So I was left with a mish-mash of nonsense which I kept coming back to but was unable to complete. This happens quite frequently. A lot of the time it's the 3am syndrome. Now, I thought I had mentioned this before, but a quick search through previous entries doesn't seem to mention it. Very simply the 3am syndrome is the burst of creative energy and lack of self-censorship that one feels if one awakes (or happens to be awake) in the middle of the night (typically at 3am). I seem to remember T&F first mentioning this phenemenon, but I preusme it's universal.
So typically one will awake and be unable to return to sleep. You'll then start thinking about a certain thing (a project perhaps) and this will interest or excite you. Ideas will flow on this idea, making it even harder to return to sleep and thus with the free-time and mental energy one will have, unusual levels of creative will flow out. None of this is particularly noteworthy - but what interests me here is the complete lack of self-crticism. Normally, I'm at least partially aware of what I'm thinking/doing/writing is utterly without merit. Normally I do not labour under these delusions but at 3am I'll be convinced the Pulitzer is in the post.
Once, I developed an entire idea for how I could write a newspaper by myself at 3am. I'd write, print and distribute the whole thing. And I couldn't see a single flaw in the plan. I eventually went back to sleep at about 6am, feeling really excited by the outline of the idea I had sketched out. It was, to my mind, utter unmitigating genius. When I awoke the next morning I realised what shite I had been talking and quickly destroyed the evidence of my folly.
This is the usual response - destruction. Sometimes I'll wake up and simply edit for typos and post it anyway. Other times it's not a finished state and I'll be forced to interact with it on a more fundamental level. It's not a pleasant task.
(As a matter of interest I write this at 3am)
You see, I used to think the blank page was the biggest tyranny you could face. You'd approach it (be it a physical white page, a flashing cursor in your text-editor or whatever) and be powerless to write anything at all. Unable to even get started in the simplest fashion.
I'm not sure if that's true anymore. A far bigger problem seems to be facing a mess of words which barely seem your own. It's not even limited to writing in the traditional sense.
Annie (a programmer by trade I believe) wrote in her blog that she is comforted by the comments in her code when she get's to work in the morning. I don't, I hate mine.
For those not familiar with the basics of programming, it's possible to have comments in a program/script/whatever which are for human attention (and ignored by the interpreter/compiler) and seek to clarify the code for either the benefit of the code's creator, or someone else who is reading it. It usually seeks to explain on some level how it works / what it is doing / anything else you should be aware of. For something that is work-in-progress it could be a development note so something like :
/*
This sub needs to be rewritten - horribly inefficient under Informix. Should rewrite only referencing Block and Property tables. DL - August 18, 2005 03:46:39 AM
*/
The above might flag up something that needs work and be an action point to the person who wrote it (or anyone else who has to work on this). Most of my comments come out something like that.
So instead of being comforting, warm notes that greet me when I get to work I am left with trawling through a bunch of barely comprehensible non-sensical defences of previous shoddy workmanship and jerry-building. So
// didn't have time to do this properly.Or
# Will re-write later. I promise.
Sometimes there's out and out sarcasm or lame apologies to myself why certain things weren't finished. I am continuously reminded of Homer Simpson's eternal quote from Treehouse of Horror IV :
Bastard! He's always one step ahead.
Working through your own 'creative' mess is a strange experience as it is a process that changes over time. If you proof-read your own work striaght after you've written it, it's fairly certain that you will miss various errors that other people would spot. This does not mean that you are less attentive or stupid than others (although that of course could be the case) but it's just harder as you're blind to your own mistakes. If you read your own work a month later, you'll spot a different set of errors.
You can read into that whatever your sort of allegory you like. But that's why I haven't updated in a while, I got trapped in a morass of my own drivel. As with many things, it was a creative dead-end.
Or at least, that's part of the reason why I've not updated. The other reason is that my life seems to be fairly settled at the moment. Not much changes on a day-to-day level.
By comparison tomorrow a whole bunch of people get their A/AS Level results (good luck, etc). The usual media nonsense rolls on about 'standards' in education, all of which will spectacularly miss the point (as always). The BBC will feature reports from around the country where strangely Aryan looking middle-class girls will be pleased with what they've got and hugging each other (e.g. like this). I'm not really sure why they resort to this sort of cliche ever single year, unless this is the closest the Beeb can get to showing white supremacist lesbian pornography (and thus they don't wish to miss the opportunity).
Either way, for a lot of people, tomorrow is a knife-edge. How their lives will go will depend very much on how tomorrow goes. Well, that's what they're told. The truth is more pedestrian and less dramatic, but doesn't get people hyped up enough to do any work. I don't really recall caring (although I suppose I must have a little), since I had already resigned myself to mediocrity but even with me it affected what Uni I was going to (although I doubt it would have mattered, in the long-term). The point is that for the people whose A-Level results tomorrow, life has a reasonable degree of uncertainty, unpredictability and change in it.
I'm not sure this is true for myself, or most of my peers at the moment. And a dull life leads to dull entries (as I doubt you need to be reminded). But moreover, I've got no complaints.
My job, while ocassionally tedious, is no worse than can be realistically expected. I am generally listened to, reasonably respected, and (for my non-existent level of effort) adequately compensated. My home-life is reasonably stable now that we have our house (although our area's charms are debatable, as I've posted elsewhere our local McDonalds featured in the news here on Monday) and there are no complaints on that front. My relationship is still awesome and without wishing to be overly nauseating, it still surprises me that other people exist who aren't emotionally damaged psychos - and thus it's possible to go out with someone for over a year and not have a single argument.
Financially, I'm doing horribly as always, but the constant letters chasing money are almost comforting by now. If there was a month where I didn't have to juggle three overdue credit cards with letters from British Gas then I'm not sure what I'd do. I'd probably find it quite depressing.
So, in short - things go on as normal. Life has reached some sort of equilibrium for me, and for most people I know. Things change but people seem to find their groove somewhat.
Or at least, I thought. But then random things happen. Olly ended up in A&E on Saturday night after an incident where pills+speed+hypertension = lolly roffle. On Monday one of my housemates said they were thinking of leaving London (soon) for reasons not ultimately clear. On Tuesday my friend said he wanted to hand in his notice next pay-day after two years.
I guess these types of drama make for more fruitful or interesting entries. Right now my life is (thankfully) bereft of dramas or stress.
Well, I have 13 days to think of a title, research and write my MSc dissertation. But that barely shows up on the radar."
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