Random Access

Yesterday when I was in the comic shop picking up Andrew’s comics and harrassing the guy who works in the comic shop, as is my wont, he suddenly asked me a very difficult question.

“Does Andrew like Green Lantern better, or Green Arrow?”

“Uh... ” I felt like I was on The Newlywed Game! “I have no idea! Green Lantern? Maybe?” He does talk about Green Lantern a lot more...

The guy, it turns out, was not asking me in preparation for a career as a lame quiz-show host. He said “Okay, then I’ll give him that cover...” and wandered over to exchange one of the comics in Andrew’s pile for one on the shelves. I was relieved, thinking that even if I was wrong the stakes wouldn’t be too high. Andrew’s not the kind of nerd who bothers about variant covers. I got to choose most of the Final Crisis ones myself (it’s a lot easier for me to be in the comics shop on Thursdays than it is for him, even when I’m working) though then it was easy: I usually went for the one with the less breastular cover.

I just remembered to ask him, though, and it turns out I did choose right; he likes Green Lantern more than Green Arrow, and he only seemed annoyed that I did not find this as obvious as he did. I protested that I didn’t know anything about them but then realized I know rather a lot: one is the liberal Democrat hippie of the comics world, that shoots people with arrows that aren’t always just real arrows but might have fire or little fists on them to punch people; the other’s something to do with the Guardians of the Universe (not Galaxy, as I first thought, that’s another comic... unless I have them backwards again) who gets his power from a ring when he says an oath that Andrew wanted to use as the vows in our wedding.

Not bad, for someone who thinks she doesn’t know anything! Or do I mean, not good?

Also, I couldn’t decide whether to be proud of myself or terrified when Dan was trying to think of the name of one of the Green Lanterns and while I nearly said the name of one of the Flashes I stopped in time and even managed to dredge up from my deepest subconscious a name that I thought might be that of a Green Lantern and hesitantly suggested it though I had no idea how many Green Lanterns there are or which this was:

“Is it Hal Jordan?” I asked.

“Yes!” he said excitedly.

I still can’t decide if I’m impressive or a total loser for knowing anything about Green Lantern though, but I think it’s pretty good for someone who doesn’t really read superhero comics, ever.

Edit: You can show your support for your Green of choice (these two, among many others) in drjon's poll here! Inspired by this entry, aww. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, also a bit terrified when I remember how many people are actually reading the nonsense I write...

“You - will - give - me - a - blow - job!” Andrew said, in a Dalek voice like the Daleks on the Doctor Who audio adventure he’s listening to.

“Daleks would never say that,” I replied mildly.

“It’s not a Dalek!” he said. “You silly Holly. It’s a Cyberman!”

“They don’t say that either, I’m sure,” I said.

“How do you know? Cybermen could want blowjobs!”

“They’d get all rusty!” I said. And then I had to stop thinking about this.

Win: I read the departures board and found the platform for my train with a lot less squinting than before.

Lose: I thought the title of a book I saw on the couch at greyeyedeve‘s was OCTOPUS CIRCLE when in fact it said VICIOUS CIRCLE.

it was a bit of a weird font. But still!

I’d much rather read a book called Octopus Circle, though.

I have one of those page-a-day calendars that says it’s about “Forgotten English,” a Christmas present from lostpositive. At the bottom of today’s page it says

In The English Husbandman (1635), Gervase Markham advised, “In this month of July, eschew all wanton bed-sports.”

If they followed this advice, a lot of my friends would suddenly have a lot more free time...

Ever since I stopped thinking of depression as a thing that couldn’t happen to me and started to hear and see all about it in my group of friends and acquaintances and eventually even my family (I think the meds would’ve done my mom some good even before my brother died but that was the event that got her to start taking them), I have been amazed by how widespread depression has turned out to be and I have been curious about why that should be.

Is it just that we have higher awareness, better diagnosis and in some cases at least less stigma than used to surround mental illness (I know there’s still a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way from “Mother’s Little Helper”)? Is it the ennui of safe suburban life? Is it Big Pharma pushing the pills? Is it that we’ve become weak little wusses unable to cope stoically as previous generations did... or is it just that we’ve realized they weren’t coping perfectly either, they were just unable to do anything about it?

