That time of year

I wonder if I'm coming down with flu, I have that run down feeling today. Perhaps I'm just coming down with the decaying after effects of boredom. I am terribly bored despite writing my newest book. Oh you know, it's that time of year.

 It's the 1st of December tomorrow, I always feel oddly depressed at Christmas, I think that's why I make such a fuss of seeming bright and festive because I don't want the outside world to know I feel rather like one of those dwellers who lingers near the suicide list, it's always more popular this time of year...no of course I don't mean I'm suicidal, not at all, but that depression category I most definitely lean towards. Winter makes me think of all the awfulness of these four walls, it brings out the worst. I remember the Christmases' gone by and even the good memories are tainted a thick gooey black by the bad. Christmas isn't what Christmas should be in these four walls and hasn't been for a very long time.

The cold doesn't help either, my arthritis starts creaking worse than at any other time, the added stress of needing warm dinners and gift giving its all just too much. It is when there are other pressing matters at hand.

I told myself I would give it until Christmas didn't I? I said I wouldn't let myself worry until Christmas. Well I have worried, I've lost sleep, I've felt sick and finally I'm just a few weeks until that deadline and I am feeling pretty damn desperate.

Groundhog Day

I'm usually in bed by now, but I know I'm only going to lie awake so I figured I'd vent a little.
There's nothing I want to say I haven't said before, I suppose I've turned into a broken record like the days of my life right now. I feel as if I'm stuck in Groundhog Day.

It's just not fair, I deserve to be given a chance. I'm a hardworking person, a decent, respectable, nice person. Everything I want in life is simple and achievable for most, I just need a door opened to set me on the path and it's not fair everyone keeps closing every door I come up to.

You know I really was upset that day the Tiger let me down. I walked home up that muddy path which has given me so much inspiration in the past and I almost cried because I really wanted a job. Then the Falcons let me down too. How is it possible for these corporations to raise people up and drop them without a glimmer of conscience? This is the 'real world' we've been thrown into is it?

Since I was 10-11 I've been working to get out of here. Out of these four walls which I'm stuck in right now. I thought I would have at least gotten close by now but I'm still trying. It's sodding freezing. It's missing necessities. I can't stand the people nature has forced me to be with. I hate it here. I have hated it here for years. It's miserable and damp, everything is crusty and crumbling and the house seems to deteriorate anything good as if it wants to push us out. An earth quake happened here years ago, an earthquake! In England! Yes that's right and it ripped a massive crack through out road and the same crack travelled through our house into the back yard. You wouldn't notice it unless you knew but it's there still, monitored every now and then by whoever monitors earthquake effects. They mended the road of course but not our house. And I just thought, there's another sign! Another sign that these four walls are bad news. Nothing good comes from them, nothing good happens here.

It's getting harder to focus on writing my books when I'm constantly thinking about how awful this 'situation' is. If I have to spend another Winter here I think I'll go mad. I need a job, and not a 20 hour a week shop stockroom job but a real decently paid job for a university graduate. I could settle for less than the most miserable positions I've looked at but what would be the point? I'd get neither the experience or the pay rate to advance either my career ambitions or my home situation. I wouldn't even call this a home, it's a hole. Not a hobbit hole, but a dark dirty damp Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole and I'm getting dizzy and tired of falling now.

Ranting again.

Writing my 2nd book, it's going well. When I'm writing I feel as if things are ok, because after all the more I write, the more books I get out there, the more chance I have of becoming someone significant. 

I'm still completely restless, I'm fed up of this situation. One day when my life is where it's supposed to be I'm going to write my autobiography and this chapter I will name The Situation, surely nothing else I come up against will be the same as this. 

I can list everything I need, everything I want...which by the way are not the same things. But getting any of this all depends on one achievement, for gods sake it's just one thing! Someone give me a job. And not a minimum wage lousy position I could have done at sixteen, although I'd consider it now. Give me a real job, one I deserve, one I've earned after all this bastard education. 

So I didn't want to teach! Fuck you if that's all that's out there for people like me. I still deserve a chance. There cannot be only one option, not in this day and age. I'm just angry at life right now. I have a lot, don't start coming the starving people in the third world stuff, yeah I know. I'm luckier than most. But it's not enough, not to survive in this country, this world, this society. I'm still trying my best. But me alone is not enough. 

Being a Writer

When you're a writer, you are not just a writer. In the art of writing you become Everything.
You're an architect
A researcher
A historian
A student of human psychology
A fashion designer
An artist
A poet
An expert on dialect and language
You're a crazy person with a hundred voices in your head
You're capable of holding down detailed and lengthy conversations with yourself
You're a weather man
You're a time traveller
You can build the future and argue with the past
You hold the secrets of magic and fantasy
You're a hero and a villain
You're God
You're the Devil
You give life and you take it away with the scribble of a pen

When you're a writer you are more than a writer, you hold the power to create anything within the capability of your imagination.

