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.

Figuring it all out

Yesterday I made a first in my life. For the first time ever (and this is rather shocking given my addiction to the internet) I legally downloaded my first two music albums. And what a buy they were! After taking what seemed like an age to get all the tracks to add to my music library in media player, I cracked it and have been playing them ever since.

I'm not sure what I'm most proud of though; the fact that I was a law abiding citizen, or the fact that I downloaded music by someone I found randomly on YouTube about two weeks ago and who a lot of my music savvy friends haven't heard of. I'm usually the last person to discover good music - I'm not the biggest MySpace surfer in the world. Usually I'm the person being introduced to random acts through MySpace and YouTube links over MSN.

So for once, I'm the one doing the discovering. And boy, the feel good goes a long way.

Tick tock... tick tock... I've only got four minutes, I mean weeks, to save the world

Time flies when you're having fun. I hate to admit it, but it's damn well true. After all the stress and horror of September to May, now that I've started to really enjoy myself and be able to appreciate my situation, I suddenly only have a month left to do so before moving on.

Yes, dear reader, I said enjoy myself. You see, I got out of the horrible situation I'd let myself stay in for 7 months, and moved into a new flat with a new, lovely (and, consequently, English speaking) flatmate. And the past month has been utter bliss. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I seem to only be able to write when frustrated/angry. I don't often feel motivated enough to write when everything's going good, even though I should push myself to write sometimes, just to be able to say that I've done something productive with a small chunk of my time.

And so the time has come to start stressing about the next step. Not about the uncertainty of the future, but it's near certainty thanks to the way I've mapped it out. And although it's what I want, and the only thing I can honestly see myself doing, it's still very scary. I don't know how well suited I'll actually be to teaching, but at least I'm finding out. Face the fear head on, that's how to overcome it, right? It better be.

But, the silver lining is cracking. Despite being much happier both in myself and my surroundings, I still manage to waste a horrific amount of time. It's not like I don't have a to-do list as long as my arm, so why do I do it? I can't decide between it being a result of having nothing to do once it's done, or just being too damn lazy to get on with it in the first place. Either way, it has to get done. All I need to do is push myself to do it.

I'll let you know how many boxes I manage to tick.

Je n'aime que moi

My hiatus got cut short. Within an hour of their return I was upset and going stark raving mad trying to stop myself from murdering one of them.

I even had a 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' moment after the disastrous reunion, albeit in a much less romantic fashion: I got off the bus and walked through the streets without realising it was raining. Heavily. So I got extremely wet. At least it cheered me up, anyway.

If I can take anything away from this horrible situation I've been living in of late, it's that I've learnt a lot about myself. I think I can look at things less subjectively now, for want of trying to see what I've done and how it might aggravate the atmosphere in my "home". So at least I can walk away from the situation knowing even though my head's been messed up in more ways than one this year, I'm a more encompassing person for it. I was never highly intolerant before, but on occasions I would make false judgements based on one or two encounters. Now I like to think that I live by that age old saying "time will tell". Because, after all, the passage of time allows us to accept and explore new people and things, and that time does tell us exactly how we feel about something or someone having changed our minds several times throughout the course of any given period.

Time teaches us who we are, and where we figure in the grand scheme of things. Which is probably a good thing. It's nice to think that I'm the centre of the universe from time to time - even if it is a little selfish of me.

Hiatus

After an extremely stressful few weeks, a two-week break is gratefully welcomed. I have a little break away in a different place, I come back, and do nothing. Doing nothing spills over from one day to the next, until suddenly I realise that I haven't left the flat properly in almost a week.

Some would find this worrying. Before I went away last weekend, I'd have agreed. But at the moment, it couldn't be better: I don't have to go to work, where I get stressed out, and my flatmates are away, thus relieving the stress of my homelife. This hiatus is amazing, and I've made a remarkable recovery. To a certain extent.

Half-way through the last school holiday of the academic year, once I go back to school next week, I will be working for ten weeks straight. There is a long weekend at some point in May, but that can hardly be regarded as a break, as such. But next week also marks the return of my flatmates, one of whom will probably darken my mood and let me sink back into the near-depression I experienced just before this holiday.

There was a time when I was this confident, outspoken individual who was clear about who she is and where she's going. Now, when my flatmate is around, I feel like a shell of my former self. I feel that I should be conforming to what my flatmate questions me on with regard to my approach to how I look. Then, I get flashes of anger that I'm even questioning whether I have the wrong approach. Everyone has their own opinions on this subject, but the bottom line is, whatever makes the individual happiest portrays the best image to others. And the fact that I don't give a stuff if I have a hair out of place to go to work, or that I'd rather have an extra half hour in bed every morning than to get up and cover up a few flaws on my face says a lot about my character. Or at least I thought it did. I guess it still does, in a sense that even though I feel much less confident about myself these days, my stubborn streak hasn't faltered, and so I'm sticking to my guns as a form of rebellion, protest.

I wasn't broken before I came here. But somehow in my mind I'm trying to fix myself, trying to bring myself round to my flatmate's way of thinking. Then I get all upset about it and realise that I'm being silly even contemplating changing who I am because of someone I've known for less than three months. And so I carry on as I am, resulting in this merry-go-round of emotions that is cutting me up but also making me stronger, bit by bit, insult by insult. The only thing that rings true in my mind these days is something my mother has said all my (and her) life:

"Take me as I am, or not at all."

That may sound stubborn and uncompromising. But all it says is that I have my principles, my reasons, my own mind. If a person can't respect that, then maybe that person isn't worth getting to know and becoming friends with.

Teething problems

Everything has a dodgy first few days/weeks/months/years. Babies have those horrible few weeks of pain as their first teeth start cutting through. Businesses have a worrying first few months wondering whether they're going to be a success or not. Heathrow's T5 is having the first week from hell.

But why? BAA have been banging on for months and months that T5 was going to be the best air transport facility in the world; that it was going to be the most efficient terminal of them all at Heathrow. Yet they've managed to cancel upwards of 400 flights in this first week, with no real idea when the chaos will end. A backlog of 28,000 bags in transit just makes the situation even more farcical. State of the art baggage system that can process 12,000 bags per hour? I can see a bit of blame shifting in the near future, what with the considerably higher luggage allowance for long-haul flights and all that.

Did anyone look at the logistics of moving the location of all BA's operations in one go? With all that's gone wrong since opening to the public last Thursday, it makes you wonder. But then, Eurostar moved all their operations from Waterloo to St. Pancras over one night, and as far as I recall it went without a hitch. Granted that wasn't on the scale of T5, but honestly, if a load of trains can find their way from one side of London to the other between the hours of daylight, surely a couple of planes can veer their way from one spot of tarmac to another within the same hectare? It's not as though T5 is out of the way of the rest of the airport now, is it?

The question on everyone's lips now? 'Will BA and BAA be fined for the chaos this hideously expensive venture has caused?" Personally, I think they should - Network Rail gets fined for having more than a certain number of late running or cancelled trains, why shouldn't BA/BAA be subject to the same? I know thousands more people are affected by late running or cancelled trains every day than they are delayed or cancelled flights, but it's the principle I'm getting at. In such a short period of time, after such high-profile (and, in hindsight, overhyped) publicity in the build-up to the opening of T5, the parties involved have really shot themselves in the foot. Maybe the government will shoot them in the pocket now... it won't buy back any time lost by all those poor poor passengers, but it'll hopefully make BA think twice about new terminals in the future...