I'm quite fed-up of this search for a job in the UK. Maybe it's the grey, dull winter that's beginning to erode my optimism or even my affinity for this place. But it's more than that. Mumbai or New York or even freaking Tunis won't be able to fix this. It's this dissatisfaction, the chronic kind. I'm looking for work in a field that I am beginning to realise I have no interest in that too in a culture, corporate, for which I have little or no personality skills.....or patience. Don't get me wrong, it isn't as if I'm some savage brute incapable of being assimilated into polite society. I can fake it. Easily. But it would grate on the very foundations of my being. I'm a feral creature. I'm temperamental, eccentric, acerbic and I have trouble conforming. I operate in the world with a deceptive amount of extrovertedness but honestly, I am loathe to
share my personal space with anyone. I am competitive but only enough to be in the 123,
I have no desire to be top cat unless of course I finally strike upon something that I genuinely enjoy. In which case my ambitions won't so much be to be number one compared to everyone else rather to just keep enjoying what I am doing. In such a situation ideally the long hours won't even feel like work.
I don't want to feel work. Ever. I want to be the few who genuinely relish in each day they spend
here on earth. And I want to feel as if I am contributing to something, perhaps to the public discourse on gender, on identity, on being confident to be oneself. And learning. Meeting interesting people, sharing our ideas, developing new concepts, doing something completely avant-garde and seeing as much of the world as I can. It's all I ever want. Maybe some day do that blasted PhD to tickle my own cerebrality but also perhaps to contribute to our understanding of contemporary society, its future course, its past. Develop a wholly new historical materialist account of social change and thereby undo the damage of ahistoric, asocial theories that have in part contributed the current global morass. Or I'd just rather lie in the sun, listen to great music, read book after book and travel. Nothing too regular. Still I'm vying for the regular and the banal,I try to for various reasons, keeping the parents happy and thus never stepping certain lines. But it really kills me to do it. So our compromise is that on this-this-this--and-this I abide their wishes and that-that-that-and-that they keep their opinions to themselves. It was working well, we'd even found some common ground but now all this pressure to start a career when all I want is to travel. I'd rather be a hobo for the rest of my life and wander every corner of the globe than be rooted to one place. To one goal. To one life.
This is my compromise. I must. I must forge a career that allows me to take 2 months out of a year and travel, explore a country and culture to the depths 2 months would allow one to and then move on. I wish to have no family attachments (i.e. no marriage, no kids right now. The family I have right now are enough thank you!), nothing to bind me to an ordinary existence. If I do have a partner, and sure I'd like to have that one penguin to travel with me till the end of our time but that's it he's got to be just as flexible. And not so ambitious to miss out on everything else that exists in some mad manic dash to achieve his goal. Actually an ideal hubby would be who's OK with me going off on a vacation without him. I wish to be a free bird.The kind Lynard Skynard sang about. Why even forge a career? So that I can finance these grandiose dreams of liberty and exploration. All I want from life is to rise out of this mediocrity. Or throttle myself before I realise what actually stares back at me in the mirror. A rat. Running round and round and round and round, moving, moving, moving, moving but with absolutely no movement. Just the illusion of it. So how do I do it? Do I abjure all responsibilities, all duties that bind me and live for just myself? Or do I shut my eyes, drift, float, soar and smile to myself every once in a while. Is it really such an impossible dream? If only I had oodles of money. I could be careless and selfish then. I could live for me and me alone and let ME dictate MY choices. I still do but ME has so
many other lives bundled in to it. People say they appreciate what they leave behind, distance makes the heart grown fonder and blah. Not me. My heart is set in stone. I seldom miss. I seldom yearn for what was and if I do I get over it. All I want is more newness.
:)
The first time I broke up with Him I got a hair make-over. The next time I broke up with him I got a tattoo. The third and final time (in 9 months) I broke up with him, I just got over it!
Incidentally he wasn't the reason why I got a tattoo. I always wanted one and I finally had the money. Or my elder brother did. Which works well for me, when my parents finally do spot it I'll pin it on him, 'Ma Bhaiyya paid for it!'. Hahaha ingrate I am.
share my personal space with anyone. I am competitive but only enough to be in the 123,
I have no desire to be top cat unless of course I finally strike upon something that I genuinely enjoy. In which case my ambitions won't so much be to be number one compared to everyone else rather to just keep enjoying what I am doing. In such a situation ideally the long hours won't even feel like work.
I don't want to feel work. Ever. I want to be the few who genuinely relish in each day they spend
here on earth. And I want to feel as if I am contributing to something, perhaps to the public discourse on gender, on identity, on being confident to be oneself. And learning. Meeting interesting people, sharing our ideas, developing new concepts, doing something completely avant-garde and seeing as much of the world as I can. It's all I ever want. Maybe some day do that blasted PhD to tickle my own cerebrality but also perhaps to contribute to our understanding of contemporary society, its future course, its past. Develop a wholly new historical materialist account of social change and thereby undo the damage of ahistoric, asocial theories that have in part contributed the current global morass. Or I'd just rather lie in the sun, listen to great music, read book after book and travel. Nothing too regular. Still I'm vying for the regular and the banal,I try to for various reasons, keeping the parents happy and thus never stepping certain lines. But it really kills me to do it. So our compromise is that on this-this-this--and-this I abide their wishes and that-that-that-and-that they keep their opinions to themselves. It was working well, we'd even found some common ground but now all this pressure to start a career when all I want is to travel. I'd rather be a hobo for the rest of my life and wander every corner of the globe than be rooted to one place. To one goal. To one life.
