i’m not sure why i need to be burdened by her obsessive compulsive needs to clean and clean and clean our apartment because she is so spectacularly failing in everything else. i think that i am also sick, 200% motivated, beyond reason, to go the other way and not end up like her.
If i lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then?
: Nick Hornby
it’s really ironic how i’m using a fun read like high fidelity to personify my mother’s sad life. and he is completely accurate, it’s what happens to these middle-aged through-to post-menopausal people when suddenly everything they have worked for in their youth has become a distant glory, and their memory is failing and even all that success is becoming fuzzy, because all these good things have been replaced by all these little overzealous concerns brought about by an acute sense of hyperanxiety, which paradoxically can only be brought about by an onslaught of the monotone, dull and unexciting middle-age crisis.
suddenly there is no need for love but companionship, in a pathetic effort to offset the pain of being alone, even though we know that the wrong person barely makes up for any sense of jadedness. suddenly financial security becomes top priority, even though we know we can’t take the money with us to heaven. and death is inevitable.
i think this is why i so impulsively quit my PR job, after 3 weeks. before graduation, i panicked. it dawned on me that the economic crisis might be the end of me. i’ll never have a career. i’ll never be able to get out.
i told myself then that i desperately needed a job, prospects of progression, the gleaming cubicle, the whole package. i do. without enough money i will die. and then i got a position at a place where i used to intern, where i once told myself unless i was desperate i will never come back here again, and i did. it’s rather extreme but by the second day i already knew i was working against myself. all these things that i should be looking for, i don’t want it where i’m unhappy. and that’s the thing about me. i do things really fast. i don’t drag. i don’t like ‘we’ll see how it goes’ when it isn’t rhetoric.
yes it was definitely selfish of me. my employers took it really badly. but if in work you are not selfish, if you believe yourself to be indispensable, you can prepare for your long-service award speech now, that is if you don’t get retrenched for being old in the future.
i cannot understand how anyone can stick with a job they don’t like, or lead a life where you make yourself suffer. people can do it for other people, but when you do it for yourself it just doesn’t work. i don’t want to be like her. i think that after she’s ‘found a right to be selfish’ i’m not even sure what she is motivating herself with. i’m not sure how she can get up in the morning and not cry at how bleak things are. i suppose all she can do is hug her possessions and keep her routine. i don’t know how you can want something so bad that you are willing to risk danger to your own flesh and blood, that despite your maternal intuition you choose to ignore the decisions of reality. because ever since a year ago she has driven me at least halfway out of the door, and i’ll be dragging my sister out with me. it is no longer my home.
but that is why i say, she is incredible. incredibly naive and suddenly believing in the good of people like an innocent 5-year-old.
i’m very clear that i’m only allowed to have these thoughts because i don’t have immediate responsibilities, other than moving out. and that’s why i’m praying so hard that i don’t end up like her. if all goes well, i will be starting at a new place next month, with a lot more to prove. tendering within the first month of entering the work force… i hope that’s not all that i will be remembered for.
