Dissolve the floors of the memory / And all its clear relations / Its divisions and precisions ...
Ha! I angst so much about the idea of the past self, how the later self is a traitor to all you once hoped for and believed in - every day is a betrayal, every day you move away from everything that made you yourself, everything - but UPON REFLECTION I see that the past self is not nearly so helpless.
Come to think of it - by which I mean, looking at my shoddy notes, not written to be readable more than half an hour after the time of their writing; my haphazard 'filing' system, not designed to allow the easy retrieval of old essays, notes or readings; the sets of notes I always meant to collate but never did (with the effect that they are now incomprehensible to me); the papers I ought to have finished weeks ago (KI IS, History H3) to give time to study for the prelims; the life choices I am making now, not aimed at a secure or relaxing young adulthood - more than anyone else, I OWE MY FUTURE SELF AN APOLOGY. I REALLY FUCKED THAT BITCH UP! ahahahahahaha
So I guess there are means of getting your own back. And here is a ready-made justification for all one's dilatory, procrastinatory hobo tendencies ... all this stuff that matters to me now, my future self isn't going to give a damn about - SO WHY SHOULD I WORK MY ASS OFF TO SECURE HER A COMFORTABLE LIFE? I probably owe her an apology more than she owes me one. WE'S QUITS. I'm presuming here that the pain that the thought of no longer caring engenders in me is approx. equal to the pain my future self feels one night before the prelims. and so on, so on.
... obviously I'm kidding, I am too gutless to do anything but panic and study hard and pray for the best. Revenge can wait! There are a million ways to fuck up your future self, and in my youth I have methodically worked my way through most of them. And I am always eager to try new things!
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Donated blood today, inspired by HP7. I HAVE IMMORTAL LONGINGS IN ME. Last year I wanted to but a million factors prevented me: weight (this time I confidently informed the woman that I was 48.5kg, because that's what I was in June; stepped onto the scale just to check and I am exactly 45kg - what the hell??? I'm certainly not any thinner, so I presume my brain is shrinking. fuck!) ... health (the beginnings of anaemia, low blood pressure: no one wanted my damn blood) ... age (need parental consent if you're 17) so this time was. A FIRST. Usually I fail the blood pressure but this time I didn't so I guess I was thinking dirty thoughts or something (or maybe I was thinking about the prelims). Then they stab you in the finger and dribble the blood into this FLASK OF BLUE LIQUID and if it floats you're anaemic and if it sinks you're fine!!! Nursing my hurt finger, I watched my blood sink to mingle with all the other blood droplets at the bottom of the flask and felt GREAT satisfaction. Character flaws so far detected: wimpery and childishness. Oh well, no one's perfect!
Later Greg and I were racing to see who'd fill up the blood bag first. MOST SATISFYING. Really the last time I remember feeling so proud of my own involuntary bodily effusions I was like ... one year old, and had just learned to go potty. IT IS THE IDENTICAL EMOTION. Something buried deep in the human psyche, along with the urge to fling one's poop like a monkey, is an unholy glee at seeing one's insides on ... the outside. no??? If I were Freud or whomever I'd postulate a sense of empathy like ... WERE WE NOT ALL ONCE ON THE INSIDE (I.E. THE WOMB OR CLOSET OR WHATEVER) before being FORCED SCREAMING into the HARSH OUTSIDE WORLD so the 'satisfaction' we experience at our own poop or bloodbag or whatever is in fact a DEEP EMOTIONAL IDENTIFICATION and a means of COMING TO TERMS with the trauma of BIRTH okay whatever okay I'm just pleased 'cause I filled my bloodbag first so obviously I am superior in some fundamental way
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There is a disproportionate fear of ill omens in the air lately. I am not exempt! Mr Perry was giving back my Pride and Prejudice essay and he was like ... if you were applying to Oxbridge Lit, you could submit this piece, you know. I was like, naw, I've gone over to the dark side ... oh, that's right, you're doing Law, he said. I ACTUALLY FLINCHED. No, I said, that's Amanda, I'm applying to Oxford History. But he may as well have stabbed me to the heart!!!
What is it I'm afraid of - failure? changing my mind? Both? Having set myself so firmly on a course which, let's face it, had not even occurred to me as a possibility before last year, I am terrified that my resolve will weaken, and it will show. That my fraudulence will cling to me, a detectable miasma, in my interviews. I talk about how I love the acrid smell of burning bridges, and it's true, but you should see me before the bridge catches fire, I'm a goddamn wreck. So many choices, so many doors that close once you've made them. Whose bright idea was it to study only one subject in university??? I say stupidly. Why don't they make junior college last longer??? No, I'm full of shit, I spend so much time bitching about how you couldn't pay me enough to go to a US university, where they make political science majors do ... microbiology for a holistic, broad-based education (retch) - how I hate to mess around. LIES. All your lies are being exposed, Karen Lee!!!
