Schrodinger's Cat

Back to school (again)

After two years of resisting postgrad study it seems to be coming relatively naturally. I’m enjoying the stimulation of new stuff – having to actually read the newspapers & be consciously aware of the outside world. The class are all friendly & articulate people, and have some life experiences behind them. It’s a natural progression for me, from total introspection 2002 through 2003 the year of chaos to 2004 which seems to be the year of non-fiction for me. Everything’s very sane & reasonable so far (apart from the actual content of the news, analyzing American foreign policy et al is a bit of a mindfuck), and I suppose I’m having a good time. To compensate for no longer working outdoors I joined the uni gym and the alpine club. I went rock-climbing on Thursday night and really enjoyed it – looking forward to next Thursday now. Not as difficult as when I last tried it as a teenager, I suppose I’ve gained some muscle strength since then. I might even go down to Dunedin for the university games in April, ‘twould be an excuse to do an out-of-town gig for once at the Arc Café, and also something to write stories about for my journalism course. I have to have forty published this year plus various other assessments including learning to write shorthand – a new language but then so will be writing about politics and sport. I even have a lead for what might be a ‘big story’ which could make me very unpopular and damage some people’s careers… isn’t journalism great?

It’s all based on tradeoffs of course. The good thing about being busy is that I’m not plagued by depression every second or third day (at least not until I get behind on assignments) and I’m not getting nagged at by family. On the other hand when I was unemployed I did use the time productively to write, and record music, and I refuse to see the pursuit of art as any less legitimate than a conventional career. It takes time & can’t be rushed. I don’t want to ever lose contact with that part of me; maybe it’ll be a matter of accommodating creative work into spare time, or alternating periods of ‘employment’ with periods of ‘real work’. I’d like to try and do a novel before I head overseas, but it sounds daunting given how I burned out just doing an album and some stories over summer 2002/2003.

I’ve got a new sense of freedom in a way. The music I recorded was all mapped out in advance, the albums took literally years to make from the initial writing to arranging & recording them to the final packaging. It was the main focus of my life, ahead of education or career or relationships or whatever. Towards the end it was feeling like a burden. Now I’ve finished what I initially set out to do, it’s not perfect but I developed an original style and there’s a reasonable body of work there. The albums are there for anyone who wants them (though I admit that they’ll never mean as much to anyone else as they do to me). Anything from now on can be new. I’m pretty much drug free, marijuana stopped being fun after a while and I got a weird side-effect of tension in my left forearm. Have to relearn to free-associate and be imaginative again without it. I’m also not quite as shy as I used to be - it was a major problem for a long time. And I got chewed up & spat out by the film industry and lost a dearly valued girlfriend to it, but now I’m safely out the other side finally. If I can get another girlfriend I’ll be dangerously happy…

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Posted by fiffdimension at March 5, 2004 09:28 PM | TrackBack