Beat up and battered around

(I've) been beat up and battered aroundbut like a tall ball hitting the wall I bounce back. It's been a hard week as I try (before Uni even officially begins) to figure out just how it is that I'm going to mix work and study. At the moment I'm doing 5 shifts a week - so pretty much full time. The problem is that a typical shift runs from 4pm to 11pm. So when you factor in things like exercise, procrastination time, a generally slow note taking ability; well the words don't write themselves and I do like the time to drink a cup of coffee or two. Anyway, I called in sick on Wednesday and this week they gave me only 3 shifts.

Getting less shifts is actually a blessing in disguise because I feel that it frees me up to now make myself less available and hopefully this will save me from getting more and more depressed and less and less happy as 5 days is just too much with a full time study load. But life and all that coffee costs money. Hopefully this change will be just enough to free me from looking into the 'mental mirror' and seeing myself as grumpy, complaining bitter guy. It's not a pretty site.

It's funny how the human condition works; it seems to be in turns that you're happy then you're sad, then you're miserable, then you're depressed, then the light shines through and you're happy and joyful again and then something else rears up. Either money is OK or you've spent too much. Damn all this 'binarity'! I want to deny that things are as simple and predictable as all that. I want to deny that we are acted upon. I want to refute externalism. I want to be miserable because it's who I am.

At the moment I'm doing a fair amount of thinking about realism and relativisim. I think that there's a lot to be said about the idea that discourse shapes our realities. But I maintain (at this point) that saying that discourse "is the world" is a bit like taking a tail, a furry tail, and inferring that there's a dog connected to it. Sure a dog is consistent with the 'existence' of a furry tail but I think that discourses merely serve to give shape and colour and definition to that tail. The tail neither exists or not exists because of language. It is perhaps more of a found thing that 'floats' in a sea of language. Now all I have to do is prove it.