On being spread too thinly

There are a lot of things I want to do and generally I want to do all of them well. There are also a lot of things I am expected to do and I don’t think anyone really cares whether I do them well or not – as long as I appear to be doing them. I was greeted today by e-mail from a militantly drab individual who has developed an inflated sense of self-importance in recent months. The e-mail was a follow up to one of the many e-mails I receive each month from different parts of the university wanting me to document everything I have “achieved” in a given period. The time period varies all the time and sometimes overlaps with previous requests just as the required information constantly changes. There appears to be an industry in information requests at my place of work and I have decided to stop responding to them. The militantly drab person referred to earlier had the front to send round an e-mailing complaining about the lack of response. The fact that we are approaching the most intensive part of our teaching right now seems to have escaped her notice. The fact that most of us will not have had time to conduct and publish research, apply for a multi-million pound grant and set up a spin-out company since we were asked to document our “achievements” last month will also not have crossed her mind. Despite my rather bitter tone I feel like I have achieved quite a lot in the seven weeks of teaching we have had so far this year. I managed to get a student to give a presentation to a class when she was terrified. It sounds small but this girl had literally run out of the class in previous years and more recently been ill with stress and unable to do it. My class was the first time she had been able to stand there with her slides and talk to the group. She came to see me on the morning before the presentation and looked grey and tearful – I didn’t think she would manage but she did. She was delighted afterwards and I was really pleased for her. I have had many little moments like that over the weeks where I have helped someone do something they couldn’t do – where I have seen the metaphorical penny drop. I have been reading my students’ reflective learning assignments and it has been great to see how much they have enjoyed learning how to do something new or how to see material from a different perspective. One of my girls is presenting her work at a conference next week and I spent time today helping her plan her slides and going through her statistics and analysis. It is important that students come to university to develop personally as well as intellectually. In our society where things are only valued if they can be measured financially or put into a table of some kind, I get really pissed off sometimes and wonder what the point of my job is (other than to fill out forms).

Pain, pain, pain

Today was a very bad day. Last night I was talked into drinking some Benrinnes (just one glass) and then I ended up having a few more drinks and stayed out late (for a school night) listening to folk music in Sandy Bells (which has previously appeared in photographic form on this blog). I can’t drink much alcohol and what would normally be considered merely ‘warming up’ for a Scotsman is an intoxicating amount for me. I stumbled onto the 23 bus outside George Heriot’s and managed to get a short sleep in before I got off the bus in Morningside. I always regret these occasional evenings of whisky because I’m such a lightweight.

Anyway, I awoke briefly in the night to hear Nigel Farage’s unusual outburst being discussed on the World Service and then I went back to sleep and grumpily got up to prepare for my 9.30am meeting. Today I had to talk to the woman who is my personal tutor on the teaching course I’m doing. She was late and I had to tell her that I hadn’t done any work on my essay about teaching because I’d been too busy teaching. Then I had to read my lecture notes and frantically prepare handouts for my four hour teaching session.

Today’s handout featured a case of false victimization – a woman who had fabricated a year long case of stalking and sexual assaults just to get attention. The lecture was about stalking and it finished with a dash of pathological attachment. The students seem to love all this stuff about “nutcases” and I think next week they will particularly enjoy my material on psychodynamic archetypes. I will introduce them to the male fantasy of ‘whore rescuing’. It will probably spoil some of their favourite films but I reckon they’ll like it more than learning about the language acquisition device.

So why is this blog called “pain”? Because I’ve been in various types of pain for the last three days. I’ve got a cold, I’m tired, I’ve got stomach pains, a mouth ulcer and my head hurts. Some of these symptoms are self-inflicted but others have appeared without encouragement. I want to lie with my monk candle on, enter a state of tranquillity and then not go to work or read my e-mail for two weeks.

Be still

I realised today that I have trouble being still. I don’t mean literally being still – I can sit in an armchair for worryingly long periods of time just moving my hands while I kill my brain cells with Google and facebook. I mean that I cannot be mentally still. I’m not sure that I know how to really relax. I always feel as though I need to be doing something, preparing for something or thinking. I sometimes cannot sleep for thinking and it’s not always about anything useful. Tonight I went to the gym, swam until I was exhausted and then walked briskly up a couple of hills. When I got home I was tired and thought about going to bed at 8pm. Then I ate my dinner and now I’m awake and my brain is working again. Often I’m awake at 1am scrolling through the TV channels looking for something other than Quiz Call to watch. I go to bed because I think I ought to try and sleep rather than because I’m genuinely tired.