This is my compromise. I must. I must forge a career that allows me to take 2 months out of a year and travel, explore a country and culture to the depths 2 months would allow one to and then move on. I wish to have no family attachments (i.e. no marriage, no kids right now. The family I have right now are enough thank you!), nothing to bind me to an ordinary existence. If I do have a partner, and sure I'd like to have that one penguin to travel with me till the end of our time but that's it he's got to be just as flexible. And not so ambitious to miss out on everything else that exists in some mad manic dash to achieve his goal. Actually an ideal hubby would be who's OK with me going off on a vacation without him. I wish to be a free bird.The kind Lynard Skynard sang about. Why even forge a career? So that I can finance these grandiose dreams of liberty and exploration. All I want from life is to rise out of this mediocrity. Or throttle myself before I realise what actually stares back at me in the mirror. A rat. Running round and round and round and round, moving, moving, moving, moving but with absolutely no movement. Just the illusion of it. So how do I do it? Do I abjure all responsibilities, all duties that bind me and live for just myself? Or do I shut my eyes, drift, float, soar and smile to myself every once in a while. Is it really such an impossible dream? If only I had oodles of money. I could be careless and selfish then. I could live for me and me alone and let ME dictate MY choices. I still do but ME has so
many other lives bundled in to it. People say they appreciate what they leave behind, distance makes the heart grown fonder and blah. Not me. My heart is set in stone. I seldom miss. I seldom yearn for what was and if I do I get over it. All I want is more newness.
:)
The first time I broke up with Him I got a hair make-over. The next time I broke up with him I got a tattoo. The third and final time (in 9 months) I broke up with him, I just got over it!
Incidentally he wasn't the reason why I got a tattoo. I always wanted one and I finally had the money. Or my elder brother did. Which works well for me, when my parents finally do spot it I'll pin it on him, 'Ma Bhaiyya paid for it!'. Hahaha ingrate I am.
15 comments:
The point in question: I'm not convinced that you are living out what is expected of you because of the reasons you cited.
What matters: Are you consciously succumbing to need or is there a desire hidden in there somewhere.
Conservative Advice: And this is coming from someone who relates to your current situation almost entirely- get what you can out of life as and when possible. Ten years, a husband and two kids later you'll still be able to, but the complications will have multiplied.
Sorry for the psychological badgering. This one struck a chord.
I'm glad it did. I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing either. Lack of courage, lack of finances mostly. Far too much confusion. Lack of clairty and far too much pressure to do and to be someone than myself. And most of it comes from within. I have been told innumerable times that I am extremely hard on myself. That's just it I want to do all these things but I can't let myself go and do them.
Wind can’t be fettered, so can’t be you. What is untamed has to live a feral life. It seems this has become quite natural in today’s world of magnets and madness. What one has seems to be forced, what is elusive seems to be natural. This is the predicament we live in… the more we learn and see the less it seems. Is it your renaissance or just another seasonal change can’t be predicted. All I can say is that freedom is not your desire, it’s your life.
I recommend you take on traveling, and write a travelogue.
Furthermore, in these times of utter chaos and pandemonium I recommend you to read these two books.
1)The Flight of Eagle by J.Krishnamurti
2)Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Once you read these books either you’ll become as normal as one can expect one to be, i.e. you’ll become my patient. Or you’ll become a heretic and live the life as you wished.
Dearest Hobo,
i would be loathe to listen to my own advice; but sometimes, dipsos say the darndest things.
You, woman, are vain. vain beyond belief. therein lie all your problems. An over-inflated sense of self-importance is consuming you. but hey, don't take it the wrong way, if its any comfort, everyone who did anything of any significance shares the dais with you.
hobo, you have potential and ability. you also have some modicum of wisdom. you perhaps are painfully aware of the limits of your abilities. that, i believe is what is really killing you. probably keeps you up all night to think that if you had the abilitites that you wish you had you would have published the great post-colonial novel, drafted the ISG report or would have ushered in india and China as gull WTO partners. and all of that before breakfast. after a couple of drinks, you'd have resolved the mis East question by persuading my yehudi bretheren to cheerfully jump into the red sea.
look, love, you know how i feel about you and what i think about you. i have incessantly told you and i will continue to do so; you are bright. you are hard working and you are ambitious. but you have to remember that you'll have to do this thing one step at a time. certain people, who are cursed by the gods (and it is a curse) manage to do all of the above before they hit 40. maybe you will, maybe you won't. only one way to find out.
its good to want to prosper. its good to want to make money and its even better to want to be happy. that is what is missing from your rather grandiose list of ambitions. you think that a Ph.D will make you happy? or even smarter? you think visiting every third world hell-hole will satisfy you? you think finding this elusive and phantasmal career will do the same?
happiness, and its pursuit is all of the above. it encompasses travel, money, ideas, conflict. what it doesn't include is vanity and selfishness. even the gods need us to worship them. you need people and the world. and i know you understand that.
that's all. i dunno if this makes any sense. this was very spontaneous, and i'm not going to change a thing. be happy, hobo, cuz that is one thing you most assuredly deserve.