I am not a builder, or a designer, I don't have any qualifications in engineering or construction, but today I built a building, I designed it and it's perfect. It might cost multi millions to build, it might be a considered as a bad job, but I have built it and over 32 characters are going to work here and I have given life to everyone of them. Today I am an architect and tomorrow who knows what, but I know for certain, being a writer is no small thing. Because I can be whatever I want to be and frankly no matter what happens in life, I wont lose this and I love it.

Pencil Skirt day No 7?

Another Pencil Skirt day, at this rate I'll have had more of these than I have sleepless nights. If just one wouldn't result in being a waste of time. So far this one sounds as if it has the potential to be ok, but then again, so did a handful of the others and they ended up in proving only that the world has too many liars and cheats in it. That sounds a little over dramatic but I'm standing by it. False advertising is as good as lying. Offering a person something and then not delivering is cheating someone. These combined is damn right evil.

I might be holding the particulars in confidence at the present but only because I fully intend to expose these wrong-doers in the biographical novel I intend to write.

So lets hope as I hope each time that this is not going to be a waste of time.

I just want something tolerable, something that means a foot in a door, something that pays just enough for me to live on and save up a little. Just something that's not so bad I want drown myself in my bowl of Kellogg's each morning...not that I eat cereal, but you get the idea.

Leftovers. Post grad.

Something happened that devastated me and I thought nothing would ever be so painful or difficult to get through as that chapter of my life, now I can say that something has eclipsed that.
This here, right now, this moment in my life is so far the hardest thing I have had to go through. Those with parents who have cancer, or have gotten accidently pregnant or some such will obviously look at my 'hardest experience' as trivial, but the truth is none of those sorts of things have ever happened to me. What has happened to me is I've graduated and I'm unemployed. And that right there is the hardest thing I have had to deal with in my twenty one years.

I've read so many posts and articles online of people in exactly the same situation, stats on top of stats and so I know it's not just me. I'm not the only one sat in my bedroom staring at a computer screen and wishing someone would give me a chance. I read today about a young woman whose dream on leaving university was to become a journalist, finding this near to impossible she had settled to find a job as a receptionist or some such but was finding that was just as difficult. I completely related.

The point is, we went to university, we now do not qualify for the training or the apprenticeships or the courses that are thrown at 16-19 year olds. We also don't have the 'Two years minimum experience' in the jobs that are available on every jobsite known to man. At the same time we're now over-qualified for the jobs that don't ask for any requirements at all. So, if the jobs that are available for university educated individuals insist on refusing employment to those of us who have spent three years studying and therefore don't have the minimum of two years experience in this role....
and we're now overqualified for anything else....
and we don't want to work in SALES knocking doors and nagging people who have finished their day at work to hand over their hard earned money....
Then what's left? Where are we supposed to go?

Granted I give you that there are a selection of us who have found a foot on a path...
The few lucky ones who managed to land a job on their chosen career path, or the people who have friends or relatives to give them a leg up over the wall, ANY wall into employment. Or for those who opted for teaching, because the country is screaming for teachers....

Well what about the rest of us? We are the leftovers, we are lost names drifting in last years computer system and no one seems to be thinking about us. Every job that seems within reach we reach out for as desperately as a soul reaches out for it's body, only to be told we are without appropriate experience. Are we expected to spend the next three years post graduate working for free in unpaid internships and voluntary roles until we have the experience we're without? What do you think we live on? It's a myth that students live on super noodles, no one can survive on super noodles!
What is the benefit of having gone to university if those three years mean nothing in the system? If no one regards the education we earned there to be enough to trust us and give out a chance? Are you giving out chances but there's just too many of us clutching at the same ones?

I refer to us humanities students , but I am certain this branches out further.

Perhaps what we didn't consider when we filled out our UCAS applications was that when we finished our degree, the jobs they listed at the bottom of the subject description, you know the bit: "Where this subject can lead you" those areas of work would, by the time we qualified, be replaced by machines!
Who needs reporters when news is spread before it's half happened via social networks?
Who needs librarians when you check your own books in and out with a machine?
Who needs informants in a museum or an art gallery when Google is a click away on our phones?

This list goes on and on when you start to wonder what you used to aspire to and what you're now reduced to.

Where is our place? I say it again, we are the leftovers, where do you expect us to go?

