Random Access

I like to cook a lot more than I like to eat. But usually I’m only cooking for myself, and leaving Andrew to fend for himself.

We’re like Jack Sprat and his wife; there’s practically nothing we both eat, and especially when I was working, we’d never eat at the same times of day anyway.

Last night, though, I felt like cooking even though I was too sick and headachey to be interested in eating. Plus I got, in my veg box (lovely magic veg box! i still haven’t gotten over the novelty of this food-turning-up-on-my-doorstep thing) one of the very few vegetables that Andrew will eat but I really don’t like. But he’ll only eat it in stew, where it tastes of gravy anyway.

So yesterday I bought some lamb mince -- I can’t even remember the last time I cooked with meat1 and since it was frozen and I didn’t have to touch it, just dump it out of the bag, it was fine with me -- and chopped up an onion and the swede (that’s the one I’m not keen on) and a few carrots and potatoes and it was just starting to bubble away on the stove when Andrew got in from work.

Domestic goddess, that’s me.

I ladled some of the stew into a bowl and brought it to him, then went to lie down and nurse my headache. From time to time, though, I heard the clinking of the spoon on the bowl as he ate, and I thought there are few things that make me as happy as that sound, evidence that someone is getting something out of my effort, my skill and work is giving nourishment to another person.

(And one who’s not too picky about what it tastes like, so there’s no pressure there!)

I drifted off to sleep quite happily then.

Ah, it’s that “comment and I’ll give you some interests from your profile list to write about” thing.

I got these from v15u4l_3rr0r ages ago, finally got around to finishing it.


Blue Plaques
A week or so ago, as the sounds of a Simon and Garfunkel album floated in from the next room, I heard “Homeward Bound” start during a lull in the conversation and so filled it with “There’s a blue plaque at the train station where he wrote this. It’s in Widnes.” I love that.

I love that if you type “blue plaques” into a little autocompleting google search bar like the one I have in my browser, all the suggested phrases have the name of a city after them: London, Manchester*, Bristol, Leeds, Oxford, Leicester, Belfast. How lovely, I imagined, to be planning a trip to Oxford or Belfast and want to know what blue plaques you might see there. It’s the sort of thing that gives me warm fuzzy feelings about humanity.

Of course the fact that a lot more people are probably searching for interracial midget three-way foot fetish porn is better left unnoticed when I’m feeling warm and fuzzy like this.

Most blue plaques commemorate people and places that seem dry and obscure to me, but there are a few that mean the concept of a blue plaque has a special place in my heart. Willie Rushton has a blue plaque in Mornington Crescent tube station. Sherlock Holmes has one, at 221b Baker Street, of course. But now that I think about this, the story about Paul Simon’s blue plaque doesn’t fit, and while there is some kind of commemoration there, it is not a blue plaque (I confirmed this in thisarticle, which is full of all kinds of pub-quiz level trivia on the subject of musical landmarks).

Though I didn’t mean to deceive, my story was believed. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect a blue plaque to be for, when they’re not pointing out the home of some long-dead architect or horticulturist, and that’s why I like them so much.


Curmudgeons
it has long been my professed ambition to become a curmudgeon when I grow up (sometimes specifically an old man from Yorkshire, which isn’t the same as being a curmudgeon, but it does overlap).

And yet sometimes i worry about sounding too much like one.

Especially if you stick me in a room with a television. I am hopeless at watching TV, after so long away; the commercials baffle and irritate me in equal measure (lots), and my friends’ tendency to watch the cacophony of music video channels (I hereby nominate “cacophony” as the collective noun for a group of music video channels) doesn’t help either; I hate almost all the songs, and I hate the things that come out of my mouth even more. Listening to myself makes me sound like your classic Old Person Who Doesn’t Get It, and I’m 27.

But they do all sound the same to me! And they’re all rubbish. I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is.

I think I’m already geared up for being a cranky old person because so much that’s modern zips over my head. I am antagonized by people trying to sell me tiny phones with no buttons that do everything but make your tea for you, when all I want is something with buttons I can push one at a time and with text I can easily read. I am buffeted by people for whom video games are a staple of life, when I stopped being interested in them around the time of Tetris and Oregon Trail. I listen to Alan Bennett while I’m knitting a jumper; I feel curmudgeonly to the point of being a chronological oddity already. And of course this makes me grumpy!

