Yet another odd dream...

I can't remember so much about this one, but I do remember sitting on Forest Road with someone else. For some reason we were singing, but kinda singing a conversation rather than just speaking it - nothing about this seemed in any way strange (as always seems to be the case in dreams). We were sitting on the edge of the pavement watching people racing cars with too many people in them at high speed around the corner, some of them leaning out of the windows, laughing crazily. The person I was sitting with (I don't remember what he looked like, but he reminded me in some ways of a person I know through Savoy) sang something, and I remember being very happy about what was said but not knowing what it was. All I did know was this person was extraordinary , and what ever it was they said was precisely what I wanted to hear. Unfortunately at this point I knew, inspite of being fast asleep, that this was a dream, so I couldn't/didn't want to say anything in return. I think I may have made an excuse or put off giving a reply imediately. Someone handed me a leaf (it looked like the kind you'd have drawn as a child - oval with a central line and diagonal concentions etc), but for some reason I wanted to see the skeleton, so I burned it with a lighter and left the skeleton. And that was it. Odd, but I do remember being very very happy.

Procrastination

Here I am in the library again. I've only been here for an hour and already I'm going utterly spare! I come here in the mornings with all the good intentions of working, but end up getting distracted by just about anything! Arg! The only time I actually work efficiently is when I get up at 5am and just start to work rather than faff, but I can't do that often because it's exhasting and I crash by 3pm, and even then I can only do it when really under pressure to finish something. Even with only 4.5 weeks to complete my dissertation I'm sitting here putting off working and just building up stress for later on. I know I have plenty of time to finish and edit this bastard, but I just can't bring myself to do the necessary work before the very last minute. It's not that I'm terribly lazy, but there seems no point in working too hard until there's no choice, and I tend to find that I work best under high pressure. Lots of my last-minute essays have recieved much better marks than those I spent a lot of time working on *shrugs*, It doesn't seem fair, somehow, that my last-minute work ends up getting better marks than projects that I've put a lot of time and effort into! Perhaps it's because it flows better as a continuious stream of thought rather than as a series of segments.

Ok, will try and do some work now. No doubt I'll post again in the next few hours...

Later:
As predicted, here I am again.

Found this on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y
So, this is the generation to which I belong; and sadly, yes, I really do belong to a generation which defines itself by ownership of technological goods and use thereof. Right now I am using three of the defining goods of this generation: laptop, MP3 player and mobile phone (clearly not all at once - I can multitask, but I only have two hands!), and writing it on my blog - Gee, could I be anymore steriotypical?! Plus I really can't see myself working for one firm/organisation for my whole life, so will probably move around quite a lot because there's no real pressure to stay in one place and it's almost looked down upon now to want to stay with one group for the rest of your life. We are given these expectations of new experiances, and once the novelty of a new job and responsabilities wear off and everything starts to become rountine, it can be very tempting to want to move on. Looking at my employment history I have had, since I was 15, 10 differant jobs! Admittedly, this isn't because I got bored or anything, it's down mostly to moving around and Uni and some of the jobs being temporary contracts. But still, 10 jobs by the age of 22 is kinda strange!

*Insert appropriate title here

Yesterday evening was a bit of a head-fuck for various reasons - in retrospect it was quite funny and a bit sad. If nothing else it explained A LOT. I think I'll have to laugh about it otherwise I'll just end up completely depressed again. At the same time I'm quite glad that the situation occured, if only because it reassured me that I wasn't at fault and that someone needs to sort their head out.

Dreams

Last night I had a particularly vivid dream, and for once I can remember exactly what happened.
The dream, more or less, ran thus: I was working with the army (not as a member but in some sort of assosiated capacity) and I knew the unit I was with quite well. We had been sent to an area which had just been subject to sever flooding, and although the water level had now dropped, it was apparent just how much damage had been done. One of the first jobs we were to do in the community where we were based was to clear all the flood debries out of the local church to make it usable again. One of the images I remember most clearly from the dream was standing on top of something outside the church, looking through a low window in to the church. In the church there were masses of rubbish and rubble, even a couple of old cars! For some reason it was vital that we cleared the church first because, according to the logic of my dream, one of the members of the unit was planning on getting married there in the near future, and the present from the unit to him and his bride was having the church back to it original state.