What I would like to be able to do is sit in a Zen state of relaxation and calm and empty my mind. Until my doctor gives me a shoebox full of Valium I will have to make do with regional delicacies.

Jeremy Kyle and mercy killings

I work at home on Tuesday mornings in an effort to make progress on my research plans. I often sit cosily on the couch with the laptop going through the vast data file on neurotic nutcases who are obsessed with facebook. I am hoping to get some of it published eventually. To cut a long story short, some people who use facebook are not right in the head but I’ll be more eloquent about that another time.

I had the misfortune to watch some of Jeremy Kyle today while I was working. It is possibly the worst show of that genre. The guests are bad but that is to be expected – there would be no show to watch if they were all nice people with lovely families. The hardest thing to manage is watching that fool Kyle shouting at people. He has a limited selection of catchphrases (e.g. “grow a pair”) which he spits out with faux rage. I am waiting eagerly for the day someone breaks a chair over his head. I switched off after ten minutes and decided to go into work instead.

It was at work the topic of mercy killings came up. You may have started reading this blog hoping to learn that Kyle had become the victim of a mercy killing – sadly no. In a discussion today a colleague suggested to me that being asked to commit a mercy killing should be regarded as a great compliment. I started to wonder about that. Death is often discussed at work especially as the term progresses. It’s not as depressing as it sounds, we often make it humorous! Mercy killings are all the rage these days though and everyone seems to be putting their opinions forward and admitting to do the odd one here and there. I’ve never done one and have never been asked to either. There are people who I think should be mercy killed though.

I think we should have the right to request death. As I get older I’ve come to believe we should be able to do a lot of things that I never used to agree with. I seem to be going in reverse. Most people are liberal and open-minded when they’re young and then get right wing and intolerant as they age. I started off intolerant about almost everything and now I’m just intolerant about most people. That’s not normally a problem for psychologists though.

This video is truly awful. I doubt you’ll manage the first two minutes before you have to switch it off, scream and have a drink.

Men’s Brains

While teaching a statistics class today I noticed one of our male students was wearing a hoody which said ‘Young & Hung’ on it in rather large letters. The chap concerned could easily be mistaken for a 13 year old but obviously he sees himself as some kind of love machine. It caused me to reflect on the male ability to be relentlessly confident no matter what they look like. I’ve seen this happen a lot and sometimes I’m quite envious as I am normally the kind of person who constantly assumes the worst about myself no matter what anyone says. Last week I went home to my husband and found he had his rather ill friend over for the night. I don’t know the exact age of this friend but he looks well on the way to 60. Years of epic drinking have taken their toll on him and he is now stick thin, very shaky and clearly physically damaged by the abuse. Given the physical condition of this man I was rather taken aback when he decided to mention his sexual prowess during a conversation about the sex offender seminar I’d just been to. I was troubled on two levels really – why would a man want his own sex life in a conversation about sex offenders? And, seeing as this man could barely make it up three flights of stairs, I found it difficult to imagine him doing ‘horizontal jogging’ as the Mayor would say…

This afternoon I got some more of it but in a different way. I spent an hour interviewing a taxi driver for a research project I’m doing. I only met him this afternoon because he was recruited to the project by my colleague who knows him very well. Within a few minutes of the interview starting he began to refer to his sexual antics. This guy was admittedly in better physical condition than my last example but I still found his eagerness to share surprising. I didn’t let him know that though – I did the psychologist thing and non-judgementally nodded as he described seducing a woman by e-mail in one afternoon. His confidence in all manner of things was off the scale and believe it or not he’d had a psychotherapist in the back of his cab last night…

