Best in class

I've been working on my main skill base over the past few days, focusing on the areas where I'm strongest. The result? I have confirmed that I am even better at procrastination than I thought. But on the plus side, I'm also going to be a little better organised and stronger out of this particular bout. Because I've not only tidied my sewing table enough to mean only a couple of things have to be moved if the urge to create comes upon me (and during a procrastination binge, that has been known to happen), I've also re-arranged the furniture in my bedroom so that things kind of work better, apart from one awkward corner (far better than the whole wall of awkward that I had before). I've purged my wardrobe, my chest of drawers, I've sorted my vintage pattern collection, I've gone to a vintage fair, I've attempted - unsuccessfully - to see The Hangover 2, and successfully wandered to my brother's for a refresher viewing of the first one.

About the only thing I haven't yet managed is the dishes (that's my next task) and the actual study I'm supposed to be doing. I think I've finally reached professional levels in my procrastination. I've hit my peak, and I'm debating upping the ante again, by deferring next semester while I re-evaluate how much I want to study for at least 2 years more to go and spend my days somewhere that may or may not suit me. How enthused I am at using my entire allowance of annual leave for the next three years on practical experience rounds. Or whether I should just take the advice of my brother's girlfriend and get into the clothing thing a little further, since, as she observed, I'm clearly quite passionate about it.

Yes, that's right, I'm apparently passionate about something other than books. So perhaps I'm studying the wrong thing. Perhaps I don't actually need to study at all, and have all the skills I need. But whatever I decide, I have about 5 hours to pull together my next assignment for submission if I fancy keeping my options open about this particular path. And I can't face it. So instead, I'm off to clean the pan I used to make pancakes earlier today (yes, I'm studying, so all semblance of a healthy diet has gone out the window, even if I haven't achieved any actual study).

So, that's another 20 minutes wasted. Clearly, I excel at this whole thing. If only I had something that would lead me to study as procrastination...

The lesser of two evils

I've just let the Talker know that it's unlikely that there'll be any more dates. And I feel like a complete heel for doing it. Because on the whole, he's a pretty decent guy, it's just there were too many niggling doubts in my mind for me to continue with it. I spent too much of the time during our dates (the parts before alcohol befuddled my mind, anyway) trying to convince myself that he was right for me. I'm not generally into self-delusion, so I've decided that it was best for everyone if I just ended it.

Maybe part of the reason I'm sensing a distinct odour coming from my own behaviour is that I did it by text. At 10pm. In response to a text from him saying that he was feeling really good all day on Saturday after our Friday night date. And I used a slightly more wordy version of "it's not you, it's me". Yep. World-class shit, sitting right here at the keyboard.

But why is that? Sure, my timing sucked, but isn't it better that I told him up front than going the ignore route that I would have taken had he not been such a decent guy? Or that I took the time and trouble to come up with an explanation for my reasoning, that gave him some clarity for why it was happening, and an idea that it wasn't because he was a crap date? Yes, my method of delivery was cowardly and pathetic, but we'd been on three dates. It's not like we were living together or anything. And this was they guy who told me he wasn't looking for anything serious (I may have used that against him in the "we have to talk" text...but it's kind of true). So what did I really owe him? I've been on the receiving end of the fade out after a third date, and it wasn't hurtful. I did consider doing that with this one, but thought it required a more definite response. So for being a responsible adult, I get to feel like crap.

I swear, if dating doesn't get easier, I'm asking my parents to take over and arrange a marriage for me...At least then they'd have to handle the break-up.

In my home town

At the risk of seeming self centred (hello, I've been blogging about my life for almost five years now, and still stamp my foot a little when I realise just how few people have come back more than once in that time. What, my ramblings aren't worthy? But I digress. Hmm, perhaps that's the problem?), I'm about to blog my personal life again. Yes, that's right, folks, welcome to another world of the completely insecure embarking on a dating exercise.

The boy I've now seen twice - let's dub him the Talker, for his ability to talk the leg off a table - has suggested meeting up this weekend. But he hasn't suggested any locations, obviously assuming that with my many years living in Melbourne I'll be able to suggest somewhere suitable. I knew it was a mistake to come across all "oh yeah, you have to try this place" on the first date. So I've just spent almost an hour googling ideas. And you know what I've come up with? A sleazy, vile pool hall; ten pin bowling. Then I hit the joys of suburb-based streets; Brunswick St, Fitzroy; Fitzroy St, St Kilda. Really? I lived in this city for most of my life, and that's the best I can come up with as suggestions for what to do? Where are the cosy venues with great food and cheap drinks? Where is the quirky back-alley basement bar? Because the truth is, when planning a night out in my home town, I'm a dead loss.

