's more blank space.

Now I'm here and I can finish my work in short order and I don't really have enough to fill my days now that it isn't painful to get out of bed. This makes me think I must be doing something wrong because I'm sure that grad students aren't supposed to have free time in such abundance. I could, of course, make myself busy with study. Perhaps I should. I doubt, however, that I shall. That doesn't feel like what's missing. I can't quite identify what's missing. I think I might doubt or fear my own agency. Any ideas? Any similar experiences?

January Haze

I've been spending quite a bit of time on facebook because I am "writing an essay and working on a presentation" which, these days, translates into five minutes of looking at something that is not academic work alternating with five minutes of looking at the academic work. The non-academic things are usually facebook and other people's blogs and my e-mail.

The start of this year has been marked by lassitude on my part and I was rather worried about it until I realised that this has been true of every early January I can think of going as far back as 1997. I think that at this point it would make sense for me to start expecting mental haziness in the New Year. The same goes for being disorganised. The same for New Year's resolutions.

Last year I resolved to lose all of the weight I'd gained while taking Seroquel, to graduate from college and to apply to grad school. I managed to keep each one of them, losing more than fifty pounds to be a healthy 140lbs (I'm 5'6"), graduated with honours and not only applied to grad school but gone to grad school. But I didn't get off to a good start with any of that during January - instead, I sat around spiritually if not physically, in my pajamas and read novels. I have been doing exactly the same thing this year. Now I just need to drag myself away from the duvet and hot water bottles and get back into real life. It will be a relief.

I have two resolutions for this year - one, to find a job that will let me stay here, which means it has to be a proper job (I've never had a proper job before - always art things that have a grand total of two or three women working for them except for the one time I worked retail at a local kitchen store with a grand total of twelve, including two men) and two, to make my life have more of the things I like in it. That is ill-expressed but I'm not quite sure how to put it.

For years now I have been concentrating on very immediate and necessary things, i.e. not killing myself, which moved on to making sure I slept and ate, then making sure that I got dressed every day, then making sure that I had enough social interaction, and then trying to help myself feel better than horrible, then trying to get to a point where I could say that I felt well instead of just 'not miserable'....and so on. That has been my focus since late February of 2007, which is when I started to lose my mind the most recent and most horrible time. By now, I have felt well without extraordinary interruption since September of 2008, I have my BA, I'll soon enough have an MSc and I feel like myself and likely to stay well for a significant period of time (for me, that means two or more years in the future.) The upshot of this is that I have started thinking more about what I want my life to be like because it seems worth trying to make myself happy rather than just trying to make sure I'm not miserable.

I am not a philosopher with an analytic bias for nothing, so I have been scratching out this train of thought in my journal and come to the conclusion that what I want out of life, what would make me happy to have in my life are more books, being around art (of any discipline) and people who make it (and also occasionally getting to help with it or make my own), public speaking (I don't know why I like it so much, it's a strange thing for a person as shy as I am, but I do), and love, in its many forms. Not all of these things can be forced, least of all the last on the list, but when I have to make a decision, I can try always to make the decision that most favours the possibility of these outcomes (and again, it's statements like these that make me realise that philosophy is always with me).

Oh bother. I meant this to be a shorter post because that essay and presentation I'm "working" on do actually have to be finished tonight. Anyhow, I was going to gracefully drag this back around to how I realised that I'm entirely out of it every New Year. I realised it while playing on facebook, of all things. I don't know how many of you that read this are on facebook but if you are then you are bound to have seen the application that will make a picture out of your status updates for the last year. Looking back at what I had up there (see pseudonymous but otherwise authentic version below), and looking back at the beginning of this blog* reminded me that I felt every bit as confused this time last year.





*This blog is now a year and seven days old! There will be a 'first year in review' at some point.

A New Year's Non-Post

I'm having a brief break from the frantic house-tidying to write this. I have friends coming to stay overnight and see the fireworks, etc, and I have been a lump on the couch with a bad cold ever since Boxing Day. Consequently, the current state of my flat leaves something to be desired.

Anyhow, the point of this non-post is to say Happy New Year, one and all. I have no rational reason to hope that it will be better than this one but I can be sure that things will change. Some of the changes will be good, and I hope that the good will outweigh the bad. Happy New Year!

(Possibly Stupid) End of Term Fun

So apparently getting a bit tipsy at the departmental Christmas party and kissing (possibly inappropriately) a girl on whom you have a non-crush cures fear. Who knew?