The tyranny of objects

First blog of 2010 – a reflection on the tyranny of objects. I’ve spent a lot of time this year pondering my finances. They’re not in the best of health, not quite Lehman Brothers standard, but not good either. They reflect almost a decade of living beyond my means. I look around myself wondering what I have to show for this five figure sum and it doesn’t really add up. I have a lot of good memories which one could argue are priceless, but I also have a lot of empty tokens. I’ve often bought things on the spur of the moment because it made me feel good. Sometimes it’s clothing, sometimes it’s a special meal or ludicrously expensive drinks. It provides a transient pleasure… unlike the cost which is altogether longer lasting. The two best objects I ever bought which I couldn’t really afford were my laptop in 2006 and my Sony D-SLR camera last May. I have used these things endlessly and they’ve given me great pleasure. I can’t say the same for the hangover inducing alcohol and waist expanding dinners which emptied my current account so that Scottish Hydro Electric had to be serviced by Mastercard instead. I am about to launch Operation Stafford Cripps to bring all this under control. For the next five months I will take a leaf out of the austere old bugger’s book and live excruciatingly within my means. I will try not to think about what Oscar Wilde had to say on that subject. At the end of June a change in accommodation will free up a little Martini money.

Last Thursday I went to see The Road with my friend from work. It’s no coincidence that I mention it here as it cannot fail to make you think about what is really valuable in life. The man and his son are living on the road in a post-apocalyptic landscape where there is virtually no food or shelter and everyone seems to be moving towards somewhere else. The film was not my cup of tea, but it was engaging. The things we take for granted became major events in the lives of the central characters – finding tinned fruit, being able to wash in warm water and having somewhere to sleep were sources of great joy. Having a bullet in case you needed to commit suicide was a great comfort. It was bleak! I have a lot of things to be thankful for as well as a lot of things I don’t need and never needed.

I will not let my possessions possess me.

I will close this blog with thoughts of my sister who is training to be a nurse. She phones me up every so often to tell me about her patients. I’ve learned a lot from her in the last few weeks about how hideously ill a person can be. She has told me in great detail about patients with flesh eating bacteria, neck tumours, full thickness burns and blood clots the length of their shins. It all sounds so bad that I feel queasy sometimes but when I go off the phone I think how lucky I am not to be in that state. I complain about all manner of minor ailments but basically I’m fine. I’m just neurotic and spend too much money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY A taste of The Road.

Goodbye

There isn’t much of 2009 left – less than two hours as I type this. I’ve not kept up with blogging like I planned to. It was supposed to be once per day then once per week but I only just managed once per month in the end. This is blog number 49 after eight months of doing it. This year has had some wonderful and surprising moments as well as some awful desperate times. I hope 2010 has more of the former. I have made new friends this year who have been remarkably kind to me when I’ve needed it most. This year I got a jalopy and a banjo, I embraced photography and baking and as the year draws to a close I have been lucky enough to get a Wii to play on. I’ve put on a lot of weight and I’ve lived badly sometimes but I plan to do better in 2010. Everyone says that, I know. Only time will tell if it works out that way.

Happy New Year.

Unexpected Pleasures

Last night I had an unexpected pleasure. After a one hour plus therapeutic back massage I went to Waitrose. I was in a dreamy state after Elisa’s handiwork on my tiresome shoulder. There had been a lot of crunching and creeking on the old back but the massaging of my ear lobes and neck practically sent me unconscious with relaxation. I think I almost forget to breath sometimes during these sessions. I wandered about in Waitrose pondering which curry to buy, then which tea bags, then which wine and then whether to get blueberries or raspberries. The choice paralysed me once I got to the chilled desserts. I was shaken from my dwam by carol singing. Not just any carol singing like a bunch of school kids or some do-gooders in woolly hats – not even a loud CD – but really, really GOOD carol singing. It was so beautiful and pure and filled the whole shop. It made me feel quite emotional and I went to the end of the ailse to see what was going on. There was a group of people in tuxedos and black dresses looking immaculate and singing in the middle of Waitrose. It was quite bizarre and wonderful and I was taken aback by their appearance and ability.