Eccentrics
One day when I was in high school my mom remarked that a friend of mine, who years later ended up being the first real love of my life, was lucky to have a driver’s license. “They don’t usually give them to... people like that,” she said. In subsequent conversation, uncomfortable on her part and thoroughly baffled on mine, I learned that she’d always assumed that this kid, one of the most intelligent people I know, must have been mentally disabled in some way. He was so strange she couldn’t think of any other way to explain his silliness, his cheerful nonconformity, his oddness... and perhaps oddest of all the fact that he clearly didn’t care what anybody thought of him at an age when most people’s lives are completely devoured by seeking the approval of their peers.

Thus started a fondness in me for eccentrics which continues to this day. There are people who are lucky enough to be not too crazy and probably smart enough to keep from being any more ostracized than they want to be. I think the appeal of the nonconformist, of being around people who are always challenging the way I think about things and the things I think I know, is one of the reasons I’ve ended up with so many people one might describe as “difficult” in some contexts or “on the autism spectrum” in others, but I find them no more difficult than anybody else and the rewards in some cases are a lot greater.

Etymolgy
I remember Robert Anton Wilson once, in an interview, saying that Chinese words are like fossilized poems, because of the way distinct ideas can be put together to inform, describe, or otherwise comment on the word we translate them to mean (though unfortunately the only example I can think of right now is the apocryphal one about the word for “trouble” being two women under one roof). It’s the same in German, another language known for mixing together words to make completely different concepts out of them (I remember being delighted to learn that the word my German textbook taught me for refrigerator was in fact just the word for “cool” and the word for “cupboard” or “closet” put together).

It’s often more subtle in English, but the incredible variety of sources from which we take English words has taught me a thing or two about all kinds of other languages about which otherwise I would know nothing. One of my proudest moments was winning an argument with Andrew about what the word calculus meant; he made a relatively small error (thinking “stones” instead of “pebbles” because he’d missed the diminutive marker) but I got it right through sheer brute force rote memorization, having read it in enough stories of Newton’s discovery.

Gonzo Journalism
I still haven’t read as much Hunter S. Thompson as I’d like, but I’ve read more than enough to learn the phrase gonzo journalism, and I immediately fell in love with it. In my case it will never involve anything like as much sex, drugs and rock-‘n’-roll, but the notion that a writer is inextricably linked to her subject and talking about yourself isn’t the bad thing they told you it was in school, where “I” was banned from your essays (though admittedly most people would’ve used it in such phrases as “I think” or “I guess” whereas in my case I’d always prefer “I stalked the mutant hedgehog through the unfamiliar urban landscape, decrepit now after so much neglect following the Killer App Wars” or something.

While my stories are always going to be more Garrison Keillor than Hunter Thompson, I like to think the style can owe something to the latter great man.

Tube Walks
I was a great admirer of tube walks, first from afar, when I never thought they’d have anything to do with me, but then the second time I came to the UK I flew to London (for reasons that escape me now) rather than Manchester and stayed with the lovely miss_newham back when she was still in Newham, I think, and watched the first episode ever of The Welsh Series (that’d be new Doctor Who to the rest of you but it has a different name in this house these days...) and the next day went on a Tube Walk!

Tube walks already loomed large in my legend, and they work like this. A bunch of people meet up at a tube station and walk to a tube station adjoining it. There is a huge list of all the stations in the order in which they are going to be done; it’s very impressive. It was dreamt up by a man of many LJs, but who was always known in this house by the one which showed his identification with this popular phenomenon, tubewalker. Though he has since bowed out of them himself, leaving the endeavor in the capable hands of Ewan (the navigator) and Jo (the blower of the official Tube Walk Whistle that starts and ends the walks, and also the one who writes down everybody who attended), tube walks go on.

