Backtracking
Sunday, 23 September, 2007
I wrote this before I left and never posted it:
You look forward to the grass ...
“... on Sunday ...”
At the moment I am so incredibly grateful for Wednesdays, my day off. I was thinking, “What's wrong with me?” but then on Monday I was writing an email to a friend who had asked me, “How have you been?” and, in the process of describing the last two or three months, I realised I really have been through a lot: Ben's surgery and recovery, The Faithful Writer conference, stopping work at CASE and my grandma dying. No wonder I still feel like I'm in recovery!
This Wednesday was very pleasant. Lizz was staying with us this week while her parents were away, and we caught the train into town together in the morning. She went off to college and I went off for a wander around Pitt St—buying a $2.50 belt, picking up jewellery-making supplies from Lincraft, having a chai tea at the The Tea Centre, writing to Anita in a 2006 Folio Society diary (what better way to give a diary new life than by writing a letter to someone in it?), visiting Kinokuniya to pick up the book they'd put aside for me, sending off a package to Anita containing her birthday present, finding a Top Shelf comics sampler in King's Comics, then coming home and mucking on the computer, still not quite in the right frame of mind for preparing for travel.
The rest of the week has been spent finishing off the Guidebook for Life on Faith. I finally did it on Friday—including the discussion guide and the back cover text. At the end of one of the chapters, Bryson talks about teaching Scripture at a high school. He asked the kids what they looked forward to in life, and expected them to give him the usual answers: get married, have kids, earn lots of money, become famous, etc. To his surprise, they said they expected to be unhappily married or divorced. One of them even said he expected to die of a drug overdose. The story stuck in my head because it made me realise that when I was younger, I never looked forward to anything. Some people I know have always expected to grow up, get married and have kids. I didn't. Some people I know thought they'd one day climb the corporate ladder or found their own company. I didn't. I had vague thoughts of being a writer but whatever ambitions I had were quickly squashed by cynics who delighted in telling me there's no money in publishing. The only thing I looked forward to was the thing that was next on the horizon—finishing the HSC, handing in the last essay for the semester, graduating from Uni. I don't think I've ever looked at the long-term in my life.
To tell you the truth, the long-term scares me silly. I don't know what it looks like, and when I picture what it looks like, it just fills me with dread. I know I've always been more on the pessimistic side and that the last three or four years have been hard, but I seriously cannot imagine life being happy or life being good. There may be patches of goodness but, overall, it's just one long hard slog.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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The long-term scares me silly too. It was easier when, like you say, we could look forward to the next thing on the horizon. I could always see an end in sight—the end of high school, the end of university. But the moment I got a job, I was like, “What’s next?” And I had no idea. Coz there is NO END TO WORKING LIFE, arrrgggh! “One long hard slog” expresses it perfectly.
It really freaks me out to think that I might still be doing the same thing 40 years from now, because, I mean, 40 years of the same old thing? Could I survive that? Which is why I’m so adamant about working at something I love, because otherwise work would be years and years of torture, and I ain’t no masochist.
Maybe that’s also part of the reason why I’m happy about going back to school… now I measure time by semesters, although I’m still working, and again have an end in sight—graduating in (hopefully) 2009. Plus I’m not doing the same thing any more!
Kid’s don’t dream… and they don’t have happy dreams?
How sad!
I always dreamed… actually I was always ambitious, but I never realised what for. Not for me—for me I just wanted mediocrity, comfort, and a house with a picket-fence and a good sound system.
When I became a Christian, I became ambitious for the sake of the gospel.
My life is good now, and I am reasonably happy. But things aren’t perfect.
I am never content, and I always look forward to the day when things will be better, and I am confident that I can make it better; because I think I bought the lie somewhere that you can be whatever you want to be, and you can change everything.
Which is a half-truth; and thus, still a lie.