On my way out of the shop I looked at the sign on the floor next to them and their bucket of donations. The bucket had an awful lot of notes in it rather than loose change and the sign read “Edinburgh University Chamber Choir” – which explained a lot. Now you don’t get that in Lidl…

The Journey of the Magi by Sassetta. The next blog will not be about religion…

Lamentations

Today I was invigilating an examination in a church and I was reminded of the motto of my husband’s alma mater: Initium sapientiae timor domini (the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom). The church has been modified into a lecture theatre but it still smells like a church, still has pews in places and still has lovely stained glass windows. There were 15 students today from a class of 113. Most of them had taken the test five weeks ago – the group today were the ones who had been “ill”. I say “ill” because now I’ve been teaching in various capacities for seven years I realise there is a suspicious correlation between illness and assessment. There should have been 20 today but I think the other five may have been ill (again). How awful for them.

Once I had made them spread out so they couldn’t copy each other’s answers the test began. I had planned to quietly surf the internet while they worked but I quickly decided that the clicking and tapping it would generate would be an unfair distraction. I thought I would sit in the middle of the stage and read. I opened my bag and realised with a sinking feeling that the only reading material I had was the module handbook. I glanced around the stage in quiet desperation knowing that I would never make the module handbook last more than five minutes. I saw piles of old leaflets sitting on a pew – they were from 2005 and were about funding for mature students – even worse than the module handbook. There was an overhead projector, some VHS tapes, more leaflets on funding and a Swedish novel. YES – a Swedish novel. Good grief, I was beginning to think I would have to spend all the time just looking at them writing with their despair filled faces. Then I saw my salvation – the Bible.

I picked it up and checked to see if it was in English rather than Swedish. It was. I slowly walked back to my seat in the centre of the stage and sat down with the good book. I opened it at random and the first thing I read was “I will winnow them with a winnowing fork”. Dear God, it’s going to be a long exam, I thought to myself. I found the book of Jeremiah to be a bit heavy on winnowing so I skipped back to something nearer the beginning and found the less than cheery Lamentations. This was a whole new experience for me as I didn’t even know there was a book of Lamentations having had such a right-on 1980s secular education. “It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” according to Lamentations.

I looked up from the book at the sound of movement. Were they cheating? No – they were looking depressed and confused as they turned pages. I looked at my watch and realised that only 10 minutes had passed even though my guess had been that 20 minutes would have passed. I watched them for a while and began to imagine how they would react if I stood up and started reading very loudly from the bible. I planned to do it in the style of Samuel L Jackson’s character from Pulp Fiction. I’d really shout and exaggerate key words like ‘vengeance’. I thought about slamming the book down on the table for added effect. I pictured their faces. Some of them would be laughing at me, others would be shocked, maybe a little frightened, maybe a few of them would be offended too. I started to wonder if there would be an official complaint or if they would just talk about my outburst amongst themselves. The whole thing came to life in my head and I think it might have been inspired by catching Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar the other night.

I decided not to do it. I became convinced that they would complain because it was an exam situation. They would put in appeals and my antics would be documented multiple times. I sighed audibly and looked back down at my Bible. I decided to skip to the end and crack open the seven seals to try and make the time pass quicker. I even found something for the students: Revelation 1:19.

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Pumpkins

I am tired and have an achey back. Yes, the complaining is temporarily back. I really want another back massage and to be looked after. When I had a back massage a few weeks ago I ended up having the best night’s sleep I’d had for many, many weeks. My sleeping position becomes increasingly foetal as time passes until I am almost circular. I get tense during the day and never really relax. I now have the phone number for someone who will give me a one hour massage for £25. I will be calling her tomorrow. It will hurt but I will feel great for several days afterwards.

Last night was very nice. I went to see my friend who is recovering from swine flu and he made me a Halloween pumpkin. In return for this I took my homemade ice cream with me to share with him and his wife. The ice cream was enthusiastically received and it was nice to get such good feedback. It was also good fun scooping the “brains” out of the pumpkin. We decided to make the incision in the occipital lobe rather than just scooping through the top of the frontal lobe and the cortex in the manner that pumpkin carvers with no psychology degrees might. I was quickly relegated to a surgical assistant due to my clumsy use of knives. I was occasionally required to put my hand in over the cerebellum and gather up the frond like dendrites. The finished pumpkin was pretty good and you can see it below photographed with a long exposure whilst moving the camera. Despite having no brain left it is still able to express emotion. Ekman would be delighted.

I am looking forward to the weekend.