locked in the wooley building with Irish manuscripts

[dolorosa_12]

The title is a bit deceptive because I have now FINISHED MY THESIS!!!!! (Actually, I finished it on Friday, and got it bound and stuff at Kinkos - it looks all professional and everything - but I haven't been online since then...) You cannot imagine how amazing it feels to be finished !!!! (although I do have two short essays to write before the beginning of November, but that'll be nothing).

Unfortunately, I now have nothing to do but worry about the future. I got my first ever job rejection letter last week (for a job as the receptionist at Four Corners on the ABC). Come on, I'm not even qualified for THAT? I'm applying to all sorts of jobs at the ABC and for the NSW public service, none of which I want. I want to be an academic, sit in an office (not in an open plan office with heaps of other people), read lots of books, occasionally lecture to a band of eccentric minions, not be paid much, and have five children. It's a simple kind of happiness, really, but strangely unachievable.

I feel like I need five more years to sort out being an adult, because I'm the sort of person who feels happy being an age...five years later. As in, when I was a young teenager, I thought 'I want to be a child still', and then, when I was an older teenager (about 17 or 18) I thought 'I feel ready to be 13 now', and when I turned 21, I felt, 'now I'm ready to be 18'. When I'm 25, no doubt I'll feel ready to cope with being 21. It's a pity that we don't have longer to become accustomed to reaching a certain age. It's not so much that I dislike getting older, it's not that I feel like I'm getting old and ugly or something, it's just that I feel that only now, when I'm 21, nearly 22, do I have the emotional and mental tools to deal with being 18. Does that make any kind of sense?

I don't even feel particularly depressed. That won't sink in until I've left uni. It's just that, I spent the first three years of uni hating it and wishing that I was still in college (despite the fact that I spent college being miserable and wishing I was back at highschool, so I could do highschool 'properly') so I could do college 'properly', and only really felt happy at uni this year. And part of the happiness is tinged with the fact that I've known that this year will be the last. Which is really pathetic.

Don't pity me, though, because all my problems are entirely of my own making. I've never been able to enjoy any period of my life while it's happening, because I've always been too busy regretting the mistakes I made in the last period of my life, and imagining how if I didn't make those mistakes, my current period of life would have been so much better.

Sorry for the melancholia

Comments

[catpuccino.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the finishing of the thesis! :) That's fantastic!

So my two cents:
I think you need to learn not to regret the mistakes that you make in your life. It doesn't help you if all you can say about it is: "but that's just what I do" and "that's who I am" because it doesn't really have to be you. You shouldn't live in the present longing for the past, because all it does is make you unhappy. Acceptance of how you are is only the first step, you've recognised that you are unhappy, now you need to do something about it to stop being unhappy.

There's no such thing as doing something 'properly'. You can only do it how you did do it. Learn to appreciate what you have now because of the 'mistake' that you made.

I've personally made a lot of mistakes in my life. Have felt like I've consistently made the wrong choices, done the wrong things, said the wrong things. And even though I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I hadn't said/done those things, I always come to the conclusion that at least one good thing has come from that 'mistake'.

Don't know if that's too preachy or anything...

[catpuccino.livejournal.com]

And yes, I realise I must sound a leetle bit hypocritical, having written a big mesh of a post that talked about regrets. But actually, writing about that stuff (to an audience) helps me to try and move past them. Or at least accept them better. I write about it to make myself feel better I guess?

Remember how we had that HUGE long (slightly inebriated) conversation at the coast last year? I hope what I meant came through clearly. You have so much going for you Ronzo, and I don't even mean it in that 'you could have been a starving child in a 3rd world country' kind of way.

In the end I guess that the only person who can solve all these problems is you. But I guess I just feel that even though life is certainly far from perfect most of the time, it is what you make of it!

Gosh, how bloody optimistic of me!

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

No, I do agree with you, and believe we learn from our mistakes and all that. And I also think that where we are in life is where we are meant to be. Everything that we do, then, is not really a mistake, since it is something which got us to the place we are at now. It's just that now, looking at a completed Honours thesis and a nearly completed BA (Hons.), I realise that I need five more years at uni to procrastinate about where I want my life to be. I don't really want to go back and do anything again, I just want to stay where I am for a little longer. Instead of having to make decisions. I hate change, and I hate decisions and I especially hate freedom or responsibilities. This is the first time in my life where what I've wanted hasn't been easily achievable, and where I have actually been required to choose what I want to do. Everything else was just part of a logical progression.

And this is...scary...

[madam-poss.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on finishing that thesis! Wow, despite the other worries you must feel so fantastic right now!

I went into one of the labs I'm thinking of working in next year and they showed me a few of the bound honours thesi they had lying around. They look amazing!

Did you just print it out in Word? Or did they recommend any other type of typesetting program? I've been learning - very gradually - how to put together LaTex documents, just because they look so good. But seeing as I'm not typing up Mathsy stuff it's a bit of a waste putting in that sort of effort.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Yes, mine was just ordinary Word. There was this very fancy program called EndNote which, if you worked out how to use it properly, did all your footnotes for you, but people kept telling me that they had massive problems getting EndNote to work (technologically inept Arts students!), and I was too paranoid to use it. But yes, it is bound and everything and looks very pretty!