It's Seeming Closer

Leaving my job has pulled up all sorts of thoughts from the depths, it seems. My job is one where you can get a new job and then have to wait for months to leave your old one. If you leave at the end of July, you have to wait until September to start the new one. This can all mean that other people, people who have somehow not got friends and relatives in the same career as me, but rather in the tiny number of jobs which operate on the system of working a few weeks notice and then going to the next job almost at once, assume I must have changed jobs about three times by the time I can actually tell them I have started at the new place.

A side-effect of this is that you can get a new job, then come to view it all as some sort of waking-dream. It is not real. Not really real. It is just something you did one day (We also accept jobs on the same day as the interview - good system all round and not at all odd in any way. At all.) and then you went back to your existing job and got on with it.

It came as something of a surprise the other day to actually hand in my keys, and my key-fob for getting through the electrically controlled doors (as opposed to the many non-electrically controlled doors you could just use instead), and my laptop. Still with a disc in which belonged to someone else, it turned out, but the joys of email and still having my work account (though who knows when it will suddenly be pulled?) meant I could at least email and tell someone. A large part of me still does not believe I have left.

A friend who has left her place of work twice now says she still feels she works there. Then again, my mum has often said she still keeps thinking she is not a grown-up and that she can't understand how she has two kids in their 30s, so it is not just a phenomenon related to leaving jobs.

The point is, we can wait for some things for so long that they seem as though they are never going to arrive, as though they are not real.

Happily, one event I have been waiting for now has a date, so I can work on making myself believe in it as a thing which will occupy space-time.

I have mentioned before the upcoming anthology combining the efforts and insanity of the RASSSA group. We've been working away at it for months and now we have a release date. The 7th August. Not too far off. Not far off, at all.

To add a little extra to the news, one of my fellow writers, Martin J Gilbert, is offering a free teaser story on the RASSSA website. Pop over and check it out.

Perhaps don't try to persuade yourself that the people in his story are really real, though, or else you may end up in trouble.

Moving Up

Thus ends my first day of no longer working at my job of eleven years.

So far, not working there has included a lie-in and a cream tea at Rufford Park (a park I would recommend. Lovely range of trees, a fantastic building for the tea-room and a lake with yellow-eyed ducks).

Whilst munching away on our sandwiches, and agreeing that none of us really saw the point of the egg sandwiches, my mother-in-law asked me if I feel like I have left my place of employment yet. I proceeded to talk about it as though I am going back for a good twenty minutes. So...no. No, I do not really feel like I have left.

That place has been a huge part of my life since my early twenties. I didn't meet my spouse there, or make my best-friends, as other people leaving this time have done, but I have met a lot of people. Hundreds. I have interacted with and influenced a good number, been influenced by a good few and grown so used to being there that it is hard to imagine not going back.

I have also been asked, by an old friend from back home, if I am moving onwards and upwards, and I am. My job includes new challenges all of the time, but you can get settled with certain routines and a fresh challenge, fresh routines, fresh people, will be good.

The challenge will include a promotion, which is always fun, but just the fact it is new, that it is a fresh challenge, makes it worth doing.

Slight tangent, perhaps, but on the theme of challenges, the excellent Matt Willis is offering a free short story which revolves around a genuinely breathtaking challenge. You can get it on his website.

The tale is in honour of the ascent of the Eiger Nordwand, and, though my own challenge is hardly on this scale, it is not helpful to compare challenges too far. A challenge is a challenge, and the important thing is to have them and face them, rather than to stand still and do nothing.

Reflections

I've been spending a fair bit of time recently looking back. 

I'm about to move on, as are a number of other people I've worked with for years, and a couple of us have fallen into the habit of late of telling stories from years ago to people who weren't around then. We haven't discussed these events for years, just letting them slip by as the next lot of tales act themselves out around us, but most lunchtimes over the last few weeks we've ended up remembering, and sharing those memories.

Some part of me is all too aware that I won't be at that place for much longer (a few days, now, and I'll have left) and, whilst it's good to be moving on, a lot of my memories over the last decade and a bit are tied to that job. This seems all the more poignant as many people have left recently and hardly anyone will be left from when I started. In my particular part of the place, no-one will be left who has been there long enough to remember some of the most vivid, frustrating, anecdote worthy times and I am aware of some urge to pass these on, even though I doubt anyone who is going to be left will really care.

The memories are only really important if you lived them.

Despite this, people are obsessed with looking back, with retelling tales. Perhaps it feels more like the stories really happened if we share them, especially if we can share the telling with someone else who was there. 

Of course, it may have as much, if not more, to do with assuring ourselves who we are now. A story about how you used to eat massive piles of take-a-way by yourself? It's safe to talk about now, when you moderate what you eat or share it with someone else. Your story is a good point of contrast to show how far you've come, how much you've changed.  Maybe your story is about how you used to spend all of your time on a particular hobby you now don't have time for. You are both reassuring yourself you still have that passion inside you and that you are busy and in demand in the present. Looking back can let us see where we are now, as well as where we were then.

