2023 Reflections

This year has undoubtedly been a year of progress, it’s the second year of my three-year fixed term full-time teaching contract so basically it was a year where I could just coast for a bit, figure out more of my living situation and myself, while holding down a near-full time job. Unfortunately now as we approach the end of the year things have turned somewhat sour.

Cooking

As I sit down to start writing this on the 23rd December 2023 funnily enough cooking is the first subtopic that comes to mind. Probably because I made a batch of prawn/fish/garlic crackers earlier today because I wanted to practise cooking them for Christmas Day lunch with the family.

Figuring out and getting better at cooking has overall been pretty fun this year, especially with my age and therefore health being in a situation where I need to be a bit more conscious of what I’m eating (less calories & carbs, more veggies). It’s been nonetheless fairly difficult to consistently eat healthy while also wanting to try new and different but not necessarily healthy recipes, because there were often periods that I would just not eat anything interesting for a while and then once or twice a week I’d succumb to some craving and treat myself.

Eating more veggies in general has been pretty hard. I’ve realised that I need to accumulate more recipes/ideas to a point where I can comfortably rotate between a bunch of them. Sometimes there’d be periods where I’d exclusively be eating bok choy as my only source of green veggies out of sheer laziness and because they’re always some ~50 cents cheaper when you get the bulk deal. Other times it’d be capsicums because they’re frequently at my local grocer’s “soon to be expired veggies” shelf and I’d grab a bag (containing 3-4) for $2. What a deal, right?! That said I’ve been experimenting with working more veggies into my recipes; the latest experiment is making sausage rolls but mixing in veggies with the sausage meat, and my current conclusion is that I needed much less meat and more veggies. Sausage meat is surprisingly cheap, did ya know?

I also bought a wok a month ago, it really brings a different experience (and fun!) to cooking, as well as the ability to deep fry stuff on the stove, and there’s a certain kind of fun in trying to perfect a basic egg fried rice recipe (thanks, Uncle Roger.).

My place & the mortgage

I’ve definitely gotten more comfortable in my place and thankfully a year of just doing my day job means I have basically about 50% of the mortgage sitting in the offset account.

A financial guy randomly reached out to me on LinkedIn and at first I was suspicious, but overall this resulted in a successful refinancing that meant that I’d be saving about $20k on the final amount. Not bad for half a day’s work, honestly! Though I did have to ask the broker if he was comfortable sitting with me while I collected the information, because I knew it was something I couldn’t mentally do on my own.

I’ve also finally gotten comfortable with just hammering stuff (e.g. picture hooks) into my walls. Silly, right? It was something I was hung up on for a long time because I knew doing so meant that once I rent out my place I’d have to repair them, so why would I cause myself additional work down the line? What finally unstuck that was realising “Well, the answer is putty, and it’s pretty easy to use.”

I still hate cleaning. Have bought some tools and do have some strategies to make things a bit easier, but generally a lot of my problems tend to be mental. Think about washing the dishes (by hand)? Big ick. When I’m already in the moment while doing it as part of my cooking routine, I’m not thinking about it and I smash it out pretty easily.

Neurodivergence and its barriers

Can I be honest? Being mildly neurodivergent fucking sucks. It’s a constant battle of figuring out why I can’t just do things, have several boxes/containers of various hobbies that I can’t seem to regularly commit to, and it just feels like as a result I have less energy to do my day-to-days (although that could also be for health reasons).

Nevertheless one thing that’s been working consistently for me all year is my “bullet journal” which really isn’t technically a bullet journal (i.e. a notebook with dots and fancy templates) these days, it’s a A6-size notebook with enough pages for each double spread to take up a week, but it’s also small enough for me to not be utterly uncomfortable by not using up space.
The reality of this success is that I’ve never actually had such a system for so long, and I’ve tried a lot of different things on and off over like…the past 5-10 years:

• To-do list apps on my phone: Typing them in took too long for me.
• Using a Notes app or to-do list app on my iPad: Too many taps to get to the to-do list for me to do anything with it.
• A4 exercise book: Is it a page, or double page per week? How many lines should I allocate to each day? Ugh, there’s so much empty space at the end of the week but each new week should probably start on a new page. Also, what happens if I run out of pages before the year is up? It’s also too big to carry around with me in my messenger bag if I needed to
• A5 size book: Nope, still too much empty space at the end of every week.
• Then I FINALLY randomly stumbled upon a smaller A6-page size book by Midori that has very comfortably everything I needed and wanted.

So imagine having so many concurrent (but not necessarily always conscious) “works in progresses” for many other little things in life that I’ve yet to figure out and while I’m mostly focusing on the process it’s definitely maddening that I’m just…not there yet. In the end so long as I’m trying I’m making progress, I guess.