Meanwhile, you guessed it, it's coming to the end of semester. I'm in full procrastination mode. And that might be why I'm planning on doing a whole lot of research into suitable date venues over the next few days. Procrastination task at the ready? Students, stop your engines...

Wanted: Forward impetus

I'm not sure what it is about me that makes me so restless, but I'm currently having a serious bout of career blues. I'm bored senseless at work most of the time, and sick of spending my nights studying to try and get somewhere else. I think it might really just be the onset of a Melbourne winter, and it being just on a year now since I left London. I think I'm entitled to a little angst, to be honest.

So, anyone who isn't prepared for a bit of self-pitying moaning, look away now. I promise that the next post will be more upbeat. Probably.

Everyone who hears about my current study plan gives such a negative response that I've started to believe them. What started out seeming like a great career move for me - get to read kids books without anyone looking at me strangely, get 10 weeks holiday a year, don't need to have the greatest attention to detail - is becoming more and more like something that I will end up hating. Sounds like a familiar tale, to tell the truth. So what do I do about it all? Do I keep studying, in hopes that it works out OK in the long run? Or do I call it quits now and find whatever it is that I'm really supposed to do? Knuckle down, rent a cottage somewhere with no distractions, and actually finish writing any one of the four or so books that I have in various stages of completion so that I can attempt to get them published? Chuck everything in and just work as a temp until I find myself a career that fits? Switch out of my current job into something similar that at least pays better? Or find myself a rich man and live a life of ease and luxury on someone else's dollar? Perhaps hold off and attempt to score myself a job in academia?

That's always been the problem with me and careers, though. There's always been too many choices on the table, and not enough will to narrow it down. Too much dreaming, not enough reality. Not to mention not enough specificity in my skill base. Jack of all trades, master of none. The only thing I know for sure is that I need to make some kind of change. My current work is driving me to distraction with the lack of challenge, and that's without factoring in the monumental levels of stupidity in the people I deal with on a daily basis, from the co-worker who is unable to shut the fridge door (and then unable to hear the annoying beep it makes when she does this), to the nut job residents of the estate, or the lazy arse council workers who take three months to act on something, but still manage an appropriately surprised voice every time you talk to them.

I have to find myself a grown up mature job sometime soon, though. It's too early for a mid-life crisis, and too late for me to be still in kidulthood. I'm a thirty-something. Surely I should be settled in some area of my life by now, rather than in an eternal state of limbo. But no. I'm still in exactly the same position I was in six years ago. And three years before that. And god knows how many years before that. Dear god, I need momentum. Someone give me a shove, please...

Better the devil you know?

I've known L for quite a few years now. We first met in a dance class back in 2002, I think it was. I shared a flat with her in London. She's an occasional reader of this blog - very occasional - and a regular contributor of inspiration for content. Today's post will be no exception, although she might be surprised to read descriptions of her self that are bound to follow. Because as good a friend as I consider her, there are a few things about her that I would dearly love to change, and I don't just mean her obsession with the idea that she is fat because she doesn't neatly fit what she has come to believe is the perfect body shape. There are reasons why we very rarely discuss politics, and one of those reasons reared it's head today.

In many respects, we have similar backgrounds. Our father's both trained as teachers, although mine left the profession when I was still in primary school. We both went to the local state school before moving on to private secondary schools and then to university. We both know what it's like to be in a family that has to scrimp and save, that there's a difference between something you really want and something you really need. And as long as we avoid certain no-go areas of conversation (religion and politics, the twin minefields of most conversational gambits), we get along like a house on fire. But in those areas, our views are such polarised opposites that conflict is bound to arise, and I find myself compelled to challenge her on how and why she can come from where she has, yet still hold the ideas that she does. At the same time, I'm rational enough to think that there's no doubt she has similar queries about my views.

Anyone who has read this blog more than once over the many years I have been writing it now (I think there's one of you out there...) would know that my own leanings are so far to the left that I'm a virtual socialist. I get fired up about the big issues of social inequality, by prejudice, by ignorance. I admit, ironically, I'm not terribly tolerant of people who don't agree with me on these points. Luckily, L and I were friends long before I discovered her inbuilt prejudices against what she today described as "total scum".

Now don't get me wrong here. There are people in the world who would merit that description a million times over. People who lie, cheat, steal, and plenty more. But I don't think that you deserve the epithet simply for being poor and, if you're lucky, working class. Last time I checked, there wasn't a means test on the right to consider yourself a decent human being. Nor was there any reason to think that because there are people of "reduced means" living in an area, people who get their hands dirty for a living, who may not have had the same chances as you or may not have had the same inclinations as you, that it must be unworthy of your attention. Poverty certainly is no justification for being branded scum. Yet L, an otherwise rational person, is so blinded by her prejudice - and acknowledges it - that she would not consider living in an area where there were such people. Nor would she look at an area that was home to many migrants, a large gay population, or any of a wide ranging variety of groups she is prejudiced against in the abstract sense. She is capable of suspending her judgement when faced with an individual case - I think it comes more from an innate politeness that stops her from giving offence - until she actually knows a person and then is more likely to consider them on their merits. Her judgement is so irrational and arbitrary that her definitions are flexible; the English, for example, are not migrants.

