Though Not What I Originally Intended, It's Still Something

Hi, I suppose you have been feeling a little neglected. Another semester down. I now have just over three weeks to put myself back together and convince myself to do it all again. If uni has taught me anything it is that life can always get worse but also on some level that despite that I can do things I would have argued to be impossible. I never wanted to hate uni. I mean I love learning but the pressure of assessments really gets to me. It ruins it.

I mean exams really are the times where you regret every decision you have ever made in your entire life. I mean it. Every single one. Even the good decisions because it is the sum of those decisions that have lead you to having to sit the exam. Content that was once interesting is no longer and for some stupid reason it wont stick in your brain. And that is just the preparation. The exam itself is a whole other ball game. Because it is only in that moment that you question things that have always made sense, because suddenly nothing does. And I have always had only semi legible handwriting at the best of times but add some nerves and it becomes another language. Your brain no longer feels part of your body and you find yourself asking, no, pleading with it to just calm down, start working and answer the question on the paper.

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Hi, again. I typed the above the day after my last exam then promptly ignored it for the next two weeks. However, one cannot claim to have a blog if one does not post and let’s face it I am very unlikely to post during semester time. But my results are in and without details they are nothing to be ashamed of. So, even though at the time I seemed to lack faith in my brain it did good and I am now officially only 4 papers away from a degree. Which as awesome as it is, its actually a bot frightening to have the end so near in sight. People are now asking me “so, what’s next” and the only answer I have for them right now is “the real world,” and I’m not quite sure what that looks like just yet. What makes it harder is that uni insulates you. Now I don’t mean that in a positive protective way. What I mean in that a person only has so much brain space and energy to give. With the pressure of uni I end up having little of either for anything beyond my next seemingly impossible deadline. Even though it’s a bit late for me I find myself wondering whether a more gradual transition would have be possible and/or better, rather than the direct cut-over from uni to life.

But anyway…

Naturally, I have been intending to post for a while. Every now and then I will actually hypothetically write a couple of lines, work out a general plan and think “hmm, not bad, the next time I sit at my computer I INSERT NAME HERE will write that and finally post.” But, when I am actually at my computer the moment is gone and of course I’m looking for my next show to binge watch. Priorities people. So life moves on, work happens, appointments happen, you procrastinate all that stuff you put off during semester, you get a cold and in my case a concussion (not at the same time thankfully) and that creative outlet you promise you do actually want gets neglected.

Which in a round about way brings me to something I think has contributed to my reluctance to post and strangely enough what I had originally intended to talk about when I originally sat down and wrote the first two paragraphs; which is how little of my life I actually capture with this blog.

But, I’m not sure I would give it justice right now and this post is long enough as it is. So I’m going to try something new. I will post what I have with the goal of finishing what I started later.

However unlikely it is I leave you now with a:

TO BE CONTINUED… (maybe)

If I Had Posted

Well it’s that time again. I find myself post exam with only a bag full of notes on a subject I would rather not think about for a while, a computer and 40 minutes to kill.

So, summer school was a thing that happened. And the lack of posts should not be attributed to a lack of ideas rather I would say it was caused by a lack of follow-through for any activity requiring the engagement of one’s brain that is not entirely essential for the passing of papers.

In saying that it could have been a lot worse. Word of advice: only consider full time summer school if you do not require sleep to function optimally and have absolutely no other commitments (I would also suggest that before one undertake such an endeavour they secure the services of a cook, cleaner and a P.A). Because half the papers in half the time does not (as one might expect) equal the same workload. But, one paper, one is completely doable.

Now if I had posted I could have told you about the awkwardness of sitting in lecture that talked about blogs (note: uni paper subject was computer science) and how the advice was that you should only start a blog if you have something important to say because there probably already exists a better one for the desired niche. And you sit there thinking of your blog neglected by both author and readers, full of bad grammar, self-consciousness and some under-developed rants. But the lecture also said that you will be able to find an audience for anything online purely because of the number of people on it. No this is important because what this means peoples is that somewhere out there in this crazy world of ours is at least one person who would read this post and actually enjoy it. Later lectures touched on how unlikely it would be that this person would ever find my blog in the plethora of other pages on the Internet but I will choose to ignore that point just now.

Additionally if I had posted I could have told you about how I Insert Name Here managed to elevate this this blog from the classification of procrastinatory activity to useful endeavour. Now obviously this is a gross exaggeration but I will elaborate. For a task in this paper we had to make a power-point presentation and a small website about ourselves. Naturally it was at that precise moment that my brain decided to forget everything remotely interesting there is about me. So in a desperate attempt to not be boring I grabbed a few quotes from my blog and just shoved then in there. Which means this blog will have now directly contributed to my degree.  So basically we can now justify that anything that may possibly be useful in future is not procrastinating. And since we can never really tell what might be useful in the future then nothing is procrastinating, we are simply preparing for a very unlikely and currently unforeseen future occurrence. Now this may be at the expense of other more pressing matters but hey such is life.

If I had posted I could have also told you about a strange phase where I decided that it was time I became acquainted with the early works of Marlon Brando to figure out if I liked his style of acting or not. Yeah, actually it’s probably for the best that I didn’t post about that. These things are almost never as simple as they seem when you start out.

I will leave you now with one last thought. A staff member at university recently told me that the brain does most of it consolidating regarding learning when we are not actually thinking about the subject. So next time when you find yourself procrastinating you can say to yourself (or others) the following: “I am not procrastinating, I am simply giving my brain a chance to consolidate the information I have learnt.” Now of course I would advocate actually not procrastinating over almost anything else. But, what I don’t advocate is excessive guilt because that never helped anybody.

Note: Not that it matters or that you care but in the interest of honesty I feel the need to confess that I did not actually write all this in the said 40mins killable time. Life happened I and I have to pick up where I left off the next day and the day after that. But it’s not like there is a rule that says post has to be written in one sitting.