Bit of a rant about knobs

I can't shake this so I'm going to say it...some people (of course I'm thinking of some in particular, but I am just going to get this out in an ambiguous way, and that will make me feel better and be the end of it with no further damage because there's no way you've picked up on this so you wont know its you, that's how selfish you've become.) ...some people are just god damn arseholes.

It amazes me how someone can change from being a nice friendly person of one sort, to being a complete and utter ignorant, spiteful, rude, arsehole. It's not my problem if areas of your life aren't matching your standards! If perhaps I have certain areas of my own life that are working out well, maybe you envy those and wish you had the same? Well that's no excuse to be a knob. There are things you have I envy and wish I had a variation of, but I don't glare at you from the corner of my eyes because of that. I don't begrudge you what you have. And besides just because you have certain things, doesn't make you above me and the others you're looking down on, it doesn't give you the right to be so damn rude! It's very Un-English. Your ignorance is what's really pissed me off but I'm going to throw that over my shoulder and just label you as a rude person. However, I cannot throw out the fact that you've changed and in a negative way. I can't like you anymore. I don't expect you to change back to who you used to be for my benefit but I hope I'm not expected to dish out my time and friendship like free candy anymore, it's not happening. It's just not happening.

So that was it, that's all I had to get out of my system. Be who you like, do what you want to do, but don't expect to keep certain friends because some of us have just had enough.

Weight lifted

If I didn't have that man in my life my happiness scale would be covered in dust pushed to the back of an unopened cupboard and would only tick miniscule fractions now and again. I love my family and the kids and I adore my friends but it's not the same.

Until yesterday evening I was wound up so tightly I thought I might snap in half if someone brushed past me. I was stressed out to the point I was overwhelmed and reduced to tears in the middle of the day. I'd barely slept lying in bed tossing and turning and fretting about my life. Then he walks into the coffee shop, looking like some gorgeous mob boss from Boardwalk Empire, there's something about that hat that really makes me notice his brown eyes...anyway, he walks in and I can feel this horrible coil of misery and confusion that's been building up inside for the last three days of being absent from him and having these pencil skirt days during that time has balanced me on the edge of a cliff.

I tell him. He's ripped the idea to shreds before I've even finished and is 100% on.my.side. I don't have to do anything I don't want to. He's not going to join those judgemental eyes or rattle any keys. He's the voice of reason, the voice I actually care to listen to. It helps to have the support of my friends and family, whose motto seems to be, 'do what's best for you' but it's his opinion that makes the final decision in my mind. I'm so utterly grateful that he's supportive.
Love, Respect, Mutual interests, Sex, everything else that is necessary to make a relationship a good one, is all rolled in there, but mainly... and I feel like this tops my list, is Support. He supports who I am, who I want to be, and the decisions I make.

I felt as if a massive whale of weight was lifted off my shoulders. I felt this choke in my throat as if I was breathing again for the first time in days, and I know that it's going to be ok. It's very childish of me, but I'm the kind of person who needs that reassurance now and then, I know it will be because things work out alright in the end, but I still like to have that reassurance. "Everything's going to be ok." "I'm going to be ok." The way I can describe it, which isn't particularly creative, is when you're holding a box, a heavy box and you hold it for some minutes until that ache is in the crook of your elbows, and then you let it down and ahhhhhh, the relief as your arms turn to jelly in relaxation. That's the feeling I got when I was able to get it all out and have the support I needed.

(I didn't get the bus that came along, that's my decision, I'll stand out in the rain for however long it takes)

The bus.

So the bus came. I'm really in no position not to board. Tears are wretched bloody things. The silent type. The worst type. Big fat quiet tears rolling down cheeks that ache with the effort of holding in a sob. Getting upset is really not going to solve any of this so just pull yourself together and get composed. I don't want anyone to know I'm upset, reduced to tears by this because I know what they'll all say, they'll be supportive and tell me what I think is best but it's not. What I think doesn't really count anymore, not in the real life. By the time anyone in my inner circle reads this it will be too late and these stupid wretched tears wont matter. It's not the most awful thing in the world, but I don't want to do it all the same. It feels wrong, it doesn't feel like me. I wanted them to say no and turn me away. I have to pull myself together. I hate crying. Crying solves absolutely nothing.

'Strict Diet' Hmm.

Considering that I was eating alone tonight I made a conscious effort to keep up my new 'strict diet' and took an obscene amount of time making a chicken salad. Half way through eating the salad (I was not much enjoying it) ended up giving left overs away and proceeded to have a large helping of chocolate cheesecake with strawberries and double cream...which was exceedingly better. I am including the strawberries in my 5 a day so with the lettuce and tomatoes consumed today that makes 3/5 so...I'm still counting today as progress.