They’re a great chance to see some bit of London or other, whether it be urban wasteland or the beautiful Epping Forest (I did that one, and it was ace). There are many tube walk regulars but always a few randoms (on my first one I became The Person Who’s Travelled the Farthest for a Tube Walk, a title I held until someone came to London from Australia) and always a different combination of people. The walk invariably ends with a pub and/or curry, as much a part of the tradition as the great transport network itself, and now that I’ve reminded myself how great they are I’m a bit sad that I haven’t done one in almost four years.

Juxtaposition
I know I added this to my list of interests for a specific reason, but of course I cannot now remember what it was. Still, I do know that I delight in strange juxtapositions of all kinds, like the time The Archers’ theme music played and then a friend asked me what I thought of S&M. My life includes many seemingly-contradictory bits, like everyone else’s I imagine. When the small, rural, conservative-in-all-ways community I grew up in is important to me, and my current crop of friends include a lot of bi kinky poly pervs (delete as appropriate), I may as well delight in the juxtapositions as be staggered or confused by them.



And, as is the way of these things, I shall be happy to ask you about some of your professed interests, if you want.


* On Manchester’s blue plaque website you can “nominate your hero or heroin.” Having personally no better way to choose a nominee, I’m going with Golden Brown, because I like the song.

“I love seeing with lines are resonating with people,” says a comment from one of the shirt’s creators.

i know mine.

Christmas.

I imagine there’s a normal progression from the giddy excitement of Christmas when you can count your age on your fingers* to the point where you feel grown up because you helped make the pies and were trusted with drying the good china after your mom washed it, to the point where you’re expected to buy presents for people you don’t like because you know they’re buying you things you don’t like.

But the normal progression gets kind of stalled when your brother dies just before you turn 24 and you move away just after. Now Christmas is fraught with landmines just under the surface of everything said and done, the joy of nostalgic itches that are scratched by everything being just the same as it always is; I can recite the food on the dinner table, the particular cheap wine, the candy and the plates it’ll be on, the sorts of clothes we’ll wear and the conversations we’ll have.

And yet however loud my aunt and cousins are, they are all but drowned out of the heavy silence of my brother not being there. On this day where everybody should be where they belong, you can’t fool yourself that he’s just somewhere else, at work or with his friends, as I do most of the rest of the year -- a fraud so easy my subconscious pulls it off without me noticing, most of the time.

But not at Christmas.

Like everyone else, the best I can do is enjoy what I have, when I can, but...

My other favorite comment there is the guy who says I keep adding to it in my head: “chocolate cake” “growing up” “Veteran’s Day with a WW2 vet at home eager to tell his hair-raising tales while a brother is in Afghanistan”.

I’d add...

Airports.

Old hymns.

Being the first one to roll over and go to sleep.

Laundromats.

Babies.

It is complicated.



* I don’t know if I have ever been as happy as I was the year there was a box under the tree that seemed as big as I was, and it had my name on it. No afternoon nap was taken that year! I tried my best but I couldn’t lay still for anything. When you’re that age size does matter, and I believed that I must have been very good indeed that year.

The contents of the box ended up being pretty great -- a dollhouse my grandpa had made for me, with little people and little furniture they’d bought and little rugs my grandma had crocheted -- but nowhere near as great as the anticipation, the impossibility of imagining what could be in that box.

Anyway, though I remember marvelling at the tiny faucets on the tiny sink, and envying the tiny people their patio furniture, but I was never really a doll person.

I bought some Christmas cards today! Would you like one? (Even if you think I have your address, I probably don’t. But I just found, again, my lesbian address book and am keen to have things to put in it so I have more reasons to look at it.)


Poll #1483980 The most wonderful time of the year
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 14

Name?

Address?

Anything else?

Last night I dreamed I went back to college. I dreamed my first class, French, in real time it seemed. After that I had math, a class about India, and...something else. I forgot it when I woke up but it sounded good. I’d even made a couple of friends already, Ross and Adrian.

It was in incredibly detailed dream, much more so than mine usually are, and while some of the details actually matched my old university (which I dreamed I’d gone back to), a lot of them didn’t but were still just as vivid and caused me no problems in the dream.

I woke up feeling really good.

