Things To Do
Go to the gym.
Take up yoga, pilates, aerobics classes.
Learn to dive or wakeboard.
Learn a new language.
Study for the CFA something (Chartered...Financial...Accounting?).
Remember that at least one of the objectives of policy-making is the maximal convenience of the civil service.
Remember that at least one of the objectives of submission-writing is to get people to notice the brilliance of your arguments (all the more for being limited to 4 pages, 3-sentence paragraphs and monosyllabic words).
Not argue with the entire top hierarchy of the office.
Not make facetious and/or frivolous remarks to any of the top hierarchy.
Dress appropriately for the office (no t-shirts, no jeans, no suspicious footwear).
Express equal parts horror and curiosity when it is suggested that the office should mount an expedition to a gay club.
Read Pratchetts over and over again.
Read intelligent books and meditate over reviews not written.
Write letters in my head to people I once knew and now talk to only in the desperate reaches of my imagination (there is an Eliot poem that talks about memory reconsidered as passion?).
Stop taking the term "depression" in vain; there is depression with hospitals and drugs, and then there is what someone called reiterated whining.
Pull myself together and stop complaining.
I haven't any idea what I'd do otherwise. I don't think I could try to read political theory again, and this is in some way a loss for me (though a boon for political theory and the academic world in general). I know how strange that sounds and it's not a bad thing to be less starry-eyed and of course I wasn't any damn good at theory to start with, but it would be nice to think, wouldn't it, that some day it would be possible to go read Arendt in the New School? I came across a phrase of Henry James - some character describing himself as a "perfectly-equipped failure" - except that I'm not very well-equipped at all. Does a handful of quotations count as equipment? At least we'll die with harness on our back?
(Thank you for listening, for writing back, for calling, for keeping in touch, for offering a lifeline of words. Make a snow angel for all of us back in Singapore and think fondly of the sun.)