All right, cure is probably too strong a term. It's more likely that the fear has just been temporarily over-ridden. Or it could be that the fearfulness was more connected to this summer's epic rejection than I realised and that evidence that I am not entirely undesirable has made me feel better about myself. In which case, hurray, because that's something I know I can and will get over.

Okay, so that's probably not it, or at least not most of it. I'll take part.

Whatever will come of this (probably an) indiscretion, I don't know and at the moment, I don't really care. I don't have any particular expectations and it's not likely to descend into irretrievable awkwardness. It was fun. That was enough.

Ah, nice day today and my essay is almost done and I'm not even up late yet and once it is done, that's it for the term and I can get myself a Christmas tree.

How Do People Think, Generally Speaking?

I have a question for everyone. It just recently occurred to me that part of the way I think might not be common to the way most (i.e. mentally normal) people think.

The way of thinking I have in mind is the sort of quasi-epiphany manner of thinking; the kind of thinking where a whole rush of complex thoughts lands in the mind, inspiring wonder. I don't mean rapid thoughts - the quality of this is sudden but whole, and while exciting, it doesn't gallop away in all directions as the rapid thinking of mania does. It has a finality to it and a completeness to it that rapid thinking, in my experience, doesn't.

It's not the kind of epiphany thinking that goes along with delusions, either. When it happens, there's a feeling of exaltation but not anything like god-likeness, nor is it a revelation of 'the one right way of being, doing and thinking' fixation that can accompany psychosis. It's more like an immediate inductive understanding of part of the world, or a sudden intellection of the functions and forces of part of the world. That's how to put it; an immediacy of inductive comprehension.

If it only occurred while I am thinking about the nature of things, something which I, as a philosopher, I feel very fortunate to spend a lot of time doing, then I would not wonder whether it were unusual. However, it also just happens upon me while I'm trying to decide what to have for dinner. It also happens pretty often, at least once a week and sometimes more frequently, even daily.

Does this happen to anyone else? Is this something that qualifies as a mental health symptom or is typical of the human thought experience? Is it a by-product of too much philosophical reading and discussion? Whatever it is, I'm very happy to have it. It's very useful when it happens in the middle of a seminar, among other things, and very enjoyable besides. I wouldn't want to lose it. I just can't settle for myself whether it is normal or not. Any thoughts?

Overwhelmed and Omphaloskeptic

There are too many things going on! I'm not sure that's really a complaint, as I quite like most of the things. However, they are myriad.

On the things I quite like side are parties; Monday night philosophy drinking; my new armchair that I lugged home in the box from Ikea over one bus route, the Overground and the Underground*, which was a rather painful thing to do but more than compensated for by having someplace to sit that isn't the floor or my bed; a new addition to my collection of favorite philosophy quips**; reading Tristram Shandy and its heroic 18th century punctuation - can't think why I haven't read it before nor why we no longer punctuate like that; all the arguments I've been able to make about infinite regress and infinites by addition; being back in London; the shocking - to me - way I've made friends so quickly and effortlessly; the general thrill of studying interesting things; seeing old friends that I haven't seen for years; reading the Guardian; my new shoes; having a clothes rail and hangers and my newsagent.

On the things that are not things that I like side very much are plumbing faults; owing medium to large amounts of money to various institutions; not having very much money to pay said institutions with and also buy food; that it takes four to six weeks for overseas cheques to clear and mine has been sitting in the bank for four weeks and still hasn't cleared; the reaction of various Anglicans to the Pope's recent announcement; the fact that somehow Rousseau's concept of the general will has gotten stuck in my head in the manner of an annoying song***; the fact that there is so much going on that I seem to miss at least half of it; that my feet hurt so much and so often and with such minimal provocation; the way this overwhelmed-ness makes my head too swimmy to concentrate and think properly; Boris Johnson; the way my hair hasn't gotten used to the hard water yet and sticks up in strange and disturbing ways in the morning; being tired all the time still and a very annoying virus/cold/cough thing that has been plaguing me for a week without actually making me properly ill or allowing me to be properly well****.

Things that I may or may not like (just not sure yet) side are the post-lecture drinking with the professors on Wednesdays because it makes me very nervous but the conversation is good; my inability to feel any emotion, positive or negative, about the ex-girlfriend which is a relief but does not bode well; the amount of Hackney Marshes closed off for development for the Olympics, which development may or may not be a good thing in the end*****; a weird crush I've developed on a new-friend girl at university that is not really a crush but something in between (and therefore not holy, see fourth footnote) that makes me uneasy and implies subtle and delicately strange things about myself and my ethical convictions; the unpredictable bursts of high-burning glittering bliss that might be the early warnings of hypomania - enjoyable when they occur but worrying afterwords and the way this post has footnotes with footnotes.