I’ve had dreams before about going back to university and they’ve all been about not knowing where or when my classes are, feeling out of place. They were straightforward anxiety dreams. This couldn’t have been more different.

My hysterics last night were triggered by, though not really about, Andrew’s dad visiting when I was lying down, headachy and sore-throated and otherwise miserable. He ate a takeaway and told Andrew that me having a job would do me a world of good, and Andrew came in to get a cuddle from me afterwards and instead I got all wibbly about how I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing by not looking for jobs now.

In a post I deleted yesterday I wrote that I was suffering the effects of not having a job or school or anything to do with myself lately, anything I could point to and say “That’s it, that’s what I’m doing. That’s where I’m trying to get to.”

Instead of being able to give Andrew his hug, I started crying and couldn’t stop for what felt like the longest time.

By the end of it I wanted to chuck my meds and start applying for jobs. I didn’t get too excited about it just then, knowing not to trust myself when I was in such a state. But I woke up remembering all the good and exciting things from, really, the last period in my life in which I was successful and happy, in which I thought I could do things.

I know this is crazy but it almost feels like the illness I’ve had these last six months has broken like a fever. Like it washed away in those floods of tears. I know that’s not how these things work. I’ve still got a headache and nothing is objectively better than it was yesterday. But damn.

Thanksgiving is the last Thursday of November. They tell you it’s about Pilgrims and shit but really it’s about a four-day weekend and eating enough food to last you a week, and passing out from the tryptophans in front of a football game on TV.

I have a hankering to introduce my British friends to this, and am already wondering if I can make pumpkin pie and stuffing from scratch (and I’ve never cooked a turkey! I won’t even be eating the damn turkey! I have the fear).

Are any of you interested in coming around on the last weekend of November for this sort of thing? I’m only sad I can’t provide the football game.

How wonderful and terrible, to have someone there to rest your head against when you are crying so much that even peeing seems hard work.

To have someone there, even in this supposedly-private time, to have someone so thoroughly a part of your life that there seems no line where one ends and the other begins....

Usually I find this distasteful.

He talks about all the past and all the future, and how I am not alone in it because we are entangled together like fibers in a rope, like quantum entities that, the physicists tell me, once in contact are forever after connected. Somehow.

Usually I find this stifling, or terrifying, his certain proclamations about always and forever. I’ve always been honest about it; it’s nothing to do with him, I’m just not a “forever” kind of girl.

I clench a tear-sodden tissue in my fist and think This is what it is to be married.

For once I don’t resent the heavy machinery because right now I see what it is good for. It is great and terrible, huge and sturdy, in all the good and bad ways.

Oh I forgot about the other fantastic thing that happened yesterday.

If you’re me and you’ve got my friends, you’ll have to deal with all of them snickering when you say you’re sweet and innocent, but clearly they believe you on some level because for the most part they’re terribly discreet about their pervertedness.

At least when I’m around. I can tell, it’s like the way I used to watch Monty Python before I moved here and could sense the jokes and references I figured I’d never get. I had no idea what they could be, but I knew where there were.

So I find it useful, from time to time, to reassure them that it’s not that I’m disgusted or horrified by their kinks, or even made particularly uncomfortable (at least about the ones I know about!). It’s assumed that most people who aren’t doing kinky things (out of a lack of desire, rather than a lack of opportunity) don’t want anything to do with them. And while I am in favor of this assumption as the general rule, I think I am a special snowflake.

In other words, I get the impression that kinky sex is like Marmite; it’s supposed to be one of those things you either love or hate. And I’m actually pretty indifferent to Marmite. I mean, it’s all right but a bit salty for my tastes...

I’ll not stretch the metaphor any further.

Anyway, in my fuzzy-brained (this was pre-nap) attempts to explain to tartful_dodger that while I was demonstrably not kinky, I wasn’t at all perturbed by the possibility of being around people and things that are. “It’s just that...” I said, starting a sentence I couldn’t finish.

“You’re thinking ‘oh for fuck’s sake, I could’ve had my orgasm and been back by now’?” he finished, and I laughed so hard I would’ve fallen over if I hadn’t been lying down.

