In times of crisis, we learn what is most important. Not that I am in any sort of crisis right now, but I am suffering from an odd period of time. Summers tend to find me a bit at odds with reality anyway, I’ve always been at my most insomniacal during summer since I was a child, and I survive it by reading late into the night.
But during the day I am waging a war of attrition against life. Most obviously I have less than a month to finish up my Master’s in Astrophysics, no mean feat, given I have written 8 pages of my 40 page dissertation in which I literally have to explain some bits of the universe. That is just the signal in the very noisy background, a background of months of crappy not-summer weather, the weirdness that the Olympics has visited upon London (it’s a bit post-apocalyptic right now, to be honest, a ghost town in normally busy places, and insanely busy in other odd places), my wedding planning REPEATEDLY getting nuked from orbit, and some other pretty loud non-trivial potentially-life-altering static.
What we have here is straight-up attenuation:
“In physics, attenuation is the gradual loss in intensity of any kind of flux through a medium.”
Every other non-essential part of my life is getting stripped down to the bare essentials. I am operating in Safe Mode. We had McDonald’s for dinner tonight. I don’t have the energy to think about clothes or looking hawt or whatever, so I wear a white t-shirt and blue skinny jeans every day. When I read at night, it is utter utter drivel, because I can barely manage to parse the gossip section of the Daily Mail much less manage a proper novel. When I watch television, anything with a plot leaves me bored.
Most of all, I care less and less about what happens online. In fact, instead of looking forward to new posts by whichever style bloggers, I find the whole thing incredibly tedious because they all look so damned contrived and high-maintenence. There’s more to life than black leather city shorts and a new pair of Loubs. Imagine if we, as women, put as much attention towards things that really made a difference to the world as we did towards makeup and fashion. I say this against myself: I am not above a really good procrastinatory session over style and makeup blogs. I’ve been watching loads of youtube makeup tutorials the past few days solely because they are soothing as watching Bob Ross paint.
There’s a lot of pressure on a woman my age to be all-singing and all-dancing. Not only are we supposed to do it all and have it all but we’re also supposed to look like goddesses at the same time. Well, at times like these, I realise that we really just give too much of a shit a lot of the time and we should just sit back and let things slide. It’s a hard lesson, since I set high standards for myself hold myself to the task of studying astrophysics without looking like a cliched astrophysicist. But you know what? In astrophysics, no one cares what you look like as long as you do good work — and god do I wish the rest of the world was like this. So right now I look pretty freaking unglamorous and I am actually quite happy about it because, yes, I do have more important things to do with my time.
However, I did buy a lovely new Chanel eyeliner today, so I am clearly not totally cured. And yes, that is a lip gloss next to my pen in the photo at the top, because one cannot think clearly without a bit of lippy on or some such nonsense.
Anyway. The point is threefold:
1) I am still quiet because I am still busy doing other important stuff.
2) Even if I weren’t busy I am not sure what I would say because the world doesn’t really need yet another style/makeup blog and yet that’s all my brain has been capable of processing in the background over the summer because its primary function has been elsewhere trying to figure out life, the universe, and everything.
3) Forgive yourself. Care less. No one cares as much as you do anyway.
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