In the unsatisfying way of these things, it’s sure to be all of these and many more factors as well.

I just read about another piece of this puzzle that I find a very intriguing possibility. Of course I’m not sure how valid it is, but it seems to resonate with my own experience. It’s the idea that depression could have evolved as a way of getting people to let go of unreasonable goals.

Since my depression turned up, as far as I can tell, halfway through a college career that wasn’t going where I wanted it to (it hardly could, since I didn’t know where I wanted to go!), I read this with interest.

Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.

It goes on to describe a study that seems to back this up and also indicates that young people who could disengage from unattainable goals were less likely to suffer from severe depression later in life.

Of course the trick then is to figure out which goals are unattainable. I’ve always been lacking in confidence in te areas of knowing what I want and prioritizing what makes me happy, and while I’m impressed that evolution might make me sad that things are wrong, it is silent on the subject of what I should do to improve things.

When I was in ninth grade I finally, after years of pleading, wheedling and cajoling, convinced my parents that they should let me play basketball. My parents lived in terror of me getting hurt playing sports, always overprotective because of my eyes. But since it’d taken me so long to convince them, the other girls had a two-year head start on me and thus had a lot of skills and knew a lot of plays I couldn’t catch up on. Plus the coach was blatantly kind to her favorites and hard on everyone else and I was in the unfavored group (something I was used to throughout school, but familiarity never made it much more fun).

I was quickly miserable, and found myself pleading just as adamantly to be allowed to quit the thing I’d worked so hard to get, after just a few weeks. My mom wasn’t having any of it; we don’t quit in this house, she said. I didn’t know that, but then I’d never gotten to do anything I might have wanted to quit until that point (except piano lessons but they were like a force of nature, been there since I was six and I hardly knew any other life without them).

Somehow she relented eventually but only when I agreed to sign up for knowledge bowl, a thing where teams of kids have to answer questions I’d been involved with in junior high and absolutely loathed (the other kids would always buzz in right away and then look to me for the answers, figuring I was magic and knew everything because they thought I was just so smart). I’d had no intention of joining now that I was in high school but I’d have done anything to get out of basketball, away from the wary looks of the skinny girls who got quiet when I came near and the barking sadistic coach.

I was the only kid in my whole grade that year, on teams of boys two and three years older than me who were all friends and probably wondered what I was doing there as much as I did. But the knowledge bowl leader found out I was good at this and then I was stuck with it all four years, going to regionals the next year (a first for our tiny ridiculous school) and making it all the way to the state competition the two years after that, spending a couple of day-s away at a fancy resort in Brainerd (and still I hated it).

All that because I couldn’t quit basketball, because we don’t quit in this house. And yes this is a relatively mild example but it really made an impression on me. Increasing my ostracism in high school is hardly the worst thing that could’ve happened to me but the idea of persisting at things that are supposed to be good even when they weren’t, that probably isn’t doing me any favors.

Dr Nesse believes that persistence is a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America—the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals, which then can lead to depression.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but it is one worth considering.

I don’t know what the science is going to say about this but personally I think there’s something damaging about this culture of pressing on no matter what the cost. Many people do achieve goals that way, but for many more (and ones that are less likely to have inspiring films made about them) the cost ends up being too high.

It’s such a tricky balance, I find it so hard to know when it’s best to fight through it and when it’s best to cut my losses and run. I worry that I’m drawn to the path of least resistance too, so I am likely to overcompensate and be too hard on myself sometimes because I’m worried about being a wuss. That probably isn’t helping me “follow my bliss” either, or indeed even find out what it is.

Thinking about this just gets my brain tangled up, and it’s not going to find any easy resolutions on this subject. So I think it’s time for a pot of tea instead.

I utterly adore Radcliffe & Maconie’s “themed” radio shows. There was Onion Tuesday with songs about onions, and I think there was Underwater Wednesday or something.

This week, because their live guests are the excellent Duckworth-Lewis Method (I could listen to their song “Age of Revolution” all day long), they did Test Match Monday.

And while I immediately got why they played Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” as their opening song (though it’s only been a few weeks since a TV program taught me why it’s called the Ashes), some of the other ones have been much more challenging! Only three songs later did I figure out why they played “Ghetto Child.”