It’s nice to have friends who understand you. Especially when you don’t yourself.

Having all but fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation yesterday afternoon, I found myself sent upstairs, to lie on top of the covers of someone else’s bed, light streaming in from the hallway, and best of all the sounds of talking and laughing drifting up to me.

It reminded me somehow of being young and having to take naps when I was at my grandparents’ house; all the adults would still be bustling around, eating and drinking and talking and enjoying themselves, and here I was just supposed to sleep. Even on Christmas Eve, which was impossible (especially the year I had a box waiting for me under the tree which was almost as big as I was (and turned out to be a dollhouse my grandpa had made for me himself)).

Of course on those occasions no one was playing Magic or doing the happy-prospector dance to “Cotton Eye Joe” when the video came on TV, but an important step towards happiness is recognizing isomorphisms, the similarities that matter can be clothed in differences that are very very different indeed.

Some would find it hilarious that the sense of community I used to get from a rural upbringing and going to church has been replaced by a group for bisexuals, or that I feel well-taken-care-of, small but perfectly formed, in a houseful of people where I am second-oldest at the time. But there’s a feeling to such things; I know it’s there because I was lucky enough to grow up with a lot of it (too much, really) and that’s made me appreciate it now when I find it, however unexpectedly.

It’s all shinydan‘s fault.

I got from William Windsor (goat) to Nils Olav the penguin knight of Norway who lives in Edinburgh, to a skateboarding duck.

I have never been so confused in all my life.

It doesn’t help that Andrew’s so nonchalant about this. Andrew says he knows all about the skateboarding duck. “it’s one of the clips they show on TV, like the dog who says ‘sausages.’ ”

Me: “There’s a dog who says ‘sausages’?”

Andrew: “Yeah. It’s what they put on TV before they had X Factor.”

I love my friends. When I asked rosamicula what I should have for lunch, she said “Baked swan’s breast on a bed of lark’s tongues, served to you by your favourite American footballers, wearing nothing but those pussy-looking helmets.”

My reaction to this is delightfully ambivalent, not just because I’m mostly vegetarian these days but also because American football made me very happy last night, even if it is pussy-looking (even Andrew, who hates all sports, hates American sports particularly and calls this one “ponce rugby” even though I don’t think there’s much that he detests more than rugby after having had to play it at school).

Andrew very sweetly phoned me up last night to say I could stay with shinydan long enough to watch the Vikings-Packers game, which I had totally forgotten about, and while we couldn’t watch it we listened to it on the radio.

There’s nothing better than cackling with glee as your team beats your boyfriend’s team in Lambeau Field with their old quarterback who’s defected to your team. It is a sublime delight, better than eating any forbidden bird.

I walked home last night, surprisingly quickly until I realized I was angry.

It’s uncommon enough for me that it’d snuck up unexpectedly.

I was angry at the guy who’d walked into the street in front of me as I cycled along, minding my own business. I had no time to react and crashed into him full-tilt, ending up sitting in the middle of the (thankfully very quiet) road, aggravating myself by bursting into tears so that the man’s scary-sounding friend helped me up and told me not to cry because it was the other guy’s fault, walking in the road. His friend stood on the sidewalk now, wincing and holding his head, shouting at me that I shouldn’t have been wearing a helmet (!).

I was angry at the guy in the phone shop, who asked me the same questions repeatedly, as if he didn’t believe my answers on anything as innocuous as my address, and got increasingly personal and accusatory until he asked me what my job title was and I had to say “I... don’t have a job at the moment” so he wrote down housewife. And then told me i’d need to have a hundred-quid deposit as well. I took back the credit card I’d offered him and walked out of the shop.

Yet I need a new phone. I get water in my shoes when it rains. I have increasingly few pairs of trousers that I can squeeze my bloated ass and thighs into, thanks to the medication making me gain weight. I hate shopping so much I put it off until I get to this state, desperate and... oh yeah, not bringing any money in.

I walked home fantasizing about maxing out the credit cards, just buying everything I wanted or needed and saying to hell with it, with the stress of crowds and predatory sales assistants who see me as another commission to top up their paltry salaries, the whole ugly consumerist hydra.

