between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I've been social today with a couple of my favourite people. Read half a book. Am now unaccountably tired.

Many people seem to be doing round-up posts for 2012. This is not one. My energy for personal blogging has diminished with the increase of other demands on my intellectual and emotional energies. And there've been a lot of demands. But overall I'm tentatively pleased by what I've been able to accomplish, even if I do perpetually take on too much, and even if I spent October through December huddling paralysed in a combination of illness-hangover, anxiety and depression. Still, we go onwards. It's all we can do.

I read 278 books, not counting re-reads. Interned in the IIHSA in the spring. Was invited to contribute a regular column to Tor.com. Reviewed a lot of books. Was granted funding for research. Co-guided a study tour in Greece. Had an abstract accepted for a conference. Wrote two chapters of my thesis. Made several false starts on the third, but such is life. Overcame social anxiety enough to send emails to publicists and writers about the column and the reviews.

Overawed by the kindness of friends and strangers alike.

Am still not good about self-worth and self-belief, but I think I'm making strides towards being more comfortable with myself. Slow progress, with much backsliding, but progress. It's amazing, though, how much easier life is with a regular, respectably-sized source of income.

(It's actually not a lot of money, the equivalent of a full-time minimum wage job. But Not a lot of money is still more money than I've ever had in my life - even if I am still living on my overdraft because of mum's sick-pay status.)

Anyway, that was the year that was. Goals for 2013: be a better person. Try to get into a good position on my thesis. Try to be kind to myself.

Happy New Year, friends. Ave!

Snow is really quite baffling.

Hopefully there will be sufficiently little of it tomorrow that I can pop into town and collect a last couple of books from the library before the Christmas closure. (I tried yesterday. Spent 2.5 hours not getting anywhere, due to SNOW which had COMPLETELY SCREWED our public transport system. The bus turned around and went back, eventually.)

If I can get that done, and this sneezy schnoz/icky cold clears up soonish, I'll have clear decks for making a productive go of the season of joy and good cheer. It seems to be a good way to spend the darkest part of the year: settle in with a stack of academic books and try to produce a workable Chapter 1 by mid February.

I also have a bunch of Greek to do, a couple of articles that hopefully someone will pay me for (money situation: not getting better, but I am not panicking yet, because something will turn up (it damn well better)) and some fiction to write so I can pretend I still think of myself as a writer. Which I do, damnit.

And the gym reopens over the holiday period, so just as soon as I get this cold gone, I can start reclaiming the (very large) stretch of ground I've lost.

We're supposed to get a thaw for Christmas. I'm looking forward to not shivering my socks off. I do not have the clothing for constant sub-zero temperatures. (And can't afford to buy new clothes till the end of February. So not yay.)

Anyway.

Today, a milestone happened.

Today, I have 3,000 words of notes for my thesis. All from just three books, mind you, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to take twice or four times as many notes as there will be actual words in the finished object, but this is significant (I haven't written up my notes for the Plato or Theocritus yet, nor yet the dramatists). This is a magic number.

I can believe in the reality of my thesis now. Three thousand words is more than a twentieth of fifty thousand, which is the minumum requirement of a master's thesis. If I can take three thousand words' worth of notes a month for the next six months, I will account myself happy with my progress.

And then all I have to do is convince my supervisor that this thesis was made for a PhD.

My conversation lately has been somewhat depressed and depressing. I have spoken to a number of people, recent graduates and post-graduate graduates of my alma mater, in the last several days. They are for the most part barely - or not - making ends meet, relying on their parents, and working dead-end jobs with no expectation of better.

Note, I do not say either relying on their parents or working dead-end jobs. With one exception (who is working two jobs) they're all still living at home.

There's something wrong with an equation where honours graduates of one of the country's top universities are aspiring to a standard of living that is working class "Clerical and most blue collar workers whose work is highly routinized. Standard of living varies depending on number of income earners, but is commonly just adequate." Or at most, low, very low middle class.

And those aspirations? The aspiration to be more than working poor? They aren't much in reach. The only employment available is in low-skill, low-security positions. An ideology friendly to (big) business and the corporatocrat state - not to mention invested in keeping the wealthy super-rich and the rest of us desperate - created, and continues to create - more so now than in the boom years - an increasing social divide. On one side are those who have forgotten what it is to know want. On the other, those of us who do not believe that "there is no such thing as society."

I don't see a solution, other than for us to preserve what dignity we have any way we can. Which will mostly involve leaving, I think. Leaving for somewhere - some mythical place - which is not prepared to sacrifice its young on the altar of Mammon. (The one of my graduating cohort who went to Toronto, Canada, is doing quite well.) This government relinquished any truthful claim to care for the welfare of its citizens when it chose to mortgage our future to failing - failed, in some cases - banks in return for absolutely nothing as far as I can see.

So. I don't know. I want my PhD. If I can't get supervision and funding here for one after the M.Litt (god knows the odds of getting funding elsewhere are minute), I don't know what I'm going to do. Ask one of my never-spoken-to-'em Canadian second cousins to sponsor me for citizenship? Go to Denmark or Sweden or France?