Bearing in mind that this is an intelligent, well-brought up woman living in the twenty-first century. You'd be forgiven for thinking that her views were those of a ninety year old woman back in 1952. Although progressive in some ways, she holds firmly entrenched views that cannot be swayed by any logic, views that, until recently when Tony Abbot's political aspirations saw the culmination of a slow drift to the right in Australian politics, most would be wary of expressing for fear of being considered as almost a fascist. I'm not calling her a fascist - I want to make that perfectly clear - just saying that, as much as I verge on socialism, she verges on fascism, the opposite ends of the political spectrum. I might lightly banter with her on the subject of her prejudices, but I sometimes want to hit her over the head about them, until she sees how far to the right she occasionally gets. I'm sure she feels that same feeling about my leftist, pinkish politics. So we avoid the topic when we're thinking clearly. When we're not, we manage to steer into safer waters soon enough to avoid a storm. But I wonder, sometimes, if that's the right thing to do. Because my understanding is that prejudices should be challenged, especially where they appear illogical. Where people who see the world differently sit quietly by while others grow in bigotry, trouble can brew. Sure, she's my friend, but if I can't challenge my friend, what do I do when I see the same bias in a stranger? Where does it end?

On that entirely too serious note, I should probably explain the context of the statement. She has been looking to buy a house, so we were doing the rounds of the open houses today and found ourselves in an area that she was probably less familiar than she might have been. "I guess it's not likely that complete scum live around here, is it," she observed, leaving the rest of us spluttering. No, we assured her. The ones poor enough to fit her definition of scum would not be able to afford to live in the area. They, like her blogger friend, would be forced to rent something a little further out of the city, on the wrong side of the upside down river that messily divides Melbourne's suburbs from each other.

I don't think she'll be buying the house in question, but no doubt she'll end up with something in a similar area. And I can't help but think that the cafes that line the streets where she will live will be filled with a certain type of person, someone who goes out on the weekend to sit with a chai latte and read the newspaper, smugly congratulating themselves on being able to afford to boost property prices to the point where a person earning an above average wage can't get a loan to buy a vacant block of land on the fringes of the city, let alone afford to build a house on it. Patting themselves on the back because they have been fortunate to escape the "scum" of the city, even though the parts of Melbourne where they live were for decades the slums where the scum thrived. And I wonder at the vagaries of a world where two people who have so much in common can find themselves on opposite sides of a fence, staring across a yawning divide that neither one is prepared to cross; the Yarra river of ethical and political debate, and I wonder if I find myself on the right or the wrong side, and if there is any way to make her see that the world is a richer place on this side.

Just one of those days

Some days, you wonder why you bother. The days when you don't want to get out of bed. When you don't want to leave the house. You don't want to spend two hours standing talking in circles with one of the world's most persistently annoying people, while his wife is in tears beside him protesting that you don't know what she's going through. Actually, you know in excruciating detail what she's going through, because you've heard it for the past two hours. And that's just on this one day, in this one meeting. When he husband called you four times the day before, you heard it again then. And when he comes back into the office later that afternoon for another crack, you know exactly what he's going to say. Because part of his persistent annoyance is his ability to say exactly the say thing, over and over again, without even varying the wording.

This particular man is one of those people who is a shade of grey. Not even a shade with an exotic of impressive name, like French Grey. He's just grey. You get the feeling that he repeats himself so often, because experience has shown him that nobody really listens to him the first time around. He's one of life's victims, the sort of person that nothing ever goes right for. I have to wonder if it's a chicken or the egg situation though; which came first, him being a boring, anal retentive, leech, or his inability to get people on-side? Scratch the wondering, I think I know.

So, it was one of those days. The kind where you work hard all day, even if it's just prying lose the tick of a purchaser who has burrowed into your skin and is slowly poisoning you, but don't actually achieve anything - not even getting rid of the tick, or any of the others like him who have filled your voicemail box while you've been dealing with him. A day where you get home and want to have a drink to get rid of the day, only to find that there is nothing in the house to drink, not even the dregs of a month old bottle of wine in the fridge that was saved for cooking.