Most of the images I can atribute to things I had seen in the past couple of days, but the meaning was a bit more difficult. I decided to try a bit of dream analysis, for fun, and see what came up. I took a few of the key images from the dream and looked them up.
1) Looking into a church from the outside can represent spiritual strife and questioning.
2) Rubbish represents the need to change bad habits and avoid scandle
3) The wrecked cars could represent feelings of being out of control of life
4) Floods represent tension and stress
5) Armies represent a massive force working against you
So, going by the analysis, not a possative dream then.

Although I don't put faith in dream analysis this still reflects a number of things in my life that worry me; my crisis of faith, wondering whether I'm a bad person, feeling out of control of my life. Although the thing that made me wonder was the fact that in the dream I was working with the army but not as part of it, so maybe that has a differant meaning. Who knows!

Feedback and stuff

Got a call back from Ian Campbell at the Scottish Government Offices in Brussels about feedback on my application. The guist of the conversation is: my application was very strong and I have relevant experiance, but my French was the deciding factor - I wasn't fluant and that's what the role required. The French requirement was what I expected to be the cause, so am quite happy that the rest of the application was good enough. I am in the process of improving my French, but obviously with my dissertation deadline drawing closer I don't have a lot of time to work on that. Ian gave me a few pointers for people to speak to if I want to go ahead with the EU thing in the future.

Off home tonight for my Mum's birthday tomorrow, so a couple of days of quiet'll do me good I suspect! Need a break from the city as am feeling somewhat hemmed in right now.

A conversation that has needed to be had for a while has now happened, and is certainly for the best. It will make life less confusing :) which is always good! But I think a seperate conversation with a differant person is still needed, but it's never going to happen because in theory "everything is fine" and there is nothing to talk about - I'm not convinced.

Finally returned Chris' flat key this afternoon.

Need to pack and return a library book now, but honestly cannot be bothered...

Later:
I'm at home now and it's muggy as anything down here - I can't sleep but should try as I'll have a busy day tomorrow.
Got a further call from Ian earlier - a job came up today that he thinks I should apply for: again, it's in Brussels, and it's a policy assistant job. I'll give it a go and see what happens.
Should go and wrap birthday presents now.

Sleepy...

1. Got an email back from the Scottish Government EU office about my request for feedback on my application - someone'll be calling me next Tuesday :) So somthing posative came out of an otherwise disappointing failure to secure a job. It'll be useful for the future anyway.
2. We won the pub quiz yesterday - woot!
3. Discovered Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog and The Guild: wasted a lot of time this mornign watching those rather than working - oops!
4. Applied for a broadcast assistant job with the BBC - don't expect to be called for an interview, but it pays to keep applying for things here and there.
5. My horoscope today on FB made me very very nervous (not that I believe that sot of crap, but still...)
6. This made me smile: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7513571.stm
(see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxWNl2Kd-dU)
7. This made me want to hit people: http://community.livejournal.com/muslims/583460.html
8. This is far too true for comfort: http://xkcd.com/451/
9. This made me go "awwwww":
more cat pictures

Oh, and I finally remembered what I had intended to write about today in the first place! Go me and my shoddy memory (warenty has probably expired by now...damn...). Yet again, it's in reference to my faith-related-crisis of the past few weeks. I was Wikipediaing stuff on the Abrahamic tradition and got to following a chain of articles on faith, philosophy etc. I came to the conclusion that my current stance is more or less sumarised by the following two life-views:
1. Agnostic Theism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism)
and, 2. Ietism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ietsism)
Really, I guess the best way I can describe it is Agnostic Abrahamic Theism - but the problem I find is that it falls in to a semi-Gnostic catagory, and gnosticism isn't something I particularly hold with at the moment.

Post 100!