Edit: I feel even more smug about knowing that since Andrew didn’t until I reminded him. He got back at me by asking if they’d played anytihng by Buddy Holly.

Last night we watched the Life on Earth with the monkeys -- it’s Andrew’s favorite -- and while I might prefer the one with the jeffylishes, this onedoes have one of my favorite moments in the whole series. It’s where David Attenborough sits in the grass with a group of gorillas and all but whispers into the camera.

He has a lot of admiration in his voice and at least a little awe when he talks about the connection he feels when he is face-to-face with the gorillas. The fact that he keeps his voice down in their presence speaks far more loudly than even his moving words; it’s as if he expects he could be overheard, in a way he doesn’t when he’s on camera with a bird or a tarantula or whatever.

He certainly speaks well of the gorillas, portraying them as placid, sociable creatures who spend most of their time grooming and playing. Either Sir Attenborough is a bit envious of their situation or he’s good enough at takling about it that he’s just able to make me envious.

Watching them wrestle and reach out to grab some food (celery, Andrew says they eat wild celery and this is proof that it doesn’t have “negative calories” because they get huge!), it suddenly struck me that they have every reason to look as content as they do.

They don’t have to worry about health insurance or how they’re going to pay for their kids to go to college or what’s wrong with their iPod. As far as we can tell they don’t care if there’s a god, they don’t write poetry or send a gorilla to the Moon (though I’m sure that last has been done in the kinds of comics Andrew reads).

Now I like poetry and I like that people have been to the Moon. But me personally, I’m no more likely to write a good poem than I am to go to the Moon so I think I could be a lot better off if I could just sit in the grass with all the other gorillas and eat celery and to have that be enough.

It’s funny; the first person I fell in love with let me go because, he said, he couldn’t see himself with anyone less ambitious than he was. And since I was well in the grasp of undiagnosed depression at that point, there were slugs who had more sense of accomplishment than I did at that point. To lose something good in my life because of something that was already bad just seemed devastating. Ambition was and is a sore spot for me. Yet here I am pushing away the oft-cited What Separates Us From The Animals, all this distinctly-human stuff I was extolling last time?

Oh I’m sure it’s just a phase. Don’t worry. It’s all a phase, right? I don’t make sense even to myself, I’m contradictory. All I know is when I saw the life these gorillas lead, and then I thought about citalopram and sick notes and sleeping too much and not enough simultaneously, somehow, and the kitchen being a mess and having failed out of college and both my OU courses...

And I looked back at the gorillas and I thought “You lucky bastards.”

Then we watched this other episode about frogs, right. And it said there’s this kind of frog, unless it’s a toad, but I think it was a frog, that lives in the desert in Australia. When it’s dry, i.e. most of the time being as how this is the desert, these frogs -- or toads -- bury themselves in the dirt. It looks like any other patch of dirt most of the time but when it rains it’s like a little lake and all these frogs wake up and do all their froggy things, especially breed. And after a only few days the water dries up and all the frogs burrow back into the mud, which soon dries out to the same kind of parched earth you get everywhere else in thes, desert, there to stay for perhaps five years until it rains again.

Being that kind of frog, needless to say, would drive me bonkers. Just thinking about that kind of frog drives me bonkers all by itself. Imagine being one of those tadpoles, fresh into the miracle of life, the wondrous beauty of this planet we call home, and after a couple of days you have to dive into the dirt and that’s it for years. Then you come out and make more babies that are doomed to the same fate! It makes me want to tear my hair out.

I know it’s no good asking why of evolution. I know it doesn’t need a why, I know if it can it will. But still! A few days every five years! I’m sure prisoners get better than that. At least they don’t spend the rest of the time buried in the desert. They can’t interact much with their ecosystem -- the frogs, I mean, not the prisoners, though I suppose they don’t react much with their ecosystem either -- inasmuch as there is anything to interact with even during the minuscule rainy season.

The frogs, by all reports, don’t care about this. I didn’t get my haircut like I intended to today. I haven’t even done the dishes. The frogs don’t care about that either. Tomorrow I have a GP appointment, counselling, and an occupational health assessment. I don’t expect any of them to be able to tell if i care about this too much or not enough. And the frogs are remaining silent on that subject too.

