Saturday 30 December 2017

#358 Elusive Christmas holidays

I'd thought about doing sod all today. Hibernating under two duvets, the picnic rug and my M&Ms blanket, while playing videogames or watching Youtube.

It was the first day that I'd had to myself since before Christmas. My own personal holiday. I'd had all the enforced fun that society required me to have - the kind that's not actually fun - and was now free to rest and do whatever I wanted, which was the true meaning of the word "holiday" in the first place.

I'd noticed this same feeling among others of my friends. The need to take part, semi-against their will, in all the charade-like scenes and routine obligations that come with being part of a community. The kind of traditions that were necessary in order to maintain contact with certain people but the fulfillment of which felt anything but fulfilling. I was done with all of that now. I'd ticked all the social boxes and was free to concentrate as hard as I could on doing as little as possible.

Only, now that the time had come, I couldn't bring myself to take a break. With only four days to go until 2018, I needed to get clear on what kind of work I was about to start looking for and to do that, I wanted to update the bank of ideas I'd been keeping.

I ended up compromising and took the morning off. After last night's wedding, I'd got back after midnight and could never sleep right after getting home, so had stayed up into the early hours and was feeling pretty groggy.

The ideas bank was in essence a collage of images representing anything that I liked or found interesting. In the afternoon, I trekked out to the Barbican for a change of scene and spent an hour combing through old blog posts for anything I'd done during the past two months that I enjoyed that could be relevant to a job search. Slim pickings. I tended to categorise the ideas fairly broadly and had already put several under each category. It felt like there was nothing left to add.

During the course of the hour, I managed to come up with ten new ideas, which were really just old ones represented by new images. Having done so, I realised I was hungry and rarely felt like doing much on an empty stomach, so I headed over to Brick Lane for a dirt cheap, nondescript chicken curry.

On the bus back, I wondered whether I should carry on updating the ideas bank at home, or to leave it until tomorrow. This was no kind of holiday. I'd been irritated by the inability of my mother and brother-in-law to arrive at satisfactory conclusions to the day-to-day situations that they themselves had created, yet I was no better. Like them, I allowed myself to get wound up by experiences of my own making and didn't seem to want to give myself a break.

5 comments

Fizzfan said...

Having been back to work for a couple of days, I’m counting this long weekend as my second Christmas holiday and intend to treat it as a real holiday doing whatever I fancy, at whatever time, and taking no one else into consideration (ish)
Thus far last night I binge watched Happy Valley Series 1 on the BEEB (possibly my favourite ever police drama) got up very late after some emailing, made some sort of snacky lunch, cleaned out my glory drawer, had a general tidy round and stuck some washing in.
None of it felt like work though because I hadn’t planned on doing any of it. It just sort of happened.

I’ve never been good with scheduled tasks in my free time. They irritate me because once I’m home my mind resents me focusing on things it has other far nicer plans for.
Organised chaos with brief spells of explosive clear ups is how I seem to operate.

Are you more a methodical planner and lists person?

Profound Familiarity said...

All this sounds good.

I had to Google "glory drawer" and the only definition seemed to call it a place where a young lady might store clothing and linen in anticipation of marriage.

I make lists for chores but otherwise I don't tend to make plans.

Fizzfan said...

Now you mention it about the glory drawer, yes that is the official version. Our family have always referred to it being the drawer you keep all your odds n sods in in the kitchen.

Profound Familiarity said...

Oh you mean the kitchen drawer! :) :)

(I'm just kidding).

Fizzfan said...

HaHa. I’m a multi drawered diva. So nergh!

Go me with all ma drawers;)!