Duality

Can you guys tell how busy I am by how much I post in procrastination? Well, thankfully the bulk of the trouble is over, that is, I handed in my TAFE assignment this evening after three marathon nights putting it together. By no means did I leave it to the last minute, but man did I underestimate how massive it was.

It brought me to thinking about how every now and again I don't recognise myself. I read an article in the Australian Women's Weekly on how we all supposedly have an average of eight personalities. (Yes, I read the AWW. This is because when Sir renewed our ISP contract we got to pick a free magazine subscription and AWW was the only one with any content remotely connected to our life. I flick through it for do-able recipes and then hand it over to my mum when I next see her. Which reminds me, I should call her).

I don't think I have quite as many as eight personalities but I certainly have at least two. Since I gave so much of my TAFE time away to doing work stuff, I actually ended up completing my TAFE assignment at work today and printed it out on the office printer. There were two questions on promotional budgets that I could not for the life of me complete because I wasn't in class when he told us about it and (... and this is my fault) I haven't had time to read the notes that Meg saved for me.

I was going to lie and 'print' a blank page and then pretend that it was an inserted file that had dropped off and then work on it tonight and send it in tomorrow saying "sorry about that, here it is" but after voicing this while working on it today, Nukte just gave me a look that showed how surprised and disappointed she was that I'd even conceived of something so devious.

But this is where my duality comes in. I am devious. In fact, I'm too clever for my own good and it's only my fraying moral fibre that seems to be tempering my desire to just ruin everything for everyone by abusing the rules in the worst way possible without anyone realising. I tell you, I could be one of those white collar criminals in a few years jailed for cooking the books or something.

However, everyone sees me as so upstanding. For the most part, I am. I believe that you can't be healthy just by eating well and exercising. You also have to be healthy at an emotional level too, and I do this mostly through my volunteer work and my environmentalism. I bet saints even had doubts about themselves from time to time. Not that I'm calling myself a saint, just a comment. But I'm not always upstanding, I fail like everyone else.

So how did it end? I went to Alan's office to drop off the paper and told him I had a lot of trouble with the two questions, so hadn't included them in my assignment. He knew I hadn't attended class so took my USB drive and gave me the appropriate spreadsheets and said "Don't tell anyone but take these and you can give me the pages later. I'm back here on Tuesday". So I got a reprieve until Tuesday, proving that honesty is the best policy. Mostly.

On the way home from TAFE I realised that this duality exists not just in a moral sense but with so many things I do, and I think it is the people that I'm with that shows this the most clearly. Take this 'date' (yes, I've taken to using quotation marks to satisfy both of my personalities) with Danny. In the blue corner I have a bunch of friends and acquaintances just stunned by the fact that I 'asked him out' (that phrase, too, has implications, but that's not for today's discussion). Then in the red corner there's a totally different bunch of friends and acquaintances who do that kind of thing all the time and think I'm tame.

The truth is that I'm neither brave nor tame, just like no person is black or white but shades of grey in between. But you can see how easy it is to believe that you are 'what you are' just by the way people treat you.

Methinks I'm in a delicate place at the moment; people are influencing me more than they ought to be and I feel like I'm tipping in a direction I don't think will be good for me. The first answer is a proper night's sleep. The second answer is some time to myself and by myself. The third answer is either a stint of writing or a long swim.

Hence I promise I won't blog until my usual posting time on Monday to leave some breathing space for myself. You'll just have to find out what happened on the 'date' then. I predict it'll be a fairly boring analysis of Sarah Blasko's score in 'Hamlet'.