Passing grades, pointless jobs and politics.

I've been thinking quite a lot at the minute about what will always be, in my head, the Butterfly Effect. And yes, Ashton Kutcher is wonderful in that film and, yes I cry like a little girl every time but I don't mean the amazing 2004 film I actually mean the theory behind it. That we're all just the summation of a million tiny choices, accidents and decisions made over the course of our lives that have somehow brought us to this point, and that any minor change to this would inevitably change the people we are and the lives we have. Pop culture theory at its best people.
But genuinely, I tend (as anyone who follows me on Twitter will confirm) to whinge on about life, about my boring job, lack of finances and general inability to just make the best of things. The more I think about it though the more I'm coming round to the idea that these things are firstly, very minor first world pains in the grand scheme of things, and secondly even ignoring point one these are things that shouldn't be whinged about. If every shitty choice, bad decision, poor judgement call and moment of laziness are what brought me here then they've all in effect also given me every good part too. Every minor victory when I get a good TMA result back, every afternoon off I can squish in with Little Miss, every night off staying up watching shit TV with the Mr are all experiences that don't exist without days wishing my life away in work and sitting drinking more cups of tea than I ever thought humanly possible and trying to write these damn essays.
I know I'm rambling but I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't know when things are good if they've never been bad. Or as my thigh tattoo quite eloquently puts it: 'Smooth Seas make for Poor Sailors'.  So I'm just going to suck it up, make the best of the present and get through it to hopefully make myself a better future.

ANYWAY now that that's over with on with the actual OU blogging. DD101 is coming on a treat, really enjoying the course book, it's a surprisingly interesting subject and I've so far managed to avoid a total crash and burn on the TMA's to date (*touch wood*). The only thing that's been bothering me was the decision to go part time at first. Although it has been a great way to get used to studying I'm really not keen on the idea of sitting around twiddling my thumbs from October to February when my first level 2 module was due to start. This got me thinking about the idea of changing courses. As I've mentioned before I'm currently studying towards my Politics, Philosophy, Economics BA which was expected to take around 6 years, when I decided that I really want to step it up to full time I started looking a which courses DD101 counts towards which could be studied as a full time course, this took me on a trip around pretty much every social sciences prospectus the OU does before eventually bringing me back full circle to Combined Social Sciences (Politics) BA. Thinking about it now it seems like the obvious choice and to be honest there are a maximum of 2 modules different so it is 100 % the sensible obvious choice and once the decision was made I realised that to be fair politics was the main subject that attracted me to P,P,E in the first place so you would assume this would be an easy decision. It wasn't. Not even a little bit.
I spent a full 10 days of my life obsessively scribbling out module start dates, course planners, career paths, studying any 'Post Grad Employment' stats I could find and generally having a bit of a nervous breakdown about the whole thing. I finally gave up last Thursday and decided that seen as I already have a job (awful or not), and I'm quite frankly studying 90% for my own peace of mind and interest I might as well go where my interest is and in the end it seemed the most sensible choice.
A bit of a let down after this whole scenario was my phone call to Learner Support which I felt was a major life changing moment which essentially involved a (polite and helpful) woman at OU umming and ahhing about whether I could go full time, whether DD101 would count towards the new course (it's the same module?) and eventually saying that someone would have to phone me back in a few days.
All in all not the momentous phone call I'd built it up to be but then again when something's built up that much it's never quite going to live up. The moral of the story is done believe your brains hype kids.

And on that note I'm off to sob into my TMA04 notes.