Friday, 02.16.2018 - 4:12 pm.
What a week this one has been, full of social engagements...including a wedding during office hours! Jose and I have gone for pizza with friends one evening, then Black Panther with friends another; I had lunch with a friend from the PhD yesterday; and tonight we're watching Tom Of Finland at a local movie theater with my friend Eric.
The wedding was today at noon. Two PhD colleagues, from Turkey, got married at the Town Hall, and then they had a small reception at a room in one of the university fanciest buildings. The supervisor of one of the colleagues baked the wedding cake. It was lovely, and there were quite a few of us from the PhD program. If I ever had a dream wedding it was this one: a short and sweet ceremony at a town hall in a foreign city.
The wedding, however, stirred bittersweet feelings in Andrew and me. Ours was nice, pretty standard stuff, though much of it we both could have done without. But we don't have great memories of it because (1) we failed at transportation arrangements and thus my parents arrived just as the civil ceremony had ended, which breaks my heart to this day; (2) it was the last time we saw Andrew's brother alive. We love each other and we love being married, but we really don't look back to our wedding day with joy. .
Anyway! I'm a bit exhausted, but I still have to carry on. Andrew and I are going on a day trip to Durham tomorrow, it should be nice. I miss going on trips with him, we haven't done that in a while.
Other news: I'm fucking done with the column at the Latin American newspaper in London. It was all very shitty, in retrospective. I wrote 30 columns, 1200 words each, every fortnight. I got some "nice column" comments from the editors here and there, but that was it. I didn't get any feedback and no payment. I mean, I knew the gig was unpaid, but I thought at least I'd get some meaningful feedback as I went along. Did anybody even read what I wrote? I submitted my last column this week but I didn't hear back from the team, nor I expect I will. I don't even know if it will be published at all.
I think the editorial team is in transition. I was kept in the dark about it, it seems I was just supposed to be churning out columns. My questions went unanswered. The last issue I received had a different editor than the one that hired me over a year ago, who was decent, and the one that started talking to me at the beginning of this year. I don't know who this third editor is, but his writing SUCKS, and yet he gets a column on top of the editorial. I showed his editorial to Andrew, just the first paragraph, and he exclaimed: "oh, my God, get out of there!". I'm glad I did. What a shit show. And what ungratefulness. I didn't even get a thank you.
At least now I can concentrate on writing what I want. I could have finished revising my manuscript this week, but social engagement after social engagement kept me from it (oh, the life of a socialite). I realized I need a plan, and a goal. Not just for my manuscript but for my writing as a whole. I don't quite know what having a plan and a goal mean, but at least I know that's the way to go.