What does it mean when we retell other people's stories? When we retell stories of people who have become archetypes and figures of myth and fairy-tale?

I suspect that is very much about telling ourselves where we are now, how we have moved on from the older versions of that tale. It's about looking at the tale through another lens. 

My friends in the RASSSA group have been looking back to look at ourselves now, reflecting old tales in a modern mirror, and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how my own anecdotes from only the last decade (not much time in the grand scheme of things) are reflections of the truth rather than wholly factual reports. 

What with so many people leaving, I've been present at a number of leaving speeches (mine is next week and will likely involve me nodding a bit and sitting back down), and some of the anecdotes used have been about the same incidents as the ones I have been drawing on over lunch.

Here's the thing, though - I don't remember the events going the way other people say the did. 

Even with tales we were part of, which happened very recently, a different view and a different lens leads to a different tale. We reflect ourselves back onto the stories. 

It might be fun to get everyone in a family group to write their own version of a key event. You just know they would all be different. 

I suppose we have to ask ourselves if that matters. And if we all only own our own version of an event we lived, then every version of an old tale is valid. I've been thinking about that, too, in terms of representation in film, TV and books. People cite the 'source' text as though it is immutable, as though it not only shouldn't, but can't, change. Which is ridiculous.

Shakespeare spent his life changing other tales. If it's good enough for Shakespeare... 

I'm probably not going to start actively changing the identities of people in my own life stories, but when we look at old tales or at re-booted versions of tales only a few decades old, I don't think being too obsessed with how it 'really was' has much mileage. It is certainly not the only yardstick.

The news that Thor will be female and Captain America will be black is worth considering, here. That is not to say we should ignore how it was in the past (but if Thor can be a frog, and has been a frog before being a woman, then that tells us a lot about values in the past), and in fact we should not wash over issues and realities from days gone by, any more than I should let myself start believing my current workplace has been a constant dream of uninterrupted happiness, just because I am about to leave it. We also shouldn't hold fast to damaging habits and beliefs just because they are from the past. 

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I firmly believe we should expect our fictions, both those we know are fictions and the ones we believe to be accurate recounts of our own lives, to reflect our present views, and let's hope those reflections are something to be proud of. 

The other day, I was asked to be the time-keeper for a 100m race. Now, thankfully for everyone involved, this did not actually come to pass. I say thankfully because I can get a Tassimo to stop working just by standing next to it and it has exactly one button.

However, my initial response was not gadgetry related (and the stop-watch the PE person showed me looked to have at least more than one button), but more to do with being vaguely disconnected from time at the best of times.

Right now, I am sitting watching songs from the 90s on some music channel or other. These songs are all from roughly the same time period and yet, in my head, some of them are recent and some are from the distant past. I seem to group songs, as I do so many things, by strands of events. Some, like the Shania Twain song I am listening to during this paragraph, linked to my visit to Durham in the very last years of the 90s. Others are linked to being a kid at secondary school.

This covers a short period of time, really. I visited Durham at the end of my second year at Uni. As far as my highly subjective view of things goes, however, there is a massive gap between school and University, even though adult-me thinks five years ago was yesterday.

I'm not sure I really have a point here, except that time is an illusion.

At a recent wedding, I spent some time chatting about time with another guest. Never met him before. He seemed nice. We played a game of some sort which involved throwing a shiny ball at a less shiny ball on a lawn. I won. This is rare, so I enjoyed it. On the whole, it was a good time. At breakfast the next morning, we got into physics. I am assuming this is something to do with his job, but I don't really know. Let's just say it is. He was talking about the theory that time does not exist, and that each slice of 'time' is a different arrangement of atoms and so forth and not really continuous from the one we perceive as coming before it.

I would like to point out right now that I am not a physicist, in case you had been fooled. I cannot do the maths on these things. I do tend to take well to the stories I am told, but you could tell me a different story and I could believe that one just as well. In any case, the concept behind these things, as related to me in layman's terms, generally make sense. Of a kind. I have no trouble deciding every instant is a separate, unrelated slice.

How does this fit with my comments on songs? Apart from to say, 'Time, eh? Tricky thing,' I am not quite sure.

I am also not quite sure about how I just punctuated that sentence, but I am blaming the glass of rather good wine from a bottle we got at the recent Good Food Show and on the fact that it is nearly 1am where I am.

Perhaps I am wandering around near the idea that time is deceptive. We can measure it and corral it into days and weeks and decades, but we experience it in spurts. Any memory I have will be a chain of linked events, and I can easily separate some event which does not seem to fit and think it happened at a completely different time.

Hey, you know what? Time, and the ability to play with it, is, in a way, linked to my story in the RASSSA anthology. So, there's that.

I may play with it in other stories. It fascinates me. How can it not? We are bound by it, it is supposed to be something which marches ever on, unstoppable, but it is so fractured and prone to manipulation and shifting.

It's almost as tricky as memory, and words.

For now, I will go and watch The Backstreet Boys and pretend it is...a few years ago.