This year has been a frustrating, tiring and ultimately mistake-laden one. I'm just beginning to see the end of the course I've been doing. To compare it to scratching nails down a chalkboard is to downplay the harmonies that creates. I have one more observation left, an extended assignment and an exam. I say that like it's fingers snappable and done. The truth? A bit further than that. But it does seem more foreseeable than it did even a few weeks ago. After bunkering down for the past week and a half moaning about the decisions that I myself made I feel as though I've woken up. Still moaning, but awake. It's never a good sign when even seeing hot girls in the street just doesn't make me turn my head. I aced (I think!) the observation I had today. This is a very very good thing as this course has been slowly sucking my confidence away. A now departed friend told me it would, but I figured I could handle anything that the course could throw. I'm handling. I wouldn't say well, but colleagues have told me that I'm exactly where I should be at this point in the course : fed up, disgusted, exhausted, irrational and completely de-motivated.
The more the year has progressed the more I've begun to miss writing (and blogging). Perhaps that's because I'm writing roughly 5000 words a month in addition to all the reading, a full-time workload and pretending that I still have a social life that is in any way meaningful. Destructive nights of stress relief don't count. I read a book of Raymond Carver short stories while I was away the week before last. The first recreational novel reading I've done since before the course began. Raymond Carver's a weird one for me. I adore his stuff, and being such a huge Murakami fan that makes perfect sense. But in actual fact the first time I bought a Carver book was by accident. I went to the bookshop looking for a Raymond Chandler book, and paying complete and total attention I picked up a Carver book because it had the name Raymond. As I wandered over to the book counter I realised my mistake but read the blurb anyway. The blurb became the first sentence of the first story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and then I was walking away with a new author to mull over. Carver speaks about the way things are. Not the blood and guts. Seems more like the puss and excrement. The real stuff. It's not that it's graphic. Just that it's about people that are alone, even with all the people in the world around them. So yeah, there's some appeal to my inner self-obsessiveness there.
Her hair's still all over the floor and in my bed and underfoot. Another top to bottom clean of the apartment is due. It's hard sometimes for people to understand that a breakup can be just as hard for the breaker as it is for the broken. Maybe everyone just ends up broken after these things. Whichever way I spin it to myself the apartment needs cleaning. Wednesday. Maybe even tomorrow afternoon.
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