A lot Like Buses

Another Pencil Skirt Day booked in for tomorrow. They seem to keep coming in but never lead anywhere, usually because it's not what it should have been, or I've had my time wasted in a cruel way. It's the same as putting food just out of reach of a starving animal.

...it's now the day after, there's another Pencil Skirt day booked in for tomorrow as a follow up. Another one for a different place on Friday too. As I said...they keep coming.

Sometimes though...how can I put this? You feel that you wait a long time for a bus to arrive, and then 2 come at once, but what about once you're on the bus, or perhaps just on the step...

You notice the bus is awfully full, terribly over crowded and a vile gone off sort of smell is radiating from the woman at the front who is...oh it had to be didn't it... occupying the seat next to the only other seat available. Clearly everyone else got on the bus, knew, (they all know who it is) and chose to sit elsewhere until this moment when you get on and there's no other seat. You could stand, but that looks obvious that you're deliberately not sitting by her, and you don't want to hurt her feelings.

So then it's a lot of jolting and jostling backwards and forwards until you feel sick and that horrid smell is perhaps sticking to you like chewing gum and now you can hear the angry noise of current music issuing from some youths phone at the back...it's a nightmare and you think:
"Maybe I should have just waited longer for a different bus, maybe I should have walked."

Well there's my point you see. Jobs are very much like buses. You hate standing at the stop, in the cold and likely rain too. People are looking at you from their car windows pityingly or worse with accusing annoyed faces ..."why aren't you like them?" Their evil eyes seem to say, "Ha!" they seem to say.  Finally when a bus or even two come along you're relieved, you jump up into it but you're not long on there before you start feeling regret. What you're getting out of this hellish journey doesn't match up to what you're putting yourself through. Is it worth it?

I'm rattling on but seriously the buses haven't reached the stop for me yet anyway, they're sort of in view but still down the road, they might turn down a different street and not come this way. If they do come this way then I really have no choice but to board. No matter how disheartening. After all no one can stand at a bus stop forever, another bus might not arrive for much, much longer and might not be any better anyway.

I'm not happy about it though. I keep thinking it's just not fair, why is it the only buses that come down this road either sail on past without stopping, or are in such poor condition I'd rather throw myself in front of it than board?

Another Pencil Skirt day

Another Pencil Skirt day...another waste of time. What is the lesson to be learnt here?! Someone, somewhere throw me a life line please.

Post-Grad, Sense of Purpose

It's not about the money. I mean...Yes the money is a big thing, it's practically 85% of it, but it's not the money I keep thinking about. It's the feeling of being without purpose. If life should have anything in it at all above all else it should be a sense of purpose. A reason to get out of bed in the mornings. That might be your three year old daughter, or your ailing relative, the goal to earn that promotion, the hunger to find The One. A sense of purpose directs our lives, our choices and shapes who we are. That's what I am missing at the moment.

University as awful an ordeal that I felt it to be at least offered a sense of belonging to a community, a home for opinions and a sense of purpose. While there, I could tell myself that I was working towards a better future. I was involving myself in something bigger and greater than the person I was yesterday because tomorrow I'll have a little more experience and education.

Now, Post-Grad...what does that mean? That I had my time for 'thinking' and now the decisions should have already have been made? That by now I should have settled into life and shouldn't be feeling so lost? That's what I feel like I can hear when people look at me.

Those three years were supposed to tell me who I am meant to be, they were supposed to turn me into somebody. Instead I feel like I'm nobody and nothing has changed except I've gained, perhaps unjustly so, a feeling that I am worth more than this.

My opinions now lie unspoken in a room in my head labelled "Should have said in lecture" or the ones that slip under the door are on social networks or this blog heard by likely no one.
My dreams that once felt like achievable goals now feel like out of date milk.
The education in my head feels like a hindrance because it's made me feel out of place in certain situations.

I am trying so hard. Everyday I am trying to find something, anything no matter how 'only tolerable' that might be just so that I can restore in myself a sense of purpose. It seems that the longer you're down on the ground the more people walk out of their way to come and deliver a kick. Disappointment's are expected in life but I was rather led to believe that hope and opportunity would outweigh Disappointment. Is that Disney? Is that where that ill placed belief has come from? Or did it come from the last ten years of education which has told you over and over again that you have such potential and you'll do so well. Well I'm trying. No one can accuse me rightly of not trying my best. But so far the definition of Post-Grad to me has been: 'disappointment' and I'm really, really forcing myself to keep that British Stiff up a Lip, but I'm not sure how much longer I can keep fooling myself because I already know I'm not fooling much of anyone else.