I’ve even started buying food online to avoid the shopping.

I thought of the LJ entry I quoted a couple of days ago: “Credit sells you the future today, but it’s at the expense of right now,” and since I’m not the lovely Taoist he is, I didn’t think of the rest of his sentence -- “... but it’s at the expense of right now, and of the pleasure of just being who you are, and where you are, and what you are, when the whole culture in which you live does nothing but daydream about who they’re going to be when they grow up.” I just got stuck on that beginning, credit sells you the future today at the expense of right now, and I thought well hell, I fucking hate the right now. Bring on the goddam future! I hate who I am and where I am and what I am.

Not for a split second did I seriously entertain the notion of buying things willy-nilly, not least because I share these credit cards with someone else and he’s done nothing to deserve more debt. But I also quickly recognized this as the closest I have ever gotten to self-harm.

I’m a total wuss for pain so could never imagine taking a knife to my arms, and I’ve always been both bewildered and grateful that my strands of depression have never included the slightest hint of self-injury or suicidal ideas. Yet there are (as I learned through the sad experience of watching people I loved do this to themselves) more subtle methods of self-harm too, and this is one that’s just tried to sink its fangs into me: bringing about one’s own deliberate financial ruin.

The notion made me shiver and walk a little faster. I’d never heard of a thing like that, but just then it sounded not just worryingly plausible, but worryingly tantalizing.

I watched (metaphorically, actually read online and even listened to on Radio 4) the Large Hadron Collider’s switch-on with as much interest as its PR could’ve hoped for, happy to play along with the rock-star status they were trying to give it.

It made such an impression on me that I even remember the date, September 10, 2008.

I remember because a few days after that, a lot of things in my life seemed to go badly really fast. And they went bad for the LHC at almost exactly the same time; there was a coolant leak and a problem with some of the all-important magnets that meant everything ground to a halt before it’d even gotten started.

It wasn’t long before the Blogahedron learned that it would be a year before things were up and running again at the LHC. I was in agony. A year seemed an impossibly long time.

And yet now here we are, a bit more than a year later, and I stumbled upon the wonderful news that the beam is back and actually managed to think “Ooh, already?”

It’s been a busy year. Long and strange, and with its undeniable ugly bits, but when I look at my life now and think about what it was like a year ago, I’m grateful to be where I am and wouldn’t go back there for all the money there is.

My life undoubtedly has a long way to go. Indeed it feels right now like I’m at a standstill: no job, no homework, nowhere I can point to and say “that’s what I’m aiming for.” When both your husband and your boyfriend just look at you sometimes and say “I wish I could do whatever it is you need to make you happy right now” and you can only shrug in response, you can’t say things are, well, zooming along near the speed of light.

But they aren’t doing that in the LHC yet either. The beams that have happened so far didn’t even go all the way around the circle, and even when they do it will be over a period of months at least that the speeds are increased to those that make the LHC the biggest particle accelerator in the world. And in my life too there has been noticeable progress over the past couple of months, which I have to remember when it seems like I’ve gone nowhere, or even backwards.

I may not have as clear a plan for the future as the LHC does, but I have a plan for today and a guess at tomorrow and that’s enough for now.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to steal the idea from ruudboy.

ve been exploring the world of Manchesters a bit today. It turns out that Manchester, South Dakota is coming like a ghost town following Tornado in 2003 (nb don’t bother reading the text on that page, but look at the cool pictures). Also, Manchester, Maryland has a website that doesn’t work properly and in Massachusetts there’s a Manchester-by-the-Sea! I want to go on a road trip visiting all the Manchesters in the USA, perhaps writing a book about them.

When I saw the brown envelope I was hoping for something more about the ESA (benefits for people who are too ill to work, not anything to do with the European Space Agency as one of my friends wishes it was). I briefly allowed myself to hope that it was some progress on the farce of my National Insurance number.

Then I tore open the envelope and saw a letter of such cold formality it made me glad I'd turned the heat on as I'd walked into the kitchen to see what had fallen through the letterbox this morning. "I am writing to confirm that your employment...blah blah blah... has been terminated with effect from 6th October."

