I handed in my dissertation

And yeah, there was something I wanted to say.

...

Never mind.

Also – up & down mountains loads, micro & night navigation, river crossings, emergency procedures, steep ground², rope work, an overnight camping trip to Sprinkling Tarn (frozen at the time), pointless evening lectures, and many, many stories about Landrovers from my room mate³. Apart from that – my evenings filled with working on my dissertation. I ended up bringing three backpacks to carry all books.

Back home and off to Ambleside with the three that participate in my Adventure Therapy research/dissertation the day after. It was a good day, I think, and I felt – at the time – that it was quite successful. I’d left late though, we missed the first train, but had wonderful weather once there.

I spent a day at home, last Sunday. Then off to Wales for “Mountain Experience Days and Assessment” through uni. The last time to stay at Charmoix Mountain Centre with the course. None of the University Lectures actually could be present, leaving those students that already have gained Mountain Leader Assessed (or more) status to run these days (as members of staff).

Two of the LJMU students were going for their Walking Group Leader assessment, however, and I joined that group (of five total) under Phil George‘s supervision. Marshlands. Welsh wild horses (one dead). More micro navigation. The remnants of local shooting practice (wooden planks, aluminium cans and assorted other material partially pullverized by bullet holes) … and more Landrover stories⁴. I am glad to have had the chance to meet Phil again before the end of the course – he remembered me from back in year one. Phil – and his identical twin Al [suffering from cancer] – is one of the legends of English Mountaineering. Now in their fifties the two left the UK for Italy aged 16, became Alpine Mountain Guides by 21 and completed many first ascends of routes in the UK.

Mostly though – he is one of these awesome personalities that are rare to come by. Highly intelligent, yet humble, full of stories, little facts and knowledge – but always keen to get to know more about the world and the people around him.

1. Unless you paid a fee.
2. Still my main problem – I am less anxious than I used to be though
3. One of the few topics that really excite him
4. He didn’t like the pink one we ran into.

Elsewhere …

I’ve received an extension on my dissertation until March 2nd. It’ll still be tight to finish in time – it’s quite hard to co-ordinate four different people all on a different full-time course. And … well – as dissertations probably always go – it all seems incredibly mundane and not particularly useful while working on it. I’ve also got a transcript of my grades through the mail. It makes for a somewhat interesting read. My mean marks for level one and two where both at around 55%. Level 3 (up to the end of last term) is on a 71% level so far. Given it counts 3/4 for the final mark … I increased my degree classification to 67.1%. I.e. I am on a good path with room for growth. I am not that sure I can keep this up though – the whole dissertation mess up will mean I’ll be pressed for time with other assignments coming up in March. And I’ll not score high on the practicals, as in any of the previous years. Hm … .

I am off to the Lake District from this Saturday on for my Mountain Leadership Training (private arrangment, not part of Uni course), then off for a three day assessment on my Mountaineering skills with uni. Which means I’ll have to work on my dissertation in the evenings.

And meanwhile …

I’ve attended a staff training for my Student Learning Mentor post – “Magic Spelling” – which is basically a NLP approach to assist people in memorizing correct spellings of words. The fun bit … you’ll have to do a bit of “calibrating” by firing of questions and observing the person(s) eye movement for some clues on how their brain works. It’s not unlike the Voigt-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Blade Runner.

Also … I love The eels.. The world needs more of them.

there’s a world outside
and i know ’cause i’ve heard talk
in my sweetest dream
i would go out for a walk

but i don’t think i’m ready yet
i’m not feeling up to it now
just not that steady yet
and i don’t need you telling me how

there’s some happiness
and my stone face cracks again
maybe sometime sooner or later

but i don’t think i’m ready yet
i’m not feeling up to it now
just not that steady yet
and i don’t need you telling me how

so if i leave my room
don’t you tell me to lighten up
maybe sometime sooner or later

but i don’t think i’m ready yet
i’m not feeling up to it now
just not that steady yet
and i don’t need you telling me how

I already forgot many of those that I wanted to note down somewhere – no blog nearby, no time, whatever. Some stuck to mind though … and given I spend a good bit of time on busses, that’s the main focus right now.

