Diary of a Mature Student: Week +6
I.e. six weeks after the end of the last crushing, needlessly stressful, poorly run semester. The incoherent blog entries of the last few weeks of that semester - quite why I felt the need to prosleytise the Open University to such an extent remains a mystery, as does the reason behind complaining about course choices so much - is lost in the pink, fuzzy mists of work-induced anxiety and the aforementioned stress.
It was not a challenging semester - in that I was only doing things I had done before, a few times, just to a greater extent - nor was it particularly bad, in the binary sense that some courses were good and some were bad. Because that distinction never really functions outside of simple arguments - the course that has nearly put me off filmmaking in toto had a few redeeming moments, washed away in the tide of annyannce and...
You know what? Complaining accomplishes nothing. Literally - I had a conversation with a friend who now works for the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education last week, who confirmed that even official complaints about badly-run courses are more or less pointless.
But in an odd way, I can find no method by which to replace the actual, factual joy I found in filmmaking prior to the most recent filmmaking course.
And maybe that's the point - because when this is done, in theory there's a transition to an actual filmmaking job, which is not going to be sparkles and roses, sunshine and, indeed, lollipops, because it's a job.
I wish I could set my hand down and put my finger on the actual reason I'm currently having to try to find a new method to replenish my joy reserve when it comes to film. Even if the course wasn't great, it was only eight weeks - with four weeks of 'self guided tuition', which if that isn't an oxymoron, should be - then it was eight weeks, it's done now, the marks are back, let's all go drink champagne, hey?
If I was 20, that would be a decent rationale. But over a decade and a half later, time wasted feels an awful lot more like a crime.
Here's the fun thing; I like to place faith - sometimes unwarranted faith, but we'll come to that later - in people. I like to believe that people are basically good - at least, the people I'm going to come into contact with where and when I am at the moment - until proven otherwise. This theory is proving difficult to work with, at the moment, because nobody's perfect - least of all, myself. I complain - a lot, but you already know that, and now you know that I have unrealistic standards for people, which leads, paradoxically, to a disappointment not in the world at large but in myself for the continued unfounded belief that the world is essentially on track.
So when the people I place faith in are unreliable, or constantly questioning or undermining what I do, or incapable of doing what they're paid to do in some cases, I add a few more layers to my shell, the shell that it took a long time to get rid of fifteen years ago and that I can now feel calcifying back into place. I can now count the people I very truly trust in my current situation on the fingers of one hand, and the people I would turn to in an emergency on maybe two hands, but other than that, my faith in the essentially beneficent nature of humanity as a whole on one hand and the group of people I've ended up cliquing with over the last six months on the other hand has just... gone.
Right now I would have trouble actually setting foot on campus.
I don't know exactly why this is, but my going theory is because my addiction - and it is an addiction, just one that doesn't have any particularly harmful or noticeable side effects - has, however temporarily, soured.
See, I got like this last summer. The prospect of five months without anything film-related to do was just... difficult. But this summer I'm trapped between the necessity of taking a break from something that became increasingly difficult to stomach last semester and the fact that I don't have anything to go to. I feel like a TV policeman who is their job, and nothing outside of it, except that the job is still there - just not accessible.
So you're probably sat there, thinking, well, get a life, man - get a hobby, get a significant other, get something, just do something that's not film.
And you'd probably be right.
