The record shows I took the blows

The title of this post sums it all up really. With just over a week left in my current position as a language assistant, I'm thinking long and hard about what this year has been to me. The optimist in me tells me I've grown as a person, learnt to take the rough with the smooth (moreso than before), and above all, I'm more focussed on what I do and don't want. However, the pessimist in me tells me that this may have been one of the worst years of my life, what with a nightmare flatmate, horrible children to teach and a lot of uncertainty over whether I am who I thought I was.

Luckily for me, I'm an optimist. But even though I look back positively on this past year, I won't be missing it too much once I get back to the UK. I'm going to miss my new friends, and I hope that like my last experience as an assistant, that we stay in contact and keep each other updated on developments in our lives - particularly our globe-trotting locations. And I guess I'm going to miss the sunshine, although this year's summer so far has been rather disappointing on Toulonian standards. Seems I brought the luck of the Irish, I mean Welsh, with me after all. But it can't have been that bad, I have a lovely tan to show for my life in the sun.

France will forever be a place that I associate with escapism and good times, but at the same time I could never commit to coming back here on a more permanent basis. Not until I'm old enough to retire, anyway. Yearly holidays to visit friends that are still here will be enough to satisfy my nostalgic yearnings, which will surely come to the fore in about a year's time.

How do I know this? Because I'm having many nostalgic episodes about my time at university these days. When I left a year ago, I swore to high heaven that it would be a long time before I was ready to go back. I actually visited for a few days in February and it was amazing, but I wasn't quite ready to subject myself to the memories of finals and the like. But now I am ready for that - I'm ready to think about and recount the stress and difficulty of finals. I guess that's what graduation is for - to close the book on the best and worst years of your life, for whatever reason.

And so, as I foray into a summer of the unknown before continuing my life path in September, I'd say this year has done at least one thing for me: it's let me go back to being me.

Damn it, I've forgotten what I came in here for...

Knowing when to stop or give up has never been easy for me. Knowing when to give myself a kick up the backside and get started has also never been easy. I seem to be one of those people who sits in limbo forever and a day, thinking about starting something or finishing something else that I managed to get started without actually taking any action.

Even now as I sit here and lament my state of limbo, I have unfinished business. I don't even want to think about the unstarted business. There is a reason why I can't get things done, though. It's the fear of having nothing to worry about getting started or finished respectively once the to-do list is all checked off.

I live for my to-do lists. The longer the better. That way, crossing off the half the menial tasks that get done makes me look like I've had a productive day. Unfortunately, those menial to-dos probably only took a total of about twenty minutes to actually carry out. Leaving me with the time consuming to-dos that have been on the list since the dawn of time. One day I'll be done with to-do lists. I'll go back to my infant days where I stored every detail in my brain and got it all done. Something went wrong in my teens, I lost the memory function in my brain - or at least the function reduced itself to a selective rather than functional memory.

What irks me most are those little distractions that make me question my sanity. Take my little detour to the supermarket on my way home from work. I went in for the purpose of buying some envelopes. I came out with a nice full bag of groceries, but no envelopes. The groceries will come in very handy, given that my shelf in the fridge is extremely bare en ce moment, but the fact that I went into the shop for one single thing, and came out with many things except that one single thing really drives me up the wall.

The onset of some debilitating illness that affects me for the rest of my life? Or a simple case of consistent superficiality - the filling of my stomach over the completion of 1001 administrative tasks? You tell me. Because I keep forgetting to think about it.