Well it's a good thing they finally got my address changd. Just in time for this. I have had no letters from them since I moved in March, since all my attempts to get the address changed on my records were falling on deaf ears until I missed a meeting with my boss a couple of weeks ago and she called to ask me why; I knew nothing about it because I'd never gotten the bloody letter. I've had no payslips for six months. No nothing. Until this.

"Salaries and Wages have been advised accordingly... yeah, I bet they bloody have. I hope they've been advised about all the holiday time I didn't use!

"We thank you for your hard work and wish you luck with your future plans." Bollocks. You have no idea about my hard work. I don't even know who you are, HR person who couldn't even be bothered pretending, or getting someone else to pretend, that you signed this letter. (Which is saying something because I did know some of the HR people all too intimately when they tried to give me grief about starting this job in the first place thanks to Occupational Health people who decided I was too disabled to do it.)

My hard work. God. I've never worked so hard as I did some days in this job. Working in a psychiatric ward is not like most people would have it believe; we've come some way from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But it's a demanding job, not often physically but always mentally and, surprisingly often, emotionally. And as with anything else, it's not just the job but the co-workers, the administration cocking things up... and working as part of the government has certainly shown to me new and exciting ways that things can be cocked up.

But it was a job I'd had for more than two years even before I spent the last five months of it off sick, the longest I've done anything. I had my first paid sick days and paid holidays with this job, it felt in many ways like my first Proper Grown Up job. And now it's gone, poof. It's not my job now. I don't have a job. And I haven't, for almost two weeks. Without me even being aware of it.

And though I knew this was coming -- I was after all on a 12-month contract that started the fifth of October last year (which I remember only because it was Andrew's birthday) -- it's still unnerved me a bit. It's the first time I've been really unemployed (rather than genuinely between jobs) since I started working when I moved here in 2006.

And it's odd that I should've been thinking of the benefits stuff when I saw that (clearly government-issue) envelope this morning. The combination of sisyphean frustration in attempting to sort out benefits and the new meds that don't seem to have the paralytic side-effects the old ones did has left me in some ways really craving a new job. Just a little one, somethign part-time and low-stress...

If I had such a job I think I'd be ready to get back to it now but having to find one first complicates things enormously for me, jobhunting being a thing that gave me panic attacks even before I realized what panic attacks were.

Still, I am not the person I was when I was last jobhunting, and while the months off sick and mind-altering drugs might not indicate that I'm better able to deal with things than I was then, I am feeling crazily optimistic in some ways.

But I'm aware of the craziness, and the emotional effect of the letter I got this morning, totally unexpectedly, so I'm not going to commit myself to anything just now.

I'm all right. Plodding along. Look, here I've hung up laundry and made myself delicious lunch (enchiladas!) and I'm dressed. Mostly. I've writen things on the whiteboard shopping list and opened all the windows to let in the gift of late autumn sun and a breeze that smells so good you can almost taste it.

I'm trying to ignore how tired I've been most of the day. I'm trying again to walk the balance between forcing myself to do things because I know I'll feel better if I do, and doing too much and having to collapse into bed.


I like to think I'm in my Swiss-patent-clerk phase.

But even then, old Alber was writing brilliant scienific papers in his spare time.

The history of great scientific figures can be enough to make one despair. Newton had a year off from college because of the plague. What did he do? Invented calculus. I couldn't even learn calculus in a year, much less think it all up. Alfred Wallce, who spurned Darwin into finally publishing his theory of evolution, did so by thinking up pretty much the same theory, while he was lying around in Indonesia becasue he was ill with malaria. I've never had malaria but I'm sure I'd just have been wallowing in self-pity. I'm insufferable even when I have a cold.

Wikipedia tells me "Before Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty, a contest was held amongst Hong Kong residents to help choose a flag for post-colonial Hong Kong, with more than 7,000 design submissions."

