Emotional emptiness

The champagne and food last night was beautiful.

Then this morning, I woke up and panicked. I'm Dr Mancy now. What next?

I feel emotionally empty. A sense of relief and tiredness. I want to be looked after, to relax, to have all my decisions made for me. A holiday.

Happy confusion!

I am finally Dr. Mancy!!!!

I'm not quite sure what I feel. Apart from very tired and relieved.

Happy confusion :-)

Should I give my blog a new title?

"I am pleasantly confused", says one of my friends on Facebook. And that's beautiful!

So, should I rename my blog "Pleasant Confusion"? I like the way the it acknowledges my reality of valuing liminality, in-between spaces and productive failure, whilst hiding behind a superficial oxymoron. Another alternative might be "Constructive Confusion". And that gets alliteration points, too :-)

Glasgow smile :-)

http://rebeccamancy.picturepush.com/album/2469/60718

Voting frustration

I've just returned from voting. I'm not sure whether even after only an hour, I can remember who I voted for. On one ballot paper, I had to vote with numbers in order of preference. On the other, I had to mark a cross in the box in each of the two columns (the first column had around 15 entries to choose from). So I guess that means there was quite a lot to remember. It's also a lot of decisions to make.

As I walked up to the polling station, I was wondering why is it that something that is supposed to give me a sense of agency - voting - actually leads to confusion, frustration and ultimately a lack of engagement?

To some extent, it's a bit like a multiple choice test. You rule out those options that are clearly "ridiculous". Then you're left with a slightly smaller set. So you read their documentation, and get a general, overall impression of each party. And then you can either try to make a decision based on some sort of list of good and bad points of each ... or you leave it to your subconscious to sort out some kind of 'average'! After all, how do you weight the different criteria? How do you choose between a party that offers one thing you approve of and really care about, and another that offers two things you approve of but value much less?

Whilst I would feel much less confusion if I were to vote in Switzerland on issues rather than parties (which really just constitute an amalgam of issues, for me), I can't help thinking that Wikipedia offers a better model of something resembling, but not quite the same as 'deliberative democracy' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy), containing many of the ideas of consensus rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision_making). So, does Wikipedia demonstrate that systems like this *can* function, and is Wikipedia developing a new version of democracy that could be tried out in other systems, including political systems? Presumably it's not as simple as that ...

Will I regret publishing this post?

Reaching out

I've just read an entry on Mac's blog (http://japanimaction.blogspot.com/2007/04/thank-you.html) that's reminded me of something I wanted to write about.

I watched The History Boys on my return flight from Singapore, and in addition to finally discovering the source of all those references towaving and drowning (it's from a book of poems by Stevie Smith), it also contained a partial answer to something else I've been wondering about for a long time: the way in which we integrate what we read.

Hector: The best moments in reading are when you come across something, a thought, a feeling, you'd thought special, particular to you, and here it is, set down by someone else, maybe even someone long dead, and it's as if a hand had come out, and taken yours.