Last night, half-awake in someone else’s house, wallowing in those strangely lucid moments before a heavy sleep, I got to thinking about my 9-5 phobia.  I mean my fear–however irrational–of being bound to a job which requires my presence in an office or–horrors–cubicle between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm, Monday-Friday.  I’ve often considered the origin of this fear (it wasn’t always with me), tried to decide whether or not I should fight it or submit to it.  But listening to the night-snuffles of sleeping dogs last night, a new thought occurred to me, and I was just able to hold it in my mind before I dropped into a dream about ordering Chinese food with an old friend near an unamed harbour. 

The thought was this: I’m a project-based worker.  It’s why I always had a freakish love of writing essays and research papers as a student, why I’m happy to devote years of my life to writing a book but bridle at the very thought of spending a week chained to a desk.  It’s why I think I’ll make a great freelance writer but a terrible anything else.  I want the work I’m doing to have shape; moreover, like an overprotective mother, I want to see it through, from inception to final presentation.  I’ll happily write late into the night, wake early, devote weekends to a project; but the endless toil of  working for an organization, the banality of spending a few hours each day doing things which will never result in a finished product, makes me feel actually, physically ill. 

I don’t know what this says about me.  Perhaps that I’m vain, that if I put in time and effort, I want to see a result more tangible than increased profit figures or a well-organized office–I want to see something that is all my own.  Or perhaps that I’m obsessive, unable or unwilling to multitask but happy to pour every last iota of energy into a single sentence.  Perhaps it’s only an inability to move beyond the simple reward systems of primary school. 

Whatever it is, it’s a huge and increasingly undeniable part of who I am and how I work.  It occurred to me too, that in my current position, I’m wasting energy at an alarming rate; my days split between, essentially, two jobs (my office job and my writing), I can’t concentrate properly on either.  But at the moment I need both to survive–without the office job, I couldn’t pay my rent, and without the writing, I couldn’t stay happy.  As good old Yossarian might have said: it’s a Catch-22.

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I wonder how much else I can not get done today?  It’s already early evening (though how could you tell, the quality of the light is so bland, has looked the same since early morning, nothing but grey, not even shadows to make the streets more interesting) and I’ve managed to avoid doing anything of worth, even thinking anything of worth.  In the rather optimistic hopes of being inspired (ha!  what a word for this day) I convinced myself to remove five books from the shelf.  I even convinced myself to open the books.  That’s a good step, right?  I smelled the books (generally helps me get things going), even read bits of them.  I noted a few helpful or interesting quotes.  Then I promptly moved everything but my computer to the other side of the couch, where I have taken up residence, and spent an hour staring over the top of my MacBook at the plants in our front yard.  And the To Let sign on the house opposite, thinking, as I always do when I see To Let signs, that I’d like to put an “i” in the middle of the two words.  And also thinking that it’s been available to let for about as long as I can remember, which is funny, because people seem to be living quite comfortably in it.  We once even saw what could have been nothing less than twenty students pour from its front door one morning, squinting and looking unmistakably hungover (if we’d opened the window we might even have been able to smell the stale remanants of last night’s booze).  Maybe they’re squattors.  But they had that coiffed-hair, popped-collar, Jack Wills-y look, and I don’t think people like that tend to squat.  Just a thought.

Now it’s Simon and Garfunkel again, because that helped last week, but it isn’t helping today, and apparently I’m bound to just work myself up into a small and useless panic about my own lack of productivity this afternoon.  Let the jolts of anxiety followed by bouts of self-pity followed by elated declarations of not caring commence…

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My knees are stiff from being bent in the same position for hours. My papers are spread across the couch like a dropped deck of cards. As part of my research, I started putting post-its on a map of Oxford earlier but they’ve all come off (the map to limp, the post-its too acquiescent) and now at my feet is a puddle of pink strips. I’ve been picking continuously at my right pinky all day. Earlier, I had a glorious run in the almost-sunshine, wearing shorts, which I haven’t done in so long, followed by an hour-long bath, in which I listened to classic.fm and read Pat Barker’s Regeneration, so my head is full of choral music and shell-shocked dreams. Every time I think about what I’m working on I feel a tiny jolt of panic.

“Don’t let your silly dreams fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall,” I hear, and I think, I’m trying not to, really.

In short, I need to get out of the house.

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My brain, today, has decided to be very basic. I mean that I don’t feel capable of complicated thought or action. And I don’t know for sure what the inside of my head looks like (thankfully), but I’m imagining it full of words. Today those words are as follows:

eat
sleep
eat more
sleep more
run?
write
hate work
meh

Fridays are the worst. Every Thursday evening, after hours of class, after reading, after pondering the next stage of my book (which I am, by the way, totally overthinking now), I feel both intellectually stimulated and emotionally/physically exhausted. More than that, I feel the overwhelming urge NOT TO GO TO WORK ON FRIDAY, because I know that what I’d rather do is sleep in and then spend the day eating at my desk and writing. But because we have to pay this thing called rent (and indeed our bills, which always come floating through the letterbox at the worst possible times), what I do instead is wake up, stagger round the house eating cereal and trying to remember how to dress myself, leave the house, cycle halfway down Hurst Street, realize by seeing my own reflection in a car window that I’ve completely forgotten my helmet, cycle back home, retrieve the helmet, head to work.

It’s an impossible situation, really. As soon as I get to work I remember that as far as jobs go, mine isn’t half bad, and I like the people that I work with, I like that it’s a school, I like, moreover, that they pay me regularly. And I know that to a certain extent it’s good to have one foot on the ground, so to speak; last summer when I wasn’t working I was so fretful about money, and about how I was spending my time, that I forgot what the real world is like, and neglected to write as much as I could (and should) have. But I know this is not what I want to be doing, this photocopying, filing, organizing job, and I know that come September, when I have another degree and (hopefully) a manuscript, I’ll need to make some decisions. Days like this make me think the decisions will be easy; but the truth is they won’t.

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I had a rejection from The Guardian yesterday. Why advertise my failures? Because (perhaps misguidedly), I genuinely think this is an improvement. It’s the first time they’ve actually responded to one of my queries. So first they ignored me, then they rejected me–surely the fact that they’re paying me any attention at all is a good sign. Eventually, if things continue on this trajectory, they’ll have to accept something for publication.

Please don’t burst my bubble here. I’m being charmingly optimistic–let’s leave it at that.

I’m writing this at work (I know, shame on me), and just had one of those incredibly awkward interactions with a pair of students that make me think, wow, I should just quit my job right now. I was utterly, utterly unhelpful to them. At one point, I simply sat staring at them, my mouth hanging open, making confused little “um” noises.

It occurs to me that I get like this when someone asks me, say, where the Philosophy class is meeting today or where students can go if they want to play hockey, because I am in no way an authority on these things. More crucially, I don’t actually give a damn about them. This isn’t an especially grand statement–I’m not an authority on most things, frankly, and lots of people don’t give a damn about their job–but it is an important one. If they were to ask me to discuss last night’s speech, or ask for an obsessively anotated bibliography of Oxford literature, I’d be happy–thrilled, in fact–to oblige. But I ought, for today at least, to resign myself to the fact that they’re highly unlikely to ask me any of these things, and focus instead on class timetables and hockey pitches.

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