Physical Health

Turns out getting older does have some downsides in terms of “Oh shit I need to regularly keep up healthy habits to ensure my body has some sense of longevity”

I mentioned eating more veggies already, the other part is regularly doing physical activity which, well, is pretty difficult for me. Again it’s a mental thing for me.

At the start of the year I was pretty consistently walking for 45 minutes or so mostly daily on the treadmill, then after a day where I unintentionally overexerted myself it’s been pretty difficult to resume the habit. I still have all the equipment, and hopefully come the new year I’ll have enough mental energy to give myself a few initial pushes to get back going using the system that worked for me back then, and then to experiment with variations that’ll enable me to keep going.

Essentially what would work for me in general is some kind of external obligation or hobby that requires some kind of physical labour/exercise, but I don’t really have one that suits my needs right now. Woodchopping with an axe is the only thing I can think of at the moment, but there’s unlikely to be such an opportunity here.

And, well, work is pretty much the only scenario where I’d otherwise get significant physical exercise because I’ve purposely situated myself in a situation where walking to local shops, to public transport, etc., is convenient.

Work

I, well, let’s be honest. The day-to-day is okay, I still enjoy teaching and interacting with students and am generally fulfilled by my job. BUT:

1. I’m starting to feel weary of seeing the same mistakes/transgressions happen year after year by different student cohorts. These have been compounded by the pandemic and its knock-on effects.
2. Work politics has become incredibly stupid and I’m only now just realising how severely disorganised and behind the times my department (and by extension, some parts of UniMelb) is.
3. This year I’ve worked too much. The burnout has been incredibly bad, and I’m not confident that come next year I’ll have healed sufficiently.

The first semester went fine but coming off from last year I’d noticed that I was getting increasingly annoyed at how many 2nd year students (in teaching Multivariable Calculus & Engineering Maths) were lacking fundamentals from 1st year, and how much it was impacting on their ability to tackle the 2nd year content. Unfortunately as one of the fewer full-time tutors who could feasibly teach such subjects I couldn’t just walk away from teaching such subjects.

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that once I’ve identified most recurring patterns/trends, the phenomenon/object/habit no longer becomes interesting to me, or something worth observing/doing, especially when I don’t have enough power to positively change it. The fact that the student cohort changes every semester/year doesn’t matter, because the overall spread of ability is still roughly the same.

The second semester, well. I knew I was going to be tutor coordinator for Subject 1 due to doing the same job last year, and I was also tutor coordinating another subject (Subject 2) which I would eventually learn required a whole lot more extra administrative work compared to other subjects I’d done so far.

Subject 2 turned out OK, thankfully the lecturer was very communicative and gave feedback on places where I’d stuffed up, in a way that I appreciated: straightforward, no emotive language, just simply pointing it out. Again, still, a lot of extra work which involved proof reading assignment questions/solutions on tight deadlines, and administrative work with the mid-semester test and other finalisations.

Subject 1 I knew had issues (due to lecturer incompetence) stemming from last year’s iteration of it which resulted in a lot of additional work on my part to ensure that the casual tutors were looked after and everything was going smoothly. “Well at least I know what they are, so it shouldn’t be so bad this time round, right?” Turns out the second lecturer introduced new material in comparison to last year’s iteration, so on top of the first lecturer’s overall incompetence I had to frustrate my way through new content that was badly taught and designed. Combined with lecturing that students complained was confusing resulting in more student inquiries, complaints, questions.

The other factor is that in the end we’re still reeling from the after-effects of the pandemic and lockdowns, which I detailed in an earlier post and, well, yeah, it all definitely crossed a threshold for me. To the point that I was so frustrated at the whole situation to the point where I was physically taking it out on my own furniture at home, and struggling to keep my temper and not really knowing any quick and effective means to exhume all that frustration. It even got to the point where I had to shut down some students reaching out for help/consultation, something I still feel very guilty about.

Probably the biggest pivotal work-related event this year to round it all off was learning that due to current known policies and attitudes in the department, my full-time teaching contract is unlikely going to be renewed once it expires at the end of 2024. In a nutshell, based on my current knowledge:

• New Fair Work regulations that came into effect in early December state that fixed-term employees cannot be offered another fixed-term contract (this is basically in response to universities only offering their employees rolling fixed-term contracts). They have to be converted to ongoing, or nothing at all.
• Apparently internal department policy is that any academic positions (Level A-E) have to be advertised externally. So this meant that for any position advertised that I’d apply for (in addition to the other Teaching Associates also in my position), I’d be in competition with many overseas applicants.
• All such positions advertised usually require a PhD, which I don’t have. Exceptions can be made for Level A positions (and there does exist a category in a university’s payroll system for Level A academics without PhDs), but one can generally assume due to usual elitism snobbery that anyone without a PhD would be filtered out pretty quickly regardless.
• One Level A/B position did get advertised, which I didn’t apply for. Why? I guess I have some level of dignity, though that might sound like a really backwards position.