It's the kind of day that can make you start looking for a new job, only to realise that your references are all out of date, and you don't think putting your current boss down would do the trick. Where you find quite a few jobs that seem pretty well paid that you think you're qualified for, but you also don't think you should apply for them because you know you're studying and that you're going to need to take some time off soon to deal with the practical rounds of teaching that will be coming up soon - something that new employers won't like at all.

Yep. It's just one of those days.

The Dating Game

It was a second date. The first had gone well, really only ending because we both knew we had to work the next day, finishing up with a walk to the tram stop and a polite kiss on the cheek. I'd put it down to him being a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense. On the way home he'd texted to say that he'd had fun, and that we should do it again soon.

So there we were, a little over a week later, meeting up once more. Somehow he brings out other sides of me. I'm normally pretty punctual to anything afternoon or evening (the morning is a whole other story); two dates, two late arrivals. We wended our way to a little Italian restaurant down a lane way, over a bar, and, in light that I later realised was entirely too harsh for anyone trying to impress but feeling a little insecure, we proceeded to discuss the joys of old-fashioned comfort food, the mysteries of public transport, exactly what constituted a hipster and why we would never be one (I disagree, I think he does have a little of the hipster about him, but nothing full-blown, or I never would have agreed to a second date), and various other topics before agreeing to move on to drinks.

Our second venue was the polar opposite of the restaurant we'd eaten in. The restaurant hasn't changed since 1978 when diners were held hostage at gunpoint - maybe earlier, I'm not sure. It was cheap and cheerful at its best. The bar - sorry, cocktail lounge - was an entirely different story. We climbed the stairs in hopes of a table with a view but found ourselves instead with a view only of a canoodling couple, and an epic drinks list. So we talked on, getting through, somehow, a bit of philosophy, gender roles, cultural reinforcement of tradition and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a completely unexpected question.

"So, I'm not sure how to say this," as alarm bells began to ding in my head, "but what are you hoping to get out of this?" Talk about a question without notice. I was left scrambling, trying to assemble an answer that wouldn't scare either of us, something suitably non-committal either way. To buy myself a little more time, I asked for clarification. Out of what? "The whole RSVP process, I guess."

That was a little easier, gave me a little more wriggle room at least. I still wasn't sure how to answer it, but I felt comfortably able to come up with something nice and evasive. "That all depends what I find," I told him, a bit of a giggle attached to break any ice that might have been forming. Time for revenge. "What about you?" I asked, watching him squirm. And squirm he did, attempting to duck and weave, and finally acknowledging that it was a ridiculously awkward question to have asked. But not before dropping something on me that I can't shift from my mind. My evasion was obvious. His was not so much evasion as partial truth, I think, although the lack of certainty has left me over-thinking things ever since.

Because he's not looking for anything serious, he was careful to make clear to me. To the point where he implied that he was just looking for friendship. I wasn't pleased, but I was OK with that. We get along well, I don't have many male friends, and we venture to places that I've never made it to before, by virtue of his touristing (he's not from Melbourne originally.) Sure, there are a few things about him that I'm not sure of (his take on gender roles, for a start, followed closely by his inherent snobbery) but it's nothing that I haven't been exposed to before from friends, and certainly not deal breakers. So although things paused and struggled awkwardly after his question, we stayed put and worked through it. It probably helped that we moved onto another bar soon after.

Several hours later, we were saying our goodbyes. Bearing in mind what he'd said earlier in the night, I wasn't expecting much. My tram was coming and it was close to the last tram of the night, as far as I knew, so a long goodbye was far from my mind. Yet the kiss goodnight was not the friendly, polite kiss on the cheek that I'd half been expecting. It was a little different. The look on his face, and the goodbye as I ran off to board my tram (rather, bus replacement service, but that's a whole other story), suggested that he was surprised I was leaving so quickly. I snuggled down into my seat as the bus pulled out, and, ipod in place, settled in for half an hour of reliving and examining. I still couldn't get to an answer that suited me.

My confusion grew when I was walking into my flat and my phone buzzed with a text. "How is it I didn't kiss you sooner? And why rush off so quickly? Would have quite liked if you'd stayed a little longer." OK, I thought to myself. Nothing serious, but a little bit of fun, potentially to be had. I can see how that might happen, without thinking too much yet about whether I wanted that for myself. Closer consideration would have me saying no, I think. Confusion grew more this afternoon. I somehow found myself in my messages archive on RSVP. His profile has become inactive. I'm pretty sure it was active when I looked in the same place the other day. So somewhere along the line, he's decided to go another way. I just have no idea which way that is, or whether I would want to go the same way.

Why does it all have to be such a muddle? It was all so much more simple before he blurted out that question, when it was just a question of liking each other. Now, with the element of potential commitment also introduced, I'm a long way out of my comfort zone and not entirely sure of the rules of the game. But then, I never really knew the rules of dating in the first place...