I finally got the email, no need to make the call, looks like unemployment will continue. Disheartening but what can you do, with this free time I must make the most of it, I can't just wallow doing nothing. Here, now? I must try. Try life, try living, I cannot keep being afraid, its untenable, pathetic even.

Made plans to go out with two friends on a day that I thought was Thursday but turns out it was Tuesday. Usually when I go out I give myself a day to prepare in my mind but I found out it was Tuesday on Monday and I dreaded going. I don't know how some people do it. One of the friends I'm meeting with showed me his calendar once and I don't think he's never not doing something and not just multiple times a week, multiple times a day doing different things, meeting up with different people, if I go out even once, that's me sated for a couple weeks. Truly, there is a diverse world of people out there.

I ended up forgetting my notebook and camera at home and I've never felt so naked. Most times I go out I don't end up using them, but not having them felt off. We went to Central London, talked about jobs, about masters, about future and the near past. We always seem to talk about the same things but it never really gets old. I said I thought about doing anthropology in an off comment expecting derision but instead I got support. I didn't say anything further and the flow of conversation moved on but quietly I was sort of shocked. Why do such good friends have to also say stupid things sometimes? What weird friendships I have, and what a weird friend I am.

I've been writing in my blog a lot recently because I have so much free time and on the off chance I do get up to something that isn't rotting at home all day, why not write about it? That being said I want to get better at writing and be a better writer and I feel like this isn't doing much. I want to push myself, but recently this whole past month I feel like I can't write anything at all, and believe me I've tried. I can write 500 words in a couple minutes for my blog no problem, but outside of it I struggle even writing a sentence. I write about myself a lot so I've been trying to get away from first-person, but to no avail. I don't know why I write honestly, but ever since I started I know that I can never stop.

I've sadly been neglecting my physical journal and just my general morning routine in general. I had a months long streak of setting aside 30 minutes to an hour each day to read or write in my journal but since I got really sick last month its all fallen apart and I really need to recalibrate myself once again.

I'm literally just saying nothing now. Nothing pertinent to anything at all, DAMN am I bored! Sometimes I feel like I'm writing too much about myself, about my life. But I figure, If I died tomorrow, I'd at least have this to know that I was alive to the world.

With great consternation I am still broke. Matter of fact, I am still in overdraft yet I continue to spend money. Why? I control myself for the most part, but I did not need to spend £20 on stationary goods. At least the stickers and the Moomin 2026 calendar was cool.

The job I interviewed for on Tuesday said they'd get back to me by the end of the week to know if I got the job or not. Its the end of the week now and I still haven't gotten a call back. I don't know if I have it in me to restart the job search. Since the interview, this week has felt like such reprieve not applying to jobs all day. Now, envisioning doing it all over again is not what I view as a good time. There are worse problems to have though, I don't want to be seen like I'm complaining. I am, but I at least know I shouldn't. I'll give it two more days until I give up and call them myself. I'm most likely already rejected by then but maybe they'll at least tell me why.

Whatever it is, I have to get some money somehow. My teeth are starting to hurt. Not largely, and it comes and goes, but dental pain is a funny pain in that the way it hurts you differs than a flesh wound or a sickness. It pulsates unseen, trapped under an enamel cage, each time it hurts I fantasise ripping the tooth out in one clean go, a mass of pain to alleviate the small aching ones. Though if the fantasy went any further than that I would then be left with a hole where a tooth should be and carrying a whole lot of pain.

My wisdom teeth grew out during lockdown and I neglected going to the dentist while in university because nothing noticeable was going wrong and I am lazy and now the consequences have bit me. My fillings I had in 6 years ago have eroded and sweet food aches my molars. My first pay check will go to the dentist. If ever I get a job and get paid.

A few days ago I went out to get coffee with a friend, another expense, but I don't feel guilt spending money to spend time with friends. As I got off the station at Liverpool Street and walked to the café I was awash with a sea of quarter-zips, I had never seen this many all at once it was sort of amazing.

As to the meeting with my friend, to be honest, it was nice, but I felt like my heart wasn't in it all the way. I didn't say what I thought, I said what I thought I should say and through that level of abstraction I end up saying nothing meaningful at all. I did talk about Zohran's win, being inspired but also kinda jealous here in London, I talked about my job interview and asked her about hers. As the coffee shop was already full we got our coffee to go and ended up taking a walk from here to the place she was staying at, and I realised she knows more about Central London than I do, someone who has lived here all my life. As she spoke I just nodded and agreed on things I have really not much idea about.

I never really have a good time in Central London, there are good places, but walking around is never fun unless I'm with a friend. There's just too many people and on top of that I hate being seen as a tourist in a city I call my own, a city I know deep and intimately, the walls of a council home and the rattling of football cages, all that is London to me is foreign in the centre.

I had a job interview today, and if I don't get this job then something truly is wrong with this world. Perhaps my best showing ever, I answered what I wanted for the most part, I kept a smile, I was confident, maybe my people skills really are getting better?

I've been letting self doubt cloud my mind a lot recently, for some reason in my mind I thought that I was the only one all the way up until they mentioned that other people were also interviewing. Hearing that, my confidence dropped and I sat there in the staff room waiting for my interviewer steadily losing what momentum I built up in my mind. They were late, and as I stewed I for some reason thought of Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal' and thought, what if I pretended I was confident in myself and I actually believed I could get this job? I think it kinda worked.

I didn't panic, not even once, I was stumped on a few questions like "what are your hobbies?" and all the dumb innocuous ones that don't mean much but all the important ones, I said what I wanted to say. I didn't fall over my words like the last interview and I didn't completely shutdown like the interview before that one.

On the way home, the bus route took me to some places that were near my old house where I grew up from ages 0-7. Not far from where I am now, but I haven't travelled this way in a long long time, and I let myself indulged in a little smite of nostalgia.

Made plans to get coffee with a friend while she's in London for a week or so, then bought tickets to some event in a bookstore on the same day, maybe one day this will be like skin to me.