Returtleneck

So upon reaching to the final leg of my now well-established A-B-to-B-to-bed routine, and after indulging in what I will allow myself hubristically (the word characterises itself, as chance would have it) to describe as a very worthy lasagne, I found myself outside of myself. I looked at myself, wearing my black cotton turtleneck jumper (it was "cold" by Brisbane standards), which might in its younger days have been considered pretentious in Brisbane (who knows, perhaps it still is), and I thought to myself, I've looked at this jumper before.

True to instinct, a quick search reveals that I not only saw myself in the selfsame sweater, but blogged about it, back in 2005, coming up on ten and a half years ago. Perhaps it came across in that post; perhaps it didn't, but I was happy with the almost revelatory sense of change ... progress even ... that the out-of-body observation gave me, the distinct and surprising impression of myself as someone so different to the person I had been not so long a year prior, and different again from the person two years prior. I'd gone from a kind of university hanger-on, working at the research equivalent of the frat house in Old School, to probably diagnosably depressed, to being an active and accepted part of a very different culture, community, lifestyle. The sense of change, of velocity, of trajectory (I won't pretend to intention), was invigorating.

So I saw myself from outside myself again tonight, but this time I wasn't surprised by the change. And that made me sad. Don't get me wrong; I haven't been sitting still. I now have an ongoing appointment at what I really believe is one of the world's great universities. For all intents and purposes I'm debtless, own my own domicile, and have no socially unacceptable addictions, habits or predilections. But I'd be hard pressed to tell myself that I've grown or changed substantially within myself over the last couple of years (an argument could be made if not successfully defended for the two preceding years).

I'm conscious, or at least suspicious, that I've felt this kind of dissatisfaction or ennui a few times. Perhaps once it led me to France, perhaps it led me back to Australia, and perhaps it led me to my current job. There has been a something of a cycle of a quadrennial renewal of vocation in my life whose catalyst restlessnesses might well have been more personal than professional.

My probation was a close-run thing; the dean ham-fistedly, and my more immediate supervisors in a much more informed and timely fashion, told me as much, and I was conscious of it even before those indications. Its been 4 years. Its very tempting to take my ennui and translate it once again into a change of employment as a substitute for addressing personal circumstance.

Hopefully I have the courage to address them separately.

a friday evening at home

Too often I write of the long, and not often enough of the now. Here I sit on a Friday afternoon, in need of escapism, and finding it, in scribed fantasy with a side of G'n'T. The G has more effect, I'm sure but the T, cheap but freshly released, is more distracting, as it crackles on the roof of my mouth while I linger on the words that so well distract me from the dreary week.  

As I read of vivid characters doing great deeds, I reflect on my own small, pyrrhic victories fought over grounds devoid of consequence, and wonder which of the great boulders arrayed around me will descend next. Recently I seem to have managed those that matter, or at least those descending from hills nearby, pushing them back up their respective slopes to fall on me another day.

I had to make the hard choice this week to push one rock to the side, rather than back up a hill. Conferences are one of the things that really renew my energy for what I do, but a combination of onrushing time and a performance review pushing me to different priorities has made me delay what would have been a very stimulating and enjoyable conference tour through the Germanic-speaking parts of Europe, in favour of a less educational but hopefully more productive trip to oh-so-familiar parts a few months further distant.

I am revelling in my return to fantasy. It has been months since I last plunged deep under its crashing waves, but the characters, the lexicon and the pleasant rhythms of its lost words come rushing easily back. It is interesting, renewing acquaintances with characters first met on the screen, which faces survive into the mind's eye through the written page. Some appear instantly on their name as they I once saw them, but others reject their televised visages and come from the page in the abstract, in ignorance of their adapted provenance. Testament to casting, I suppose.

In a little while, Asha and Arya and Lord Snow (who knows nothing!) will release me, and I'll turn to my tarte (bacon and leek and zucchini and cheese, oh my!), but for now, its downtech and backtime and offworld to esapism...