I wrote this very early Sunday morning, couldn’t post it until now. I’m feeling a bit better, though it’s all still true I probably wouldn’t have had to need to write it if Saturday hadn’t been such a bad day to be inside my head.

I haven’t worked for a month. Or more now. Six weeks? I’m not sure. It feels like forever. It really does. Sometimes I could forget I have a job at all, other than going to the doctor every couple of weeks.

The rest of the time, when I’m not at work, what am I doing? I’m watching a lot of DVDs. I got through the last season of CSI that a a co-worker lent me months ago (I’m borrowing them one at a time; just finished the fourth). I’m making a good dent in The West Wing ones...I think I must have watched a season’s worth in the last couple of days. I’m keeping up with the laundry -- really proud of that, considering how much I usually hate it; like so many things it’s not so bad when you keep on top of it -- and I’m doing okay with the dishes -- which I also hate, come to think of it, and which are also much more bearable when you can stay on top of the chore -- and I’ve been cooking and stuff, though my bizarre avoidance of food shopping continues, compelling me to be more creative while ending up with less interesting meals.

Beyond this day-to-day housewifery stuff, I’ve impressed myself with tidying up the bookcases, sorting out the cupboard under the stairs, making some progress in the spare room, vacuuming -- for the first time since we moved, partly because I couldn’t get the vacuum to work properly the first, last, time I tried it, partly because there was and always has been so much stuff on the floor that vacuuming was a ludicrous prospect. So yeah, I’m pretty proud of all that. My feet still cringe when I get out of bed in the morning and then seem surprised to be stepping on nice flat carpet rather than lumpy piles of clothes, books, junk, yarn, knitting needles, pens, and who knows what else.

Okay, so the knitting needles and yarn are still on the floor. I haven’t found a better place for them yet. So much of this tidying lark is a mental exercise. Especially when it’s still unpacking rather than normal tidying in a lot of cases. Putting things where they belong is easy. Finding a place for them to belong can be very difficult.

And what about me: where do I belong? That’s what’s preoccupying me lately. I suppose objectively I would say that my anxiety is better in the last week or so but my depression’s worse. Subjectively I am crushed, panicky, despairing, all but catatonic some times, almost all over the one thing, which cannot be expressed without sounding stupid so here it is: WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE? Well, not so much with the question as the answer: Nothing. Nothing!

Knowing that feelings of meaninglessness and worthlessness are common symptoms of depression doesn’t really help very much. I know that, and I also know I’ve been dissatisfied with my life since I started doing badly in college. And there are legitimate reasons for that, to write it all off as an illness would be to denigrate one of the crazy, stupid, hubristic, ridiculous things that makes humans great: our desire to be better than we are, our belief that we have something to contribute to the world, our wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

And this is what I feel depression has taken away from me: the ability or even interest in doing anything other than languishing on the couch watching DVDs. It’s a self-perpetuating thing, too, and it’s been getting worse -- sometimes gradually, sometimes not -- for something like eight years now. So while I remember how passionate I was about music when I was a teenager, I remember reading about astronomy back when I had to do it under the blankets with a flashlight, I remember how I was utterly consumed with wanting to write even though I had nothing to say... these things are vivid in my memory but distant somehow, as if they happened to someone else who told me about them. Someone close to me, someone who mattered a lot, but someone else nonetheless. A big door has been closed between there and here, then and now. And while I still listen to music, read about science, and write -- well, okay, I only write in this blog -- I don’t feel the way I used to about those things. And, much worse, I don’t seem to feel that way about anything else, either.

I need hobbies, I need goals. I know this and people tell me this. It’s that drive, that desire, that stuff that makes us individual in our personalities as well as connected in our humanity.

The only thing I really seem to want any more is to get that back.

In the meantime, did I mention I sorted out my sock drawer?

Why are you here?

When I first got signed off work I wrote (complained, actually) about not being able to find a narrative for my life, a story I could fit it into. Stories are important enough to me that I was floundering without one.

Still I am attempting and mostly failing to cope with not knowing what I want to do, much less what I am doing, with my lifeeems.

I don’t want to go back to the job I have. I don’t know yet if I’ll have to -- I’ve been signed off for five or six weeks so far, a week or two at a time, and since my mood and energy levels seem to change about every half an hour I am happy to take things as they come, but I do worry about the always-imminent doctor’s visits -- but I know I don’t want to.

