Friday, June 10, 2011

Atavisms, ghosts, and a potential new direction?

Dear Diary,

My post technically pertains to Thursday, which has just passed. Maybe I'll tell the story backwards.

It's 2am, I can't sleep. The podcasts are playing in the background. I feel the need for constant sound in the background. I have woken up after what must be between 5-5.5 hours of sleep. Considering how early I went to sleep, I suppose 5 hours isn't so bad, but I need to get up later for work. My shift is at 11:30, which means 10:30 I leave, which in turn means I need to get ready from about 09:45 or earlier. The time now is about 4:15. After 30 mins of laying in bed, I felt it was good time to venture out of bed. I felt distinctly tired, but not tired enough to sleep. I realised this feeling was hunger. Again, I had a low blood sugar level.

Skip to Thursday morning. I woke up earlier than usua. However, things went at such a pace I wasn't able to do things advance of my schedule. As it happened I made some preparations for the wedding I'm going to next weekend, I bought a Bowtie, I've found a new Cummberbund, and I have determined that I need a new dress shirt. The main item for Thursday's itinerary is a meeting with this guy for a not-quite job in a not-quite interview. As it happened, it was in a nice part of London, I think it was near the various London colleges, and I almost recognised Tottenham court road, as well as the route to the British Museum. Central London is such an enigmatic place, I love learning about it. I came early so I went for a walkabout. My aphorism is: you never get lost in London, you just learn more about it.

Anyway time came near and I had a meeting. This is going to sound necessarily vague, and I really don't feel like saying too much about it and at the same time I don't want to sound bullshitty to you. I'm currently 'in negotiation' with this startup organisation, who I think have been named on various outlets such as The Guardian (the only paper I read). They are well connected it seems. The only thing that makes me feel a bit off about it is they haven't at any moment yet mentioned renumeration, something I desperately need. Basically I've sort of provisionally agreed to take part and take creative ownership of a project they want to run. It's a social media project and I unfortunately cannot say anything more specific then that...okay it involves RSS feeds. This could be a really neat opportunity for me. This isn't where I want to be in life, but PhDs are too hard to come by. I'm happy to read Karl Popper on the train at the moment.

If I accept this opportunity, I'll be in charge and the face of a media project. I have no experience at all, but I do (by some freak of having diverse interests) have extensive knowledge about the medium. Somehow having a google reader fetish has paid off. After the meeting my thoughts started to race about, my thoughts were moving about to things so quickly I felt very uncomfortable with it. I felt like an old part of me from the past, a part of me that used to run the ADC has emerged in me again, or rather, an atavism of my past has found itself to be relevant again.

Should I see it as an atavism that I no longer want, or an oppurtunity to enhance a skill set I used to encourage? An atavism is something like reptilian fear in the human brain, not my capacity to be a romantic lover. That said, romantic love has been so detached from my life, I feel like its dead, or its an atavism long forgotten. We are taking this project slowly for now. I'll meet up with them in 2 weeks. I have an uncomfortable feeling about taking on this project. But I felt the same when I got involved with the internship last year. Lets just see how this goes. I think that the people I'm getting involved with are well connected, and if would do me well if I got stuck in with that crowd. Heck, maybe I have something to offer them!

It's been a long time since anyone has invested confidence in me. As I'm writing this post I keep thinking about that Ladytron song with the lines:

There's a ghost in me
who wants to say "I'm sorry"
Doesn't mean I'm sorry

Maybe its the throbbing bassline that's in my head. Before I went to the meeting I was in a semi-rush as I was picking out clothes pertinent to the wedding. That meant by the time I finished the interview I hadn't done much in the day in terms of job searching or reading tasks, or applications. I went to the gym after the interview and I bought a protein shake, my god it tasted horrible with water. The shake tastes a bit better with milk, however. I think there is something to the viscousity of the milk that enables a froth that enables the powder to assimilate in the milk much easier to water. Does the protein shake help my performance? I am yet to determine that. I do know that I only put in a half session at the gym today. I felt tired enough after all the walking and I reasoned to myself that I've done too much walking and not enough scheduled tasks.

Once I got home I had a slow supper consisting of bread and philadelphia cheese. This was a pretty high cal food because the bread was 100kcal a slice, and I had 4 slices. I was in fact, over my caloric limit on Thursday. I fell asleep soon after as I couldn't focus on anything due to fatigue. I then woke up at 2am, you know the rest, 15 minutes after starting my post I'm right here.

So in summary, I've been invited to lead a project under a potentially influential social enterprise. I could make a name for myself, or at the least, I have something to say for myself when people ask: so, what do you do? I feel odd that my thoughts started to get really flustered and all over the place. I also had this weird dream, I was listening to a podcast and it got mixed in to my dream, where I thought the content of the podcast was a lecture Q&A and I had some really important points about the nature of secularism, and I kept trying to get the attention of the speaker and say to him that he needs to read Chris Mooney and Michael Shermer's less volatile approach to atheism. I have dreams which involve talking about books and references, yes that's the kind of person I am.

 

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