What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
(and remember, you can always e-mail me if you love or loathe anything you're about to read)...


   Friday, December 13, 2002

THE EVIL OF BANALITY

Not thrilled about still more gaps in my supposedly daily entries here but, as musician Robyn Hitchcock writes in his own Slate Diary this week, "most of my life is too intimate or too banal to describe." For me, that would currently be my break-up with Darcy last week and my daily shifts at the record store and the pub. I'll have to stay quiet about both for the time being, while I search for topics less intimate and less banal.

Otherwise, I think my excuse for not writing more is still a solid one -- in a week of scheduling-gone-bad, I've just finished my fourth double-shift in a row. I need sleep like a junkie needs heroin but, as a hamster discovers, it's hard to stop that big wheel once you're running in it. I can deal with it -- this is the life I've currently chosen for myself, after all -- but I admit I'm still bristling over an encounter with an old acquanitance last week.

Running into me right after The Talk with Darcy, he could see that I was unhappy and frustrated. He decided to give me a pep talk but, when it began with "What happened to all those plans you used to have?", I knew I was in trouble. My well-intentioned hero let me know that working at the pub was not the best thing for me and that I have to "get out there" and "make things happen" for myself, because it's all just that easy and had never occurred to me before.
Ass.

In Hollywood movies, people frequently get "one chance" to win the game, get the girl, beat the bad guy, whatever. In Hollywood movies, they usually succeed. But what if you live in the real world and that "one chance" never comes? Or if it does and you fail? Or -- perhaps worst of all -- if it does and you don't recognize it? What becomes of you then? Do you just "get out there" and whip up another? And do you deserve to be abandoned if you can't?

I'm angry at this guy because he's right, of course -- I know success won't come along without any effort from me -- but I refuse to be lectured about laziness when I'm working fifteen hours a day on little sleep. Obviously, I need to be working smarter rather than more -- doing less for more pay -- but how? If it's so damn easy to "make things happen", why are so many of us barely getting by? Obviously, I should have finished my woefully-expensive and essentially-useless Psychology degree -- grinding myself further, further into debt -- but does not doing so mean I've doomed myself to a life of labour-class living? Time to get out there...

Labels: oh l'amour