On the one hand I hate doing stupid shit, it's true: one reason why I prefer exams to ... project-based learning (you can't see my expression but my sneer is spectacular) is because, you know, there's a point to everything you do - at least in the sense that all the work you do will have some effect in your future. Projects, I hate 'em, sit in groups, pretend you're newspaper editors ... marks will be given for creativity ... draw a treasure map, make a presentation board using attractively coloured scraps of paper and clipart, build a toy using the physics concepts you have learnt this term, come up with an advertising campaign and write all your posters in the correct register, thus honing your language skills ... you can't see my expression but, etc. I was like ... THIS WOULD ONLY MAKE SENSE IF I WANTED TO DO PHYSICS, WHICH I DON'T, AND EVEN IF I DID, I WOULDN'T WANT TO NOW!!! [electrocutes self on little motor carefully extracted from toy lantern for later incorporation into creatively designed 'scientific toy'] It is no life for grown-ups and/or anyone with any self-respect (though I understand that these two categories, on a Venn diagram, have a very small intersection)
Anyway true to form what I believe in and what I want instinctively are completely at odds. What I want on my friendly, snuffly, animal level is to not have to make any decisions, Literature, History, Law, why, do all three! These are the urgings of my id (or my ego, sorry, what my id really wants is, uh, sex, if Freud is right). What I know to be right and sensible and good (hello superego) is ... if I am old enough to legally drink, have sex and possibly get a driver's license, then I am old enough to make a decision on this matter! And I have made that decision, however uneasy it makes me sometimes. All my decisions make me uneasy, these days.
Bah. In the staffroom the new History tutor said ... you're Amanda, aren't you? You're doing Law? IN THE SAME AFTERNOON??? WHAT ARE THE ODDS? I struggled briefly with the temptation to just agree (there are benefits to anonymity, including The Right of Pon) but in the end said no, I'm Karen, I'm applying to Oxford History. (Practise saying it often enough and I will increase the conviction of my delivery). Oh, Karen Lee? he said. Yes, I said testily. Karen Lee is applying to read History in Oxford, and she is scared shitless.
(Maybe what I should really be worried about is how everyone keeps mistaking me for Amanda: WHY? Is it the glasses? Is it all this talk of bodily effusions? Amanda!!! I am offended both for myself and on your behalf!!! Why won't anyone acknowledge our unique individuality???)
Continue to remind yourself of the compelling reasons for your choice, Karen Lee! It was good to be forced to admit I never really wanted to do Law: boring as hell (or would be to me, anyway), I wouldn't get along with the people, I don't want to do a 'professional' degree (surely the point of university is the academics) and besides some nebulous idea of giving my parents the matched set of professionals (Matthew's all set for medicine) - a matched set they never wanted, all my parents want is for us to be happy, though conflict arises over how exactly that is to be achieved - and some notion that I would be good at Law (youthful success at KI critical thinking went to my head, I suppose), I can't suppress a sort of sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I see the content of a Law prospectus. Some part of the old Karen Lee wanted to do Law very badly: something in the harshness of the discipline, the long hours, the glamour of the idea of Law at least, and the sense of ... well, who knows. It was never a positive decision anyway, always a process of elimation: History hadn't crossed my mind, Economics a kind of tragic joke, Literature a dead end.
Literature is the real wrench: going around interfering hungrily with everyone else's Lit H3 papers I sometimes feel a sort of panic at the thought of never studying it again. It's the only thing that really makes sense to me - its lines of argument; the discipline it requires, its levels of meaning - I don't think anyone is given to understand more than one subject instinctively, and Literature is mine: so why am I walking away from it? That sense of everything coming together when the lines of a text shift and reform as a coherent and perfectly ordered whole, is, forlornly, the only real intellectual pleasure I know (sad music). For someone basically emotionally bankrupt (freely do I admit this, my parents must have dropped me on my heart when I was a baby) this is an alternative route to ... what? Anyway. This is hardly to be painted as my selling my soul and choosing "practical" subjects that will lead me to a life of money and prestige (if I wanted to do that I'd still be dead-set on Law) - rather, the realisation that that isn't how Literature works in university became more and more convincing. I get hysterical and depressed when forced to plow through critical views rather than direct study of the texts - sadly critical views are, I think, Literature at university is all about. And I don't want to ... if I were to pursue it at a higher level, as they say, I would go mad and believe after a while that this is all there is - critical essays, postmodernism ... Also uh I am forced to admit that I might hate the people. Also I am learning to accept the dangers of equating who you are with what you do, and if I did Literature, I'd be finished. Like, you think I'm a basket case now? THIS WOULD BE EVEN BETTER. And plenty of things about the study of Literature are, I also admit, pretty bad for my mental health - in that they create a false paradigm. (HOW false??? ONLY TIME WILL TELL) I've been whining about this for months, so I'll spare you the fresh angst.
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On that note I leave you. I'm not sure why I'm still awake! August is here and I am going to stop messing around and start studying instead. My life is turning into some weird pastiche of Eliot, though I think that's more a general expression of my personal modernist condition than anything else. Or, possibly, sleep deprivation! GOODNIGHT