#1: Not uncommon is the on the job chat. Not with a passenger, but a friend that happens to pass. The bus coming to a sharp stop, and a 10 minute discussion between driver and passer-by through the open door, while the passengers stoicly wait. No-one’s complained yet.

#2: Or that busdriver that reads a book while working … a few lines every red light (and a sip of tea). He’s bearded, wears glasses. Enjoys thrillers.

#3: The magic all day ticket that passes from passenger to passenger. Day-passes are valid an unlimited amount until midnight of the day of purchase, and, if you do more than three bus trips, cheaper than individual tickets. So frequently people just pass them on once they are done, and a single ticket transports many, many different people as it (I’d guess) is passed on from person to person, wherever the last person using it alights. I just got one of these (it was bought at 10:04 in the morning, it reached me by 21:03) today. From a complete stranger I’ll never meet again, as usual.

#4: I’ve mentioned pedestrian area musicians before. Nothing says Liverpool as the drummer and guitarist playing decently “hard” metal at a central spot of the shopping area. During christmas shopping time, with candy-cotton music oozing out of anything even remotely commercial. In the middle of a stressed out over-crowded shopping frenzy. Plus – they drew an audience!

#5:

Midnight, mid-January

——————————————————————————————————

I am late with my dissertation. So late, in fact that I won’t make the deadline. I am in the middle of crunching out interviews and transcribing, still. I am getting somewhere, though … and there are nice results up to this point. I’ll meet my tutor Monday. Let’s see what happens.

But because of that all leisure activities are off. I missed a Merchant of Venice performance by Propeller (an all male Shakespeare company) that I’d bought a ticket for (I’ve been told it was great, too ) – and skipped today’s Headsound session at FACT, too.

And I need to hand in the “open” Mountaineering paper that ate away my time these last few days. And of course I want to yield to my own self-promise of using this journal to get some routine in my life. An entry a day or every other. The Problem: these assignments always take on a life of their own and I end up leaving home at eight in the morning and only return back home a few minutes to midnight.

I am tired of this.

Down the river, saw you drown.

But what keeps me awake now are these:

Sennheiser HD 280 pro

Wanted good headphones since a while – as I have been using the cheap library ones to get rid of of the noisy atmosphere. And well, working on soundrecordings at FACT gave me a lot of time with headphones of decent quality on. These don’t look nice. But that’s fine. They grip tight. The first hour was actually painful. Now that they made friends with my head and lost their initial factory inflexibility …… they be wonderful and comfortable. And they keep the noise out. Meaning lower volume required to listen (around -32 db is good).

Did you know that there’s a small voice track mixed into Propellerhead’s History Repeating? “Can you hear this?”

You know it really is amazing.

I’ve finished the first mandatory part of the World-Of-Work twiddlefaddlemuck at uni. Let’s say I am carefully optimistic that some parts of that may actually prove useful. However. Myers-Briggs. Psychometric Analytics! Onehundredeleven rolleyes.

We could sing the Pope to sleep
(…)
would he take up too much room?
would he hog the blankets, too?

Good night.

Here’s a list of side effects
Practice tested
Covering every malice angle
For example you will sleep forever

One reason is that I just haven’t managed to keep routines much, something I want to work on. My course, given the frequent times we are away, has an ever changing time table adding to that. Framing my day by writing more and making the time for it seems sensible.

The Headsound group has started working on our next project – a stop motion animation – this last Friday. I will likely experiment some on my own, using my digital camera and will post results here, once in a while. We were discussing stop motion in general and watching some examples as a starting point for discussing where we want to go. I’ve fallen for Jan Švankmajer‘s Stop Motion Animation: The Flat (split in two parts), Food and Dimensions of Dialogue, for example:

Otherwise – life just moves along. I am working on my dissertation, a short paper on behaviour in Mountain terrain and signed up for a Mountain Leader Trainer Course mid February. I’ve also been asked to rework one of the seminars I held last term as a journal article. For now that is on hold – I need to get the rest of my workload out of the way first. This is the interesting part. I have only three weeks left for my Dissertation and basically no data as of now. What is fascinating is that I am not panicking about that. I just don’t. And it is, of course, entirely possible to get that data through interviews and transcriptions within that timeframe as I have managed to write pretty much everything else. This is, however, an immense difference to just about half a year ago, when I panicked about pretty much any task at hand. I have no idea what brought that change along. I am also in contact with Graduate Development hoping to find a bit of a lending hand on where to go from here, working toward finding a job by the end of this term.

