We went to London, not to celebrate, but because I had been complaining all week to Yoko: my life is so damn boring, I was saying. All I do is go to work and come home. My life is here and there. So we went to London: you get on a train--an hour later you are strolling to Soho. Here we are, I thought. Yes, this has been worth it.
Has it been worth it? Yes, yes, of course it has. It's been hard, very hard, but worth it. I'm looking at my options for next year, and they are all options that I didn't have three years ago--wouldn't have had if I stayed in Japan.
We ate sushi bentos in Soho square. We walked down to Piccadilly Circus, had coffee. Walked up to the National Gallery and I was overly (OVERLY) happy to discover that if you enter the Piccadilly side of the building, you can easily, very easily, get up and down to the galleries with a pram.
You know what's amazing? The 19th century rooms at the National Gallery. You start in the English rooms which are... uninspiring. There's Turner: Turner's okay, I guess. But you go one room over and suddenly you are in France and France in the 19th century is like an explosion of colour. Having learned a bit more about Impressionism from the BBC, I was explaining things to Yoko about the paintings, things I suddenly know about umbrellas and Seurat.
We then walked up Charing Cross road: we got rained on, I was angry and hurried. We rode the 16:13 train home, back at the house after a stop at the supermarket at 18:00. My life, my family.
This morning, I'm skipping Yoko's church to do some part-time work for Birmingham, and then starting to look at ESRC standard funding bid applications. Tomorrow, I have a meeting with the primary investigators for the bid I'm going to be named on. We have 3 1/2 months to write our bid. Cycles: I have been looking for jobs because I have been bored. Now, I will begin working on this bid and I will be completely swallowed, consumed by it. I've been complaining about visa fees, security, etc. But talking to other people... If this bid comes through and I can work with the people that I would work with, I would be pretty stupid to turn it down for money and security in the short term. Again, it's very unlikely that we'll be successful, but... I have to try and I have to start acting like I'm 29 and haven't paid my dues, not 40 and looking to settle into a big leather chair.
We'll see. The choices are all going to become clear in the next 8 months. Either way, it will be over soon, and now I have to focus and enjoy what I have, not be continually obsessed about what I don't have.