Yesterday I saw a picture of one of those failed submissions being displayed in Hong Kong as a piece of art (part of the fantastic One Degree of Separation exhibit, which I cannot recommend highly enough, going on now at the Chinese Arts Centre). The accompanying text said that the artist saw all the flag designs that were not chosen as future paths that Hong Kong did not take.

Closer to home I'm seeing kaleidoscopic reactions, from wistfulness to melancholy to outright mourning, for futures that will never be. Autumn seems a good time for it.

Here's something else for my arsenal to fight procrastination: when inspiration or guilt-tripping myself don't work, there's always deterrence by fear and dread.

When W H Auden once found [T.S.Eliot] playing patience and asked him why he seemed to relish it, he reflected gravely and then replied, "Well, I suppose it's the nearest thing to being dead."

I think if he'd been alive in the computer age he'd have thought the same thing about spider solitaire and minesweeper. I've been thinking about this the rest of the day, as I've started playing my two favorites, mah-jongg and SameGNOME.

I used to work with someone who was doing a course on social work and psychology and something like that. Once I found a photocopied article on procrastination that she'd left lying around, which I read with enormous interest as it has always been my ruination. I found it a lot more interesting and helpful than pretty much anything else I've ever heard or read on the subject, though of course now I don't remember a lot of it, or the title, or who wrote it.

But one thing I remember well, and remembered again just now as I stepped over the overturned laundry basket, half-filled yesterday, kicked over last night, and neglected ever since, that one of the big things procrastination is about is not wanting to do stuff.

As with most useful information I've found, it sounds glaringly obvious but was such an epiphany to me at the time I read it that it's stuck with me even when everything else has receded into the mists of my poor, addled brain. Just recognizing how much I don't want to do things, even fun things a bafflingly large amount of the time, doesn't make any of those things magically go away but it does make those hurdles easier to cope with than they are when the reasons for them being there are entirely mysterious to me.


'Cause I don't wanna do what I don't wanna do
I'm Queen Refusenik.



I am obsessed with this song.

This is how music should be, something you hear on the radio when you're doing something else (knitting a scarf, in my case), that pulls you out of yourself and makes you pay attention.

And this is how music is now; as soon as the song was over I managed to catch the title of it and look it up on Spotify. (Here it is. If you don't have Spotify, the video is of course on YouTube, though if you want my advice you should watch it with your eyes closed because it looks ridiculous; the song's worth it though.) And I played it about three times in a row, liking it more each time.

Immediately I liked the disconnect between the sound of the music and the content of the lyrics; I'm a sucker for this kind of thing (consider the example of classic TMBG songs like "They'll Need a Crane" and "Don't Let's Start," probably the most danceable song ever to contain lyrics like "No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful. Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.") The driving beat of the straightforward instrumentation, and the strong vocal performance, kesps the song from sounding as stereotypically emo as the lyrics might suggest if you just read them on their own.

Got no place to be seen
I’m not part of a scene
I'm a genius loser

And the chorus struck me, stuck with me, "Oh my god if I was somebody you'd be kissing my ass right now." Such a strange and irresistible combination of confidence and despair, swagger and low self-esteem. It sounded, actually, a lot like me at times: trying to climb up out of the pit my all-but-friendless childhood put me in by means of a sort of fake-it-'til-you-make-it strategy to making myself be stronger and better. Someone I would like more. And yet this isn't that, because there's that horrible if. If I was somebody.

If I had a new job.

If I felt well again.

If I got out like I'd wanted to today.

If I'd taken a shower and cleaned the house and eaten better.

Oh my god if I was somebody I'd be doing it all just fine.

And yet, look at her. She's touring the country and this song is played on Radio 2, that's where I heard it. She's got videos and a website and a great voice. I trust that she's having a good time with all this. Her name is Nerina Pallot, and people like me who've never met her and don't know anything about her really have a fondness for her because of this song.

And I'm fond of me too. Fond of all the good people who are so kind to me; I want them to be right about the sort of person i am, the degree to which I am worth being friends with. I want to be happy with what I've got, which is so much really, rather than grumpy about what I don't, which is almost entirely transitory anyway.


No point in worrying if my day's a disaster
Inside my little head I’m happy ever after
Yes I am