MaW’s Blog

Something occurred to me this evening. I have some suspicions about where this occurrance originated, but I’m not going to point any fingers. There wouldn’t be any point, Goddesses don’t tend to be in any one particular place which someone lounging on a bed in this world can point at — at least, not without being able to point at right-angles to reality. Or maybe not even then. I’ll have to look into that one day.

But I digress. Something occurred to me. I had to watch The Shawshank Redemption which in itself is quite enough to think about. Thankfully I could satisfy the urging to watch it quite easily, as Rob has a copy on DVD (as does Welfare, but Rob’s was the copy I borrowed). So I’ve just finished watching it, and this is more of an attempt to get my own thoughts straight than to tell anyone else about it.

Well, maybe it is an attempt to tell someone else about it. If you think that might be you, read on and see, but don’t ask me. I haven’t worked that out yet.

This is the only life we can be absolutely certain that we have. Admittedly, we can’t actually be one hundred percent certain that we even have this one, but as far as I’m concerned I do have this life, and that’s enough to be going on with for now. Coming to the end of my degree, this is naturally a time to be thinking about future opportunities - and past regrets to go with it.

Walking back from a short trip to Jackson’s for sugar-rich snacks earlier this evening with Jon-man, I realised that if I want to get anywhere with my attempts to do a PhD, I’m going to have to send in the application form. Why haven’t I? I’m not entirely sure. I guess I’m worried I’m going to be rejected, and I’m worried about what people might write in references, and I’m confused because some people have said that I don’t need to get any references because I’m applying internally, which makes a twisted kind of sense but also doesn’t make any kind of sense at all because I have no idea how to accomplish this feat. At least I’ve got one good reference promised, but my other one might not be so keen to give it now that I’ve wasted a couple of months not providing him with the appropriate paperwork. But if I don’t get my act together soon, I’m never going to manage it.

Wasted days.

I also have a Program Construction and Verification exam to do (take-home exam), the last part of my degree. I could have done it already, have it out the way. But no, I’ve put it off.

Wasted days.

Months ago I took on a project for a friend of mine to write a website. PHP-powered using MySQL for the backend, it’s a simple enough proposition with only a few elements touching on things I’ve not actually done before — although I’ve worked on other sites which used them, so I didn’t anticipate it would be particularly difficult or take very long. That site stands incomplete and no closer to realising my friend’s original vision than the stuffed penguins on top of my monitor are to establishing their own high-quality organic herring farm. But I’ve had enough free time to finish it. More than enough.

Wasted days.

And there are other things as well, but I’m not going to go into all the details. I don’t want to. I may say quite a lot here (and probably more here in one place than I generally say out loud — or the edges of it at least) but that doesn’t mean I’m going to say absolutely everything. Suffice it to say that I’ve wasted a lot of days. I got up this morning and didn’t get dressed until I’d put dinner in the oven at half past five. I spent the intervening parts of the day playing games, randomly surfing the Internet looking for something to do, and eating. Most of this day was wasted.

This has been happening increasingly often. Perhaps it’s a curse of always-on, always-fast Internet access? I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s not, because I like having a cable modem. Perhaps we really do always want the things which are least good for us. But for now I’m going to accept that the cable modem isn’t responsible — how can it be anyway? It’s just a thing, a box of tricks through which electronically encoded information can flow. It’s how I use it that causes the problems, surely. Guns don’t kill people, people do.

Cable modems don’t waste days, I do that just fine by myself.

So after I got back from Jackson’s and settled down with my Flumps and my Chocolate Buttons, it comes into my brain with such suddenness and randomness that I cannot but attribute its source to an outside entity — outside as in not me.

“No more wasted days,” it says. “No more wasted days.”

It’s still saying it. This could be an attempt to shut it up for a while so I can get some sleep, although if it’s who I think it is then that’s definitely not going to work.

Earlier in the week I called upon Ceridwen, the Celtic Goddess of Knowledge (among other things), to help me access and comprehend everything I had ever learned related to Computability. This was the night before the exam that went better than I thought it had any right to go (not perfectly, but I was expecting a lot worse than I got). Ceridwen, it seems, came through for me with the help of a couple of crystals, a dose of personal power and some excruciating politeness on my part, both to Her and to Taliesen (God of Wisdom, Ceridwen made him stir Her potion of knowledge for a year and a day, I can’t imagine He liked that very much but They seemed quite happy together with me in my circle the other night). Not that any amount of politeness is about to turn a Goddess or a God from Their chosen paths. For whatever reasons They had, They helped me do what I asked Them to, and that is nothing more than any human can ever ask for.

So now I get this thought in my head, and who’s put it there? Ceridwen seems a likely candidate to me. Even as I’m typing this I can picture Her in my mind almost unbidden, as if the image is coming from outside. Which it probably is. She stands in a forest clearing, tending the cauldron in which She brews the potion of knowledge, some of which She granted to me at my request.

And now She sees what I’m doing with what She gave me, and I don’t think She’s particularly impressed. So is now the time to change?

Is there a better time to change?

Probably not, and is there any reason why I shouldn’t stop wasting days? Of course not! I should have done this a long time ago.

Another reason I’m writing this, of course, is to make sure that I actually stick to this. Ceridwen will be making sure of that of course, but I’d rather not make Her do any more work than absolutely necessary. She’s the one doing me a favour, after all, and it wouldn’t be nice to try and extract any effort from Her that I could provide myself.

The Gods I work with, unlike the Christian God, can be fickle, and it is entirely possible to get on Their bad side to the extent that you can’t talk to them anymore. As I understand it, the Christian God is infinitely forgiving. That doesn’t wash with me, but I felt I should mention that contrast because there are likely to be one or two Christians reading this (if they even got this far, I am going on and on rather a lot) and I’m talking about Ceridwen in a way that will probably seem very unusual to them.

On my left as I sit here is more wasted time. My room is a mess as usual, I waste the time I should spend keeping it clean and tidy surfing the Internet pointlessly, visiting the same sites again and again to see if anyone else has posted. This does not seem to be a happy state of affairs.

To the world in general, to Ceridwen and Taliesen, to all forms of the Goddess and the God and the Divine, today I recognise that this cannot continue. Tomorrow it is time to stop wasting time.

As I needed to watch Shawshank again to remember — “Get busy living, or get busy dying”. While my situation is nothing like so extreme as theirs, the point is valid. We’re all heading for death, but do we spend our days waiting for it to turn up, or do we try and accomplish something in the intervening time?

I’m going for the latter.

And if I can stick to this, that will truly be Divinely inspired.

And no, that’s not a hint to start hinting that I got the name of the Deity responsible wrong.