transponderings

I’m giving myself a little less than an hour to write this off-the-cuff meandering piece of irrelevance. Why I should subject you to this is anybody’s guess, but I reckon a gap-filler like this might be better than nothing for someone. If you’re only here for my proper blog posts, that’s fine. Ignore this and another post will be along shortly (maybe).

I’m sitting with a cup of coffee and a couple of squares of chocolate in the university chaplaincy centre. It’s not a bad place to sit. Quiet enough and with no pressure to move on. I used to sit here quite often when I was around the university regularly.

My only slight concern right now is that I’m having to work hard to stop my lips moving as I write, because someone is sitting just across from me working on their laptop. It wasn’t until a couple of sentences ago that I realised I was speaking aloud, albeit quietly. I just hope the person opposite me didn’t notice.

I will be here a little more regularly again, now that I’ve signed up to teach two syntax classes a week. I’m not back to my PhD, but tutoring is a good way (I hope) to get back into the swing of things without throwing myself in at the deep end.

This week, though, I’ve had far more to do than I’m used to doing and it’s been quite tiring. The tutor welcome and training events yesterday were exhausting, even though I didn’t have to do anything (apart from collecting my shiny new staff card, now attached to an LGBT-ally rainbow lanyard). I know that most of my week is empty, but that’s just where I am. I couldn’t imagine doing a full-time job (or a PhD) right now.

My americano is still a little too hot, but the squares of chocolate have gone, as has the person who was sitting nearby. I can relax a little – though the drone of multiple voices from the café area outside the chaplaincy centre is slowly sucking energy out of me.

I just made the mistake of rereading what I had written so far. Writing-without-editing is still quite difficult for me, but it’s a good discipline. Still, I had to go back and tweak a couple of sentences that didn’t quite work. And now I have to pick up my train of thought, if I had one.

Just watching awkward freshers (I presume) going about the ritual of being away from home for the first time and learning to express their individuality. To be fair, most of them are far less awkward than I was, or indeed am.

I have seen the occasional person who seems to be bursting to say something with their choice of clothing but at the same time looking very uncomfortable, as though they’d worn a costume to a party that turned out not to be a fancy-dress party. I know the feeling, having tried too hard to stand out in the past, and I feel for them.

Anyway, that will have to do. Fifty minutes’ worth. Now I’m off to a seminar on some Japanese complementiser–copula constructions, which should be interesting but will no doubt also challenge me (in various ways!).