At some point in late October,deep in the midst of post-viralness when the most act­ive thing I could do was think, I real­ised the strange­ness of months and years: how could a group of days be so eas­ily cat­egor­ised as Septem­ber or This Week or 2009, and how could I spend so much time blam­ing that month or that year for everything going wrong, when the days, the years, really have no more in com­mon than the sun­rise and sun­set? It was no more October’s fault that I had been con­stantly ill than it was the people next door’s, and I wasn’t cry­ing at their front door each night, ruing the day they moved in. So I’m find­ing myself try­ing really hard not to blame 2009 for the cata­logue of gen­eral lous­i­ness that has been 2009, try­ing hard not to pin my hopes on wak­ing up on Janu­ary 1st 2010 we a sense of focus and clar­ity and bound­less energy. But if I were to look at 2009 as a whole, to lump the days together into one neat bundle: wow, 2009. You sucked.

The biggest meas­ur­able chal­lenge? Eas­ily my dis­ser­ta­tion, com­plete with overam­bi­tious, over­crit­ical, under­qual­i­fied, under­help­ful super­visor. No, really, did I ever tell you that story about how she only sent me the first draft feed­back at 7pm the night before the dis­ser­ta­tion was due in? And how that feed­back included a huge list of things she wanted in it that she’d never men­tioned before? I can­not let go of the whole thing. Spend­ing six months hav­ing to answer to the every whim of a slightly crazy per­son will do that to you.

The biggest chal­lenge to my faith in the world? Either my purse being stolen (I know. It sounds so… petty.) or the ran­dom stranger Waitrose incid­ent. Taken alone — even taken together — these seem like such rel­at­ively minor incid­ents, and you know, I am fine with repla­cing bank cards and watch­ing bruises sub­side: I’m both alive and I’m grate­ful not to be in the head­space that makes attack­ing people in super­mar­kets seem like a good idea. But I’m increas­ingly real­ising that both incid­ents eroded some­thing in me: I’m leav­ing 2009 with much less trust, and most less con­vic­tion of the good­ness, of the world around me. I’m aware of how over­dra­matic that sounds, but that per­son who reaches around me to pick up a loaf of bread? I don’t think I can trust them anymore.

The biggest me-challenge? Try­ing to find out who to be when uni ended. I left uni­ver­sity know­ing two things: 1) I didn’t want to be a lin­guist 2) I didn’t want to jump onto the gradu­ate career tread­mill. It turns out that rules out very little and there is still so much hanging in space, unde­cided. I’m lucky enough to have a mar­ket­able enough skill to pay the rent while I work as a (some­times very) part time freel­ance web designer, and for someone with no design back­ground what­so­ever there have been vic­tor­ies — I some­how man­aged to brand an awards cere­mony, got two very con­ser­vat­ive organ­isa­tions to adopt social media policies, have yet to be arres­ted for the shoddy filling in of a tax return, and I’m cur­rently dis­pro­por­tion­ately excited about being on some Cre­at­ive Review Twit­ter lists as an actual designer. [That’s just crazy. There are real design­ers on those lists!] But I don’t know if this is really the dir­ec­tion I want to take, don’t know if this is really what I Want To Do and whether I shouldn’t just go and do what my fam­ily sug­gest and get a “proper job”.

But the biggest chal­lenge of 2009, the one I will look back on and go I can’t believe I did that? Just keep­ing one foot in front of the other and keep­ing going. It has been so ridicu­lously hard at times, but I’m start­ing to regroup and start­ing to look for­ward. You have been a lousy arbit­rary col­lec­tion of uncon­nec­ted days, 2009, but I’m look­ing for­ward to the next lot.

[Note: I wrote this, which is less of an entry and more of a col­lec­tion of ran­dom thoughts, as part of the Best of 2009 Chal­lenge. I’m strug­gling to find any “bests” this year. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the next dec­ade can’t get worse than the last one.]