What is clear is – I will stay in Liverpool for at least another two years if I can, hoping to raise the money for the M.A. in creative writing I deferred a year and a half ago. I guess also that – in many ways – I am actually for the first time in my life actually “bonding” with a place I live in, in the sense of having a life outside the singular reason (study) I moved there for. I am not sure Liverpool is my dream location – but in the end, any place will do.

(*)If you operate on PAL.

It’s the type of movie that makes you look at the titles of the e-mails caught in your spam mail filter and actually almost find some profound meaning in them, only that it just about escapes you around the next corner. (There’s profanity here, but that comes with the territory.)

Betreff:   ID MSG:74452 You have new mail from Olga

Betreff:   V|a_gr-a 100mg x 10 pills = $ 59.95

Betreff:   Prices cant be lower

Betreff:   Hot blonde gives blowjob and swallow some sperm

Betreff:   Available for you period

Betreff:   Transaction failed

Betreff:   RE: Le logiciel populaire, localise pour le franca…

Betreff:   eliminate credit card debt

Betreff:   Thanks for reading

I remember there’s been one spam mail message that I’d kept around for a while. It was one of those automated ones that had pulled out lines from random webpages to mask itself and trick some of the spam filters out there. What amazed was that it was poetry. But I’ve deleted it a good while back, so no quote here.

Today (my old rule of the day not being over before I go to bed still is valid; I am a couple days younger then my passport says) was a day that somewhat escapes words. It is that feeling I struggle with – of not quite feeling things are real, where I watch myself, where I don’t quite feel I fill my body. Where I am not really “me”. But I’ll start with yesterday.

I’ve discussed my dissertation with my personal tutor – and chances are it will turn towards a critical theory approach; not a prescriptive intervention, not me working as a researcher but a participant in a collaborative research project on Adventure Therapy. Where the group decides what Adventure Therapy is (which, naturally, implies a critical perspective on therapy forms that do exist). Where the group forms the methodology. The problem: I am anxious about pushing this forward. I know I need to, as I need to start producing data. But yes … when trying to formulate all this in words (spoken) it goes down the “it’s all too ridiculous line”. Another day.

Back home – late night – the main fuse went off. It’s only Anne and me here right now, this being reading week, and everyone else (including Gopi. back to India, to attend a relative’s marriage) gone. Anne was already fretting about having to finish an essay on rhododendron and with the power off, being forced to call it quits, was getting wound up about the whole situation. Thing is … the wiring in this house is messed up, somehow, majorly. We don’t have lights on the ground floor (and didn’t have any on the first floor, either, for some time). They’ve been here, trying to fix this frequently, it might work for a while, then some fuse refuses to cooperate. It’s never been the mains, so far, however. We tried getting power back on for a while but gave up eventually and used candles (and early bed time for each soon after).

Today … well, one of the amateur builders (they all seem best buddies with our landlady’s agent) came in, switched the fuse back on, and it stayed in. I had to leave, I don’t know if he actually called an electrician.

But also, today, was a day where I couldn’t communicate (meeting Silé, not being able to express myself well). We both walked over to the Liverpool Mental Health Consortium’s general meeting – one of those conferences that are important but largely pass you by. It might become more meaningful a year down the road, once having more of an insight what the Consortium is actually up to.

Once back home … I needed to just crash down. One of the weirdest realisations really is that you feel you are just a brain stuck in a hard skull, it’s all very cramped, physically feeling how claustrophobic it all is. And yes, that feeling of … a distinct lack of reality as indicated in the first paragraph.

The weird thing is – it’s always books or movies or fiction in general that grounds me. That reaches me in a more real way than reality – my reality, my existence, my being, my being a physical form, me existing in a space, in a sense, in well “here” this “place” – does.

I am still trying to figure out how not being me feels like. If there’s common ground between what me individual feels like and what them (other individuals) being them feels like. I guess that distinct thing I am trying to express here is not a common feeling – but it’s not dissociative, not quite (or not even close) – it’s just a keen sense of observing oneself and how unreal and bizarre the way live just always winds and moves forward is. It’s also based on an incredible amount of confusion.

But well. It’s time to end this day.