The world is all the things that are the case, and so it follows that this is the world I'm in for now******.
____________________________________________________________________

*I feel very boring though to be buying furniture from the Ikea. Why did I lug it home? Please see paragraph three, thing I don't like number four.
** "That's not a counter-example, it's a monster." Imre Lakatos
***I wouldn't have thought that philosophical concepts were capable of this but it seems to have happened anyway.
****This virus is a thing partway between being and not being and is therefore not holy (Please see De divina omnipotentia++, a letter written by St. Peter Damian to Pope Gregory. Peter Damian was also in charge of reforming cannon law and is responsible for the formalisation of the law concerning priestly celibacy {somehow, the Catholic Church made it through 1,000 years without actually requiring it} and the regularisation of cannon law concerning homosexual behavior {I know we think of it as identity and not act now generally but it would be inaccurate to say that Damian condemned homosexuality itself rather than homosexual acts} that has led to the modern Catholic condemnation of homosexuality via Aquinas' natural law theory and thus forward to the present day to one of the things I dislike in paragraph three. These later accomplishments and the reasons behind them are discussed in Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, which is a very interesting read. Impressing pagans is part of the reasoning behind the celibacy dogma and the restriction of the priesthood to men and priestly duties with regard to hearing confession are behind the condemnation of homosexual acts.
*****It was a great thing for my childhood stomping ground, Atlanta, but then look at Calgary - hard to predict.
******Blatantly stolen from the beginning of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
____________________________________________________________________

++ De divina is found in vol. 6 of Damian's Opera Omnia, if memory serves. It's definitely in the Opera Omnia but it might not be vol. 6.

Feminist Quasi-Rant With a Cheerful Postlude

It has been easy for me to forget what a male dominated academic discipline philosophy is but I can't help noticing just now. Out of all my set texts for all of my seminars, none were written or edited by a woman. Only two out of the fourteen professors in the department are women. In my philosophy of science seminar, I am the only woman. In my further logic seminar, I am one of two women. In my political philosophy seminar, I am one of three women. In my moral philosophy seminar, I am one of five women. Each of these seminars has fifteen people, so in the one with the largest number of women, we still make up only one third of the group. All of this at a university where women outnumber men when the university population is considered in its entirety (53% female, 47% male).

Added to that, there is a man in his mid-forties in philosophy of science who has gone out of his way to tell me what seminars I should be taking instead of philosophy of science and further logic. Apparently, philosophy of science is so specialised and jargon laden that it will be too hard for me to join in and it does not seem to matter how many times I explain to him that I have yet to find any jargon I am not already familiar with in the reading and that I have a prior acquaintance with several of the set texts. I am a philosopher and therefore acquainted with philosophy. Philosophy of science is a subset of philosophy and I am, therefore, sufficiently qualified to study philosophy of science. It is not as though I am trying to teach it!

During undergrad, nine of the ten people in the philosophy department in my year were women, which is unusual but is what I am used to, so all this is a bit of a shock to the system. I don't want to be unfair to my new university: the professors for philosophy of science and further logic are very clearly supportive of my being in there and two very nice PhD students (one who is in phil of sci and logic with me, the other of whom is in phil of sci and public policy) have been very encouraging and supportive, so it is not as though I am suddenly staring down the establishment all alone. Nevertheless, it has all been rather jarring.

I am having a fabulous time though, spending hours each day talking about philosophy and art and politics, and drinking copious amounts of coffee. I thought that I would enjoy being here, I just never thought that I would be quite this happy quite this soon. No objections on my part to that. I didn't think I'd make friends this easily either but lo and behold, I have a party invite for tomorrow night and a date to see the Turner Prize show at the Tate. I don't know what's happened to my life but I like it.

Ah, the Joy of my Very Own Pay As You Go Mobile Broadband Stick-Thing

Hello!

I am now the happy possessor of a flat of my own in east London, a travelcard, a phone, an NUS card, an interesting seminar schedule, various library cards, a minimally sufficient amount of furniture, and some new friends. Now I just need a bank account (actually harder to get than a visa, believe it or not: UKBA should take lessons) and an iron and I'll be all set.