@barry: oh shush! you're right though, i am painfully aware of the limits to my abilities. keeps me up all night indeed wishing and hurting, hoping that a genie lamp finds its way in to my hands. or if nothing else then the courage to play the cards that have been dealt to me.
@albert: i'll travel. i'll do it all and as barry thinks i might even do it all before 40! will look up the books but i have 8 novels piled high on my desk presently. in due course of time.
@anyone else: what?
Hobo, hobo, hobo. You might have hijacked my brain in this post. I've always thought I'm a tad too peculiar to slide into a tailoured corporate whore position. I fought it for many years. I dropped down to a part-time load at university and finished my three year degree over five years while doing hazaar things on the side: I edited the uni magazine for two years, I worked on a film awards night, I sold shoes, popcorn, and art supplies, I waitressed [that was VERY shortlived though] at a Lebanese restaurant: anything to delay the pinstriped nightmare.
Anyway, I've graduated now and in January I start a graduate program in a mammoth communications conglomerate; I will be an Account Coordinator in three of their companies for a third of the year each, and I will probably stick out like a sore thumb and maybe I will quit in the end, but the fact is that it is not what I imagined myself doing - I mean, ideally, I'd be lying in a garden outside a mountain cottage somewhere, reading beat poets and penning a brilliant postcolonial novel in Hinglish, but it's not going to happen, now is it?
You're luckier than most, Hobo: at least you studied what you wanted to [I gather], you live in the most exciting city in the world, and you are surrounded by lezzo literature :). I don't know you but I think whatever Barrycuda said is great advice.
Everyone compromises in the end. Unless of course you're Zadie Smith, in which case you publish a stunning debut far beyond your 23 years.
Addendum: Hobo, all you need to do is show some skin and marry into some rich aristocratic upper crust English family just like Jonathan Rhys-Meyers did in that movie Match Point. Then you can use immerse yourself in your husband's wealth and travel and infect everyone else with your wanderlust and be a hobo...but a stylish faux-ho hobo, you know?
And ho ho ho.
ammaaa you worry too much. the great calling eludes us all, but really nice to see conflict, i tire quickly of people with good intentions reserved to coffee table conversations. get hands out of pockets and in the dirty mud babe.
one thing i know about now though, my 2 paise...a phd is really the most useless way of going through life , if one is honest, though academia will offer you your 2 months of vacation.
work by definition is never enjoyable.......so lass dont u ever...as the grand daddy of finance - Buffet- has avered many a time, he's never worked a day in his life
-The UnSane
@Surly: Appreciate the advice but fuck all that which awards night? Was it a Bollywood awards night? Is there gossip you can share. I lluuuuurrrrrvvvvvveeeee Vollywood gossip.
@UnSane: Compromise is the name of the game, I'm well aware of it. It's just the scale of the compromise I am willing to undertake.
@Partly Cloudy: Didn't quite get what you meant by the conflict and coffee table conversation part but it's just a vexing time and the blog is my outlet. I'm beginning to stagnate and something's gotta give, plus I watch too much of the travel channel in my spare time. :) I disagree with you about the PhD. My motivation for a PhD is driven entirely by the subject, by a greater desire to study irrespective of whether I can translate that experience into a career et. al. What holds me back is that I have NO DESIRE WHATSOEVER TO TEACH. Not my cup of tea. But abhi toh main jawan hoon, so a PhD shall come a little later. No more penurious student lifestyle for me for a while.
Hobo: the Awards night was in Australia, the country whose passport I am ashamed to hold, and where I did my Bachelor's. There's a magazine called FILMINK, which is sort of the Australian cousin of EMPIRE and I worked as a publicity and red-carpet assistant. So no Bollywood but I did meet Russell Crowe.
But as for Bollywood gossip, I have plenty - my friend Leo in Bombay [Scritch's friend] used to tell me all this shi'ite about SRK because obviously I am obssessed with him [I don't know about it being too recent though].
@Surly: Sigh........I thought there was a glimmer of hope. I know Leo.
Now how do you know Leo?!
And who the hell is Khattu? Do you mean one of the Khattar sisters?
Hey hobo,
about your "ink." i am confident that you're smart enough to "desecrate the flesh sacred" in strategic spots, not usually visible to the average onlooker. so maybe you'll be able to get by without ever having to sell your long suffering brother up the river. unless your mamma still scrubs you clean.....
Interesting, and definitely strikes a chord. More so even, because I just posting something on similar lines on my blog.
Perhaps the only serious one. Do read it. I usually dont advertise, but this is an exception.
I totally get your job with 2 month break concept. For so many years i've got this mental vision of working mon-fri and weekends playing with my band... Though after 16 months in a consulting firm, i realize just how far that it.
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