Frustration

Here it comes again.

It's strange, but I have a predilection for being immersed in bouts of frustration at painfully intermittent periods of my life. Simply put, I'm pent up in frustration and a sense of mental claustrophobia, as if walls were closing in on me. At the same time there's that constriction and senselessness and that feeling of being cut loose, adrift on a wide sea, to borrow the oft-used metaphor.

Right now some worries gnaw at the back of my head. There is, for example, the SRP conundrum. SRC on Friday managed to paint a rather grim, unfriendly atmosphere for us prospective researchers - as if we are inmates being thrust into hard labour with unfriendly and reluctant supervisors to monitor our activities. The first part of SRC was fairly interesting sans the deliberately abstruse project presentations, but the latter half performed admirably in its capacity as a wet blanket. Or perhaps sour grapes. Based, as it were, on less than spectacular performance from preceding batches, whose majorly uninspiring antics galvanized the blase coordinator to lambast we unsuspecting few with a preemptive "scolding", as he put it, of our future misdemeanors, taking out his frustrations on us. I don't fancy mentors that don't want my untrained faculties poking into his research. Much less being watched with eagle-eyes by a cynical, jaded authority.

There is that enduring problem of EE and my inability to decide on what I want or can do. Posthumanism? Political, social, ethical, stylistic considerations? Subbranches of posthumanist literature? Case-studies? Dune? How shall I structure the EE? How shall I talk about the enduring themes of mere fiction? (Note the irony.)

Then there are the holidays. Which are ending. A puerile consideration, perhaps, but irritating nonetheless.

***

I'm reading Ilium by Dan Simmons, which worries me because nowhere on this good Earth have I yet seen the sequel Olympos. Ilium is a strange book built on strange premises - that of Homer's Iliad being performed by hapless pawns on Mars, of sentient machine-cyborg beings no doubt inspired from Dyson's astrochicken, that for once copy human linguistic patterns and swear liberally, of postliteral humans trapped in an Eloi-like state of society, ignorant of even te most elementary things. Ilium is engaging because of its sheer novelty and complexity, and for now, although I haven't finished, it has already offered several fascinating thinking points.