And some sleep - I can't remember the last time I was this exhausted.

Life Right Now is Bland, Tasteless and Rather Squishy

After two days spent not changing out of my pajamas and/or leaving the house I have had to admit to myself that I am just plain depressed. I don't seem to have any motivation to do anything besides read and knit and I can't seem to make myself stay on top of all the fun governmental paperwork I'm trying to do.

It's hard to tell whether this is 'real' depression in the DSM sense. After all, that's supposed to go on for at least two weeks (yes) with a marked change in appetite (no) and change in sleep patterns (hard to say). The main criterion, in my mind, is whether or not it interferes with your daily life (I can't tell).

I can't tell because I don't have much of a daily life at the moment, not because I'm avoiding people or too panicky to go anywhere, but because all I have to do at the moment is move and work on my visa application. I don't have to be anywhere. There is no particular reason for me to get up at any specific time, nor to get dressed and it's hard for a schedule like that to be interfered with by anything. I do feel melancholy but I think that's more to do with breaking up my home than anything else.

Everything is flat right now and that is the case for me when I'm depressed; that complete lack of desire that makes it almost impossible to choose one thing over another even when there are no particular consequences (such as picking out a book to read).

Another possibility is that I am extremely bored. I rather hope that that's it. Usually, when the semester is over and I have sixteen weeks ahead of me with no requirement to do anything, go anywhere or see anyone, I feel a huge sense of relief. This year, I woke up on that first Monday morning and thought, dammit, I have nowhere to go and no one to see: I took that to indicate that I wasn't depressed.

Right now, I feel like I have some sort of interior dimming, a grey-out of desire and interest. I have plenty of time to do some work (e.g., write a post that has actual content instead of navel-gazing) but I don't seem to be able to summon the concentration or will to do so. And time keeps folding up in strange ways so that some days feel like weeks and some weeks feel like days and two hours will pass agonisingly slowly until I look at the clock and notice that it's three hours later than I thought.

I do hope it's just boredom. I suppose I'll find out soon, when term starts.

The Other Side of Envy

I did tell myself in my strictest tone that I was to go to bed at 10.00, no arguments. It worked last night. Here I am, however, at 1.24am. I finally got really excited about going to London. I've spent a great deal of time with boxes and back pain this week. It's about forty minutes of packing, ten of whinging followed by three hours of sitting on the couch with the hot water bottle.

I have an ink stain on my couch, annoyingly: this is the price I pay for building nest on the couch out of blankets, pillows, my journal, several pens because I can never seem to find the same one twice, books of various kinds, both reference and fiction, my knitting and one or more shawls. I think I shall be quite content to be 65 and eccentric, once I get there. There used to be a cat and a pack of biscuits in there too but those have disappeared (and no, the disappearance of the biscuits was not an easy thing for me either). Somehow, the cap seems to have come off the pen - I only use ink pens for proper writing on paper - and somehow re-attached itself in the night for when I picked it up this morning, the cap was on but the pen was entirely empty and there was this big black mark. Time to get out the rubbing alcohol and old paper and rags. This has nothing to do with anything in particular so I shall return to the subject at hand...

...renewed enthusiasm. During all this knitting, pen covered, hot water bottle couch sitting, I have been watching movies set in London. I didn't start off doing that on purpose: I just picked one and then another one. Now I'm excited and my accent is doing that shifting thing that it does. We have an Oxbridgian Classics professor at the university and whenever I talk to her I get accent shift and then turn tongue-tied because I'm worried she'll think I'm making fun of her.

It's an odd, rather moth-eaten accent that I get living in England. It sounds British to Americans and American to Brits, although I do get the occasional confused inquiry as to whether I hail from Ireland or New Zealand. That mostly happens when I'm drunk. But it shifted enough today that when my sister called, she teased me about it.

She also told me she envied me a little. She hasn't been the only one to say that recently and it feels strange to me. Many of these statements come from people whom I envy. I tend to be envious of their ability to graduate from university in a normal amount of time and to hold down jobs and to settle down and get married and, in spots, enter into the property market. This has something to do with my impending 29th birthday, I'm quite sure, but a few (well, only one out of that list, to be quite honest - going to grad school has put paid to my worry over my ability to graduate with my BA, hold down a job, since I have a good reason not to for a whole year and I have no overwhelming desire to entangle myself with real estate for the time being) still hold. I only have intermittent envy over their mental boringness since I can see two sides to being mentally interesting.