Honestly the most infuriating thing for me is that nobody above me has thought to think “Hey, Matt’s been here for a while, is he interested in career advancement? Is there someway we can help him get that PhD qualification while still retaining him for teaching? Perhaps a fellowship of some kind?”
That said this is not limited to academia. I’ve read enough anti-work/anti-capitalism stories on Reddit where employees don’t feel valued and that it’s better to job hop to get a larger salary, because they would always be denied a raise after staying too long in their current role.

And it’s made me realise that due to the transient nature of academics in terms of e.g. getting a PhD at one place, a postdoc at another, and generally encouraging travel and working at different places, that there’s no incentive for permanent academics to want to keep and retain the people they have because there’ll always be a supply available.

I should add as an aside, the primary reason I don’t have a PhD is because I got fucked over severely in my Masters:

• My first supervisor left one semester into my Masters research. My second supervisor didn’t come until another semester later, so that was one year I was already in limbo.
• The joint company I was doing it with, had a lot of red tape and approvals that meant I couldn’t have access to the relevant information until the final semester of my degree.

So obviously I didn’t get a lot of research done, and I basically have very little to show for my efforts. It seemed like people were just happy to forget about me now that their commitment was over.

I quietly tried starting a second Masters in 2020 (yes, the year the pandemic and lockdowns started) and dropped it after a year because I couldn’t balance studying and work at the same time. It didn’t occur to me that since I was older now I didn’t have the versatility and flexibility that I had while young and I had to rethink my whole approach to studying and figure out how my brain worked (thanks, neurodivergence 😒).

Anyway, if there’s one thing I’m thankful for it’s having a year to job hunt and appropriately skill up. There’s definitely some basic computer science fundamentals I need to pick up along the way, I’d imagine not conceptually difficult at least. I’ll also probably wind down my work commitment (to about 0.6-0.8 FTE) as well so that I’ve got more breathing room to do so.

Mental Health

Putting work aside I continue to have figured out myself a bit more with regards to my mental health and managing things, and I’m hoping to share some of these insights at some point.

However I can still attest there’s still an underlying current of ennui, a dreading sense of “What’s the end goal? What’s the point of all this?” that continues to plague my mind especially at weak moments. It’s like a constant background noise that continues to get louder if I don’t have the mental resources (and antidepressants) to keep it at bay. Granted, I’m better at dealing with it these days now that I’ve got my own place, my own bed and recliner to curl up in, but I often wonder if there’s something missing in my life.

If I had to be honest, the one thing that seems to be missing when I compare myself to others (oops!) is some kind of close companionship. The answer to that is reasonably obvious: get a cat. For those who don’t know me, I’ve been single my whole life and have never had a serious relationship. Thankfully I’m old enough to be past the 20s where it seems like “everyone’s” getting married and having babies, and past the fear of missing out.

It feels shameful to admit, but I imagine most people would categorise my existence as fairly lonely in comparison to an average person. It’s no surprise to me, really, people more familiar with my spread of internet activity would still recognise my habits to be that of one who’s ‘terminally online’ which seems to be a common trend across neurodivergent people.

But I’m also realistic in that I’m not really making any conscious effort to step outside of my comfort zone (that far) to meet new people. I have friends that I’d happily ‘just do things with’ even though I’m still failing to make the effort every now and then. It’s rational to realise that if I’m not actively making an effort to date and/or meet new people it would be unreasonable to expect any kind of close human companionship to happen in my life.

2024 Goals?

Like in past years the overall goal is continually making progress on myself as a person and ensuring that I’m spending my time doing things that matter to me. People who’ve known me for long enough know that I don’t really make solid and achievable resolutions, mainly because I’m familiar enough with my own temperament to know that sometimes, random shit just happens, I might find a shiny new toy, I may lose focus, work may end up being stupid, I find a new job and need a period of adjustment, and so on.

In addition to “continuously working all of the above”, some thoughts about what I hope to achieve in 2024:

• Do less work on things I’m not enjoying, or in the least, do less work under shitty people: this will most likely be reducing my teaching down to 0.6-0.8 FTE unless I’m lucky to get more behind-the-scenes work that I can do at my own pace.
• I want to start regularly streaming on Twitch/Youtube.
• I want to go back to making useful Youtube videos.
• I want to produce a video of a multi-cello arrangement. I’ve been working on some arrangements this past year but have hit a few annoying mental blocks that takes a while to mentally power through.
• Avoid taking on new things/hobbies. It’s safe to say I have a pretty sizable number of “things I’m interested in” such that it should be good enough to rotate to the next one rather than go “oooh shiny!”

So, yeah. 2024. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it but if there’s one thing I’ve been getting better at all of 2023, it’s “just getting up and consciously working on tasks that make progress”, so I have a little hope that so long as I do that, something’ll eventually work out.