It seems selfish, to focus on how this affects me. But I can't think of it on a wide scale without wanting to rip the people responsible to little bloody gobbets of human flesh. And that's not a healthy urge.

---

While I still can, I'm trying to build up a reasonable classics library from cheap or second-hand editions. If I do end up trapped on the soulless bloody dole in two years' time, I want to be in a position where I can keep engaging in some intellectual activity without great outlay, and without relying on Perseus's (really quite cruddy) interface.

I mean, I'd prefer to work, if there's work going. But I'm not going to work six days a week at an exhausting job in which I find no satisfaction if I can help it at all.

Maybe I obsess over this possibility too much. But I've lost too damn many dreams to the cold grey turn of "reasonable expectations" not to fight this one with all my soul. I will write history, dammit. I can be good at it.

I'll write fiction, too. But there, good is more complicated.

No, I'm not talking about my government's plan to force everyone to emigrate, allowing them to have the country to themselves. (I could wish I were joking about that.)

No, this is my very own two-year plan.

2YP AIMS

-- core thesis complete
-- complete novel #1.
-- reading competence in ancient Greek
-- reading competence in modern Italian
-- have investigated freelance writing opportunities to some limited degree.
-- basic reading skillz in German

Followed by! The (still tentative) Five-Year Plan!

*sinister drumroll*

5YP AIMS

-- nonfiction book proposal for a) thesis and b) something else relevent to my interests.
-- complete novel #2
-- reading competence in Greek, Italian, German, Latin.
-- send out complete novel #1.

---

...No, I'm not really sure how I'm going to be able to succeed at this yet. On the other hand, research is what I want to do, and if that means I have to live on the dole and eat beans and rice for a large part of my life, and scrimp my pennies for ILL, I think I could accept this outcome.

Not gracefully, but I could well accept it.

My attempt at making lamb kleftiko has failed miserably due to lack of the right herbs and an insufficiently hot oven.

On the other hand, the lamb... thing... I ended up with is quite tasty, so it's not like it's a complete loss.

Today was a good day. Until I got on the train to come home.

So there I was, minding my own business, surrounded by other people minding their own business, and before we leave town, two boys get on the train. About fourteen, fifteen: they start passing comments on all the women in the carriage, being randomly insulting and misogynist, doing just about everything short of pissing on the furniture to mark territory.

Everyone's ignoring them, or trying not to engage. Reader, I lasted four stops - that's twenty-five minutes, give or take - and then I lost my temper.

I stood up. I told them that their behaviour was juvenile, offensive, and inappropriate in a public place; that they might think they were amusing but they were not, and furthermore they should just shut up. (I'm pretty sure I spluttered over the just shut up.) They tried to talk back to me: I told them again that they were juvenile and offensive, and then when the louder boy tried to insult me, I got up in his face and told him to cease, and when he was still trying to figure out what "cease" meant, I changed carriages.

Because if I had been provoked - if the kid had so much as stood up and looked like he was going to push me - I was in the place where it would have been much easier to smash his face in than walk away. And if I'd stayed, the kid would have had to prove to his friend that I didn't intimidate him. And wanting to beat someone only about two-thirds of my weight to pulp isn't really an impulse I'm proud of having.

(And no, I'm not proud of the fact that I enjoyed getting up in the kid's face and intimidating him with superior size, strength, and barely-repressed fury either. On the other hand, maybe he'll think twice about behaving on the assumption that women in a public space exist for his amusement and convenience next time.)

Sigh. It is just barely possible that I have too much anger for anybody's good.

I swear, sometimes I think this thesis is going to drive me mad.

First it was -- and still is -- the problem of half the scholarship being in French. Then there was -- and still is -- the nagging frustration of having so many pieces, so few of which slot together neatly. And now, of course, is the frustration of having so far yet to go to construct a theoretical framework into which to fit the pieces which I do have.

And I can finish this draft in twelve or fourteen days. There'll be a goddamned lot of [cite] in there, but I can push it up over the 12K mark before January 18th. That's the goal. Assuming I can get my hands on Grant's Hellenistic Religion and Kockelmann's Praising the Goddess at some point shortly thereafter, I might actually have a thesis.

---

But I'm not going to go mad. Despite the fact that this is heading on for the third week of actual winter, and it's too cold to spend any time outdoors, and I want my temperate rain back so I can go for a proper run. Because the world is full of wonder. Even when it's bloody cold.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

Okay. I have finished my course of antibiotics and now I'm marshaling my brain. Work must be done, even if I still feel weak as a kitten and sleepy as a sloth.

The plan for today is: go to cafe for lunch, do work in cafe, come home, sleep. This is not a bad plan, no?

I have photocopied. I have worked.

The status of the thesis:

That bloody thesis

2200 / 15000 words. 15% done!

Now I must go to the bookshop and spend my pennies on (text)books, and after that? Well, seeing as how I haven't run in nearly two weeks, I suspect I'd better go to the gym, don't you think?