I have spent the vast part of this summer longing for that one thing, as though I were a transplant from the earlier part of the 20th century. I would rather have that than an MSc, at the moment. I've had to sit myself down and, again in my sternest tones, tell myself that if I can't have it, at least a year in London and a good degree is an excellent consolation prize; and really, it is. Still, it's funny to see that while they have what I want, I have something that they want. Even my sister, whose life to me seems so well-run and complete and perfect of its kind and whom I would envy with an ill grace if she weren't such a lovely person and good, beloved sister to me.

I miss my cat. All this taking myself aside and giving my self stern talkings-to is a bit more to the side of madness than it was when he could be involved. Then it was more like being Alice through the looking glass. She had three: a cat and two kittens. Of course, things turned out rather more oddly for her than they have for me.

I find I'm on the other side and it's a strange place to be: it is strange to have something that can be envied, especially something for which I have had an incomplete desire all this unending summer. I don't know what to do with it, nor to think of it. The world has switched sides while I was otherwise occupied and I'm disoriented. That has happened fearfully often this summer but to elaborate would need another post.

Speaking of posts, this is no way to end one but I have been on an anaxiolytic-induced shambly rambling tropos all evening so I shall just give in. Did you know that in both Latin and Greek, fearfulness is such an important and prominent emotion that there are 'fear clauses' in the grammar? They are usually followed by the subjunctive, occasionally the optative in Greek (if I remember rightly - the optative is a verb mood so alien to English that I have always had a great deal of trouble distinguishing it from the subjunctive, not least because the conjugated verbs are spelt nearly exactly the same way) and even, in Greek, make use of a different negation word than most sentences. Now whenever I use 'fear' or 'fearfully' my subconscious shouts 'fear clause!' at me. I wonder whether, by virtue of lacking a formal fear clause, English is braver or just less realistic about human nature.

Stuck

I keep trying to write a new post but I think I am too mired in quotidianity to write anything sensible. My critical faculties seem to have departed and so I cannot see anything about which to write. There is a distinct lack of significant form. Everything is a sort of mush. A greyish mush.

I'm back in urban Appalachia at the moment, trying to finish the packing. I have hurt my back, however, and have been lying on the couch with the hot water bottle all afternoon instead of getting anything done. I'm finding it very hard to keep still; there are too many anxiety provoking things to think about.

One thing that causes me great difficulty when I'm depressed is not being able to look forward to anything. I should be looking forward to grad school: it's something I have wanted and planned to do for almost five years. I don't seem to be able to muster much enthusiasm for it, nor for any other plan. This has bothered me not a little.

Then, last Sunday, I talked to my sister on the phone. She had just been to the beach, some friends of mine have just been to the beach, others have just gone camping. I have not had what I would consider a proper holiday in many years and I was shot through with discontent and envy on hearing that my sister had been out to the beach. I haven't done anything like that because I haven't been able to afford it or I couldn't get anyone to go with me or there wasn't time or I was too depressed or there was school; or, or, or.

However, I am now in a different position. I have a little money from graduation gifts, I have some time and I'm not depressed. After I get to London, I will have two weeks before term starts and I am going to take myself out to St. Ive's for a few days. I have found a B&B for L30 a night, the train ticket won't be too much if I book it in advance and it doesn't cost much to feed me. I'm going to have three days of walking and thinking and reading and looking at art and just being somewhere that isn't full of associations and sorrow where I won't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to. Three days of time entirely for myself.

This, I cannot wait to do. Of course, to do it, I will have to pack up my belongings, arrange my visa, move and so on. I am very glad to have found something to pin my thoughts on! Now if I could just get my back to stop hurting...

This Post Has No Concluding Paragraph

Well, amici mei, I am feeling much better these days. I'm through the worst of the finding money for school, a form for this whole visa application process that I thought would be scary turned out not to be at all bad and will take me about five minutes to fill out and my personal life is no longer in tatters. Hurrah!

I know that this is going to sound obscure and specific simultaneously but I'm just going to say that I'm a lot happier having my third choice than my last choice with respect to my personal life. I don't know that it's really my third choice because I haven't actually undertaken a quantitative ranking but you get the idea. Things being what they are now, it is the best outcome anyone could expect, so I suppose it's my pragmatic first choice.

[I have tried three times now to write a concluding paragraph to this post but it has come out trite and/psycho-babbley each time. I give up! I'm just going to stop here and hope that my writing skills return to me for the next post...]