In lieu of going to bed, I give you the Spo­tify playl­ist I’ve been obsess­ively play­ing over and over for the past few weeks, to the det­ri­ment of Al’s men­tal health. It’s only eight tracks long (track­list­ing below) and it’s in no par­tic­u­lar order that would make musical or lyr­ical sense, but I sug­gest you play each track on repeat about ten times before listen­ing to the whole thing. Trust me, it’s the best way to listen to music and the people you live with will just love you for it.

Obvi­ously, because it’s a Spo­tify playl­ist, you’ll need Spo­tify to play it, and because it’s a Spo­tify playl­ist there’s a good chance it ran­domly won’t work because the sky is the wrong shade of grey or there are leaves on the inter­net or something.

Click here for playlist

Low – Just Like Christ­mas
David Gray – Please For­give Me — Radio Edit
The Hol­lo­ways – Gen­er­ator
Slow Mov­ing Mil­lie – Beasts
Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Big Pink – Dom­i­nos
Andrew Bird – Eugene
Kate Nash – Mariella

Some days it’s best to just give up and spend the after­noon sit­ting in the kit­chen listen­ing to the radio and cov­er­ing bal­loons in tis­sue paper.

If you’re won­der­ing, the image is from a copy of the Sunday Times Magazine wherein Mariah Carey describes her music as “hard­core, but not too hard­core.” I love this. It proves you can say any­thing, and as long as you believe it — even if you are the sort of per­son so deluded that you want a mil­lion white kit­tens to ser­en­ade you as you enter a room — people will print it without ques­tion­ing. Okay, so it prob­ably helps to be both extremely rich and superbly fam­ous, but if Mariah Carey can claim to be hard­core without any­one so much as rais­ing an eye­brow, I should be able to get away with more.

LED lights from Pound­stretcher, con­ver­ted from bat­tery to plug powered by Al. Now I just need to get my hands on some very small bal­loons and Bal­loon Light Pro­ject 2.0 can begin.

It turns out that I’m ter­rible at this blog­ging every day thing, although I have been keep­ing to my photo a day res­ol­u­tion. I apo­lo­gise for the lack of post­ing, but I have been too busy — oh, you know - leav­ing the house to write every day. Oh yeah. After almost six weeks of feel­ing a little like death warmed up and then rap­idly cooled down to shivery before being boiled up once more, I’m able to get up and out most days. This week the plan is to build up to leav­ing the house and work­ing in any given day. Don’t get too jeal­ous all at once, now.

I am real­ising, though, that in some strange way I prob­ably needed the last six weeks of com­plete body break­down. I stopped. For the first time in years, everything ground to a com­plete halt — even brain activ­ity seemed to stop for a while. Every so often a Big Thought would push its way through the fog, but with time to con­tem­plate I actu­ally man­aged to get some­where with my think­ing. There’s a few things I’m a lot closer to being able to let go of now, just because I had no choice but to work through them before hav­ing another nap (to get over the exer­tion of think­ing!), so recov­er­ing from it all almost feels like a renewal in some way; an emer­ging. I’ve real­ised how blocked my head had become, and while I’m no clearer just yet on where I want to go, it feels like some­thing I’m able to think about now instead of the messy tangle of before.

Part of my frus­tra­tion is in real­ising that I’m strug­gling to express myself in any way — some­where between thought ini­ti­ation and expres­sion, some­thing gets blocked, and noth­ing — writ­ten or spoken — comes out feel­ing authen­tic. I’ve always felt divided in some way — I’m not wholly aca­demic or nat­ur­ally artistic, not entirely cyn­ical but not fully optim­istic, even not badly ill but still not very well — and it almost feels like that’s where the con­flict lies, like I’m strug­gling to work out how to straddle all of the ele­ments yet remain a cohes­ive per­son. I don’t think I’m man­aging it at all at the moment, but I’m start­ing to fig­ure out that work­ing that out a little is prob­ably the key to work­ing out everything else, like what I want to do with myself and where I want to go.

(And this is the part where I would nor­mally insert a pithy joke about how lousy I am. But I am not going to let myself do that — although you have no idea how hard that feels, being Queen of all Humour is the Best Defence — I’m just going to let this lie for a bit. Let it go out there into the uni­verse and maybe help my brain to start work­ing on it all. We’ll see.)