It feels strange. There's no direction any more and things have to be reasoned out again from scratch. The next step is an amorphous construct in the dim unseen future and the past is a hundred miles away to the North. What next? Job applications, personal reassessment, reassuring of strangers and maddening correspondents, and much much writing of nonsense!
Being temporarily unemployed will have some effects. For one thing, the emphasis of this very blog will have to shift a little, and revert to an earlier state perhaps. There might be more posts drawn from random words of the day, or even baking! Gosh, the baking has been gone a long time! Also, there will be breaks over the summer due to holidays. No cover posts this time as I'm frankly exhausted of ideas and need replenishing. Even the stories have ground to a halt. Holidays are the thing this year, with breaks to Ireland and Spain somehow planned. Gosh, travel is so hard to organise!
One of the great ironies is that research is one of the few professions where you can still work even when without an employer of any kind. In fact you are required to, as publications are the lifeblood of your chances of getting another position. Hence not having a job is roughly equivalent to having a voluntary job with the added load of conscience for work that needs to be done for your own benefit. So, everything will change but everything will stay the same, in the grand and unsatisfactory way of things that must be done. It's all very quantum; please feel free to avert your eyes or consume a cookie.
Aimlessness and holidays, two opposite versions of the same thing, and both difficult to deal with. Aimlessness is very much like that hole that opens up when an enduring unrequited love finally gives up and fades or the grim realisation that something isn't going to be the easy escapade you were expecting. Holidays are the grand delusion that we can go somewhere or take time off and not spoil the experience with the pressure of making it all 'worthwhile', the irony being that in this instance we can't accept that something is going be easy and inflict ever increasing effort upon ourselves. Oh, holidays, where is it all going to lead to this time? Hopefully not riding pigs on the veldt again, at least.
On a fictional anecdote level, I'm reminded of the great Rodney Silverspoon MBE. Silverspoon was a great aficionado of swizzlesticks, and wanted to visit some of the ancient rum plantations to fully appreciate the history of this grand implement. Unfortunately, Silverspoon fell foul of one his great phobias and was mesmerised by a hula hoop outside of a newsagent on Fleet Street on the way to the opening train journey. So consumed was he with terror that he was eventually picked up, statue-like, and kept in a place for the bewildered. Upon recovery from stasis, the only words he muttered for a week were "The hoop, the hoop, it bears down upon us!" The poor man.
And now back to holiday planning. There must be a cheaper way to not fly to Spain, surely? Surely?!
O.
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