Welcome to my 100th post :)

Nothing terribly exciting to say really. D'oh!

Oh, did go and see The Forbidden Kingdom last night - it was a lot of fun :) And saw Kung Fu Panda a few nights previously - laughed my ass off!

Got a call from the Telegraph asking for photos from HMS Pinafore for an article they're doing, so that's more or less sorted now. Free Publicity! Woot!

This article on the BBC website makes me worry about people:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7503861.stm
In what way would someone's sexuality impare their ability to drive?! Helloooo discrimination!

This one is more specifically for Si (assuming he still reads this) regrading the conversation we had the other day:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7487995.stm

This just ammused me:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/7504433.stm

This doesn't suprise me:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7502678.stm

And finally, in reference to my little crisis of faith that has been going on lately:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7503968.stm

I could go back to my first post and do some sort of retrospective, but I think that would be really wanky and unnecessary given that anything that needs retrospection will (for the most part) be in this blog.

P.s. I identify far too much with this:
http://xkcd.com/449
Can't quite believe it has been 7 months already...

Environmental developments

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7501476.stm

This sounds fantastic if it is ever fully implimented! But not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, is it ever going to get as much funding as it potentially deserves...? We'll see, I guess.

Faith revisited and other stuff

I was listening to the news this morning, and one of the big stories of the day is the decision by the Church of England to allow the appointment of female Bishops. I think that this is a big step forward; a really significant event for all involved. What I don't understand is why women in the Church was ever an issue of contention? We could get into the whole 'women are the source of original sin' thing, but quite frankly I think that is utter BS. The Garden of Eden story shouldn't be taken literally, in my view, as historical fact; it isn't fact. Evolution is a fact (or as close to one as we can reasonably get at the moment). I don't see that the creation story and Evolutionary theory are at odds - we just have to acknowledge that the Garden of Eden story is a annalogy for the development of consiousness. Which makes the whole idea about Eve tempting Adam with the apple of knowledge utterly irrelevant. The exclusion of women from positions in the church on that basis is, thus, unjust and backward for a body which claims to desire equality for all. If the traditionalists were to have won the vote today, then it would have been a backward step for the church of England and a sign of the continued institutional sexism which has been rife in the Church for the past 500 years. The claim that women are fundamentally tainted has been used to justify the oppression of women, and exclude them from full and fair participation in a faith which teaches tollerance and forgiveness. Surely it's about time 'Eve' was forgiven and her daughters were no longer burdened with an unfair reputation as 'tainted'?

This kinda feeds into my thoughts in the last post: can I really follow a system of belief in which sexism and inequality are central tenants of the faith? I have been to a couple of Christian wedding ceremonies in the past year, and in each I was annoyed by the emphasis on the dominance of the man in the wedded state and how the woman was expected to 'submit' to the man 'as the Church to Christ'. As a feminist and a female Christian I find this hard to bear (perhaps this is why I'm not a very good Christian). In any relationship there should never be any forced dominance or submittion involved (I'm not talking in the sexual way - what people get up to in that respect is entirely up to them); a wedded relationship should be about negotiation and discussion. No decision should ever be made simply because one party has been 'picked by God' to be dominant. Besides, I doubt that God (who/whatever that is) would honestly create humans unequal; any traditions in Christianity are almost certainly the result of millenia of Church dogma and unjust male domination. Woman's submittion to her husband in the wedded state in Christianity is almost certainly the result of institutionalised patriarchal dogma. Using the 'fear of God' to restrict women of faith from full and equal participation, and full emansipation as a sex.

I'm almost certain that most of the Traditionalists at today's vote don't think of it in those terms: I guess they reason that it's "God's will" and that women were designed as man's 'help-meet' but not to be religious leaders. My response; you're stuck in the past, and many of the best and most faithful Christians are women. It's about time this was acknowldeged.

That was more of a feminist rant than I was intending, but can you see where this leaves me? Again: in the same situation as before: can I follow a faith that requires inequality? I think that I have to believe that this inequality was not God's will, but is the result of centuries of church politics.