I do want to work, or do something, as soon as I’m able (the way I am now, “fun” things are at least as liable to leave me headachey and upset as are “chore” things, which may be proof that I’m not entirely faking it but is not very reassuring otherwise). But I don’t want my work, I don’t want my job where you’re always “on,” as far as you’re concerned something’s always about to go wrong and you have to be able to spontaneously react and get it right every time. Now my little cri de coeur is “give me something with spreadsheets and a water cooler,” something I never thought I’d say, but I don’t care now, just get me away from this...

The idea of going back to university this fall is looming large To do what? Well physics seems to be the assumption, though my confidence takes a nose dive as soon as you get above the level of the pop-sci stuff that so intrigues me. Besides I don’t want to be a scientist, I just want to be somebody who knows about science.

“You could be John Gribbin,” Andrew said after having bought me a book by that honorable personage. The names of science popularizers are household words in my household, him and David Attenborough and James Burke and Jacob Bronowski and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan... their names come to my lips as easily as those of soap opera stars and football players do to readers of celebrity magazines. And I would love nothing more to, in whatever small way I am able, be one of them.

But this inevitably still involves slogging through a science degree, and typically for me I’d have to insist on doing the one with the most math in it when math’s what I’m worst at. And I think the chance to be a science writer, journalist, communicator, whatever, is an awfully dim and distant prize to keep my eyes on for that long.

Not just that, it sounds frankly ridiculous to my own ears now that I am attempting to find words for it, but that might just be the depression, might just be the vagaries of my moods. Becasue I do know at other times I’m capable of getting terribly excited about this, at the thought of writing the kind of books I like to read...

Is it really either that or another bad temp job in an office... if I’m lucky? I’m aware this is hardly the best time to be casting one’s job aside. But would another dead-end job see me feeling as unfulfilled as those I’ve had heretofore? Would the lack of a degree do more than chafe at my sensitive soul and irredeemably hinder my prospects of getting practically any job niow that employers can be so picky?

And so it goes, round and round in my head. I can’t think straight... but I’m also aware that it’s already midsummer, the days will start to get shorter after this weekend, and even on the few days I can leave my house without a jacket i’m aware that time’s a-wastin’.

Listening to a Hardware Hank commercial for sprinklers (they cut the ads out of the TV versions of baseball games but leave them in the radio ones), I was just reminded of one of the last things I saw in America.

Just before we ate and took me to the airport, my parents wanted to buy a new faucet, some cat food, and other similarly fascinating stuff. My dad wanted a sprinkler, because it hasn’t rained there in so long he’s getting sick of watering his beloved garden himself. As my parents compared the various pros and cons of the $4 sprinkler and the $19.99 sprinkler, I got bored and leaned against the shelves of garden hoses on the other side of the aisle.

If it hadn’t taken them so very long (they ended up with the twenty-buck one) I might never have noticed that the brand name on all those lengths of garden hose happened to be NeverKink. After that I wasn’t bored, I was busy trying not to giggle or smirk too much.

I just can’t decide if thinking this way means I don’t fit in with the Fleet Farm crowd at all... or that I do because, hey, I might know enough to snicker at it but still it does describe me perfectly well.

Seriously, the best. You know who you are.

I have the kind of friends who ask me what kind of ice cream I want right now, and when I say, as I always do, “mint chocolate chip,” replies “I TOTALLY KNEW IT WOULD BE MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP!!!” I had to at least feign disbelief and ask him how on earth he could know a thing like that, and you know what he told me? (I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was; I should know him better by now but you don’t so you can be surprised along with me.) He told me:

All nervous people crave mint chocolate chip ice cream, because it emblematizes their hope that an unsettled condition can nonetheless result in beauty and insight. Also, in alchemical thought green is the colour of perceptions awoken from insensate matter. Also, in Sufism, green is the colour of the immortal spirit-guide named Khidr, who corrects human action so as to avoid or resolve mistakes. Also, in the story of Perceval the cup that caught Christ’s blood is brought into the hall of the Castle Of Wonders on a green cloth by the Grail Queen, who is “above falsity”.

Also, it’s a delicious treat.

When America elected George W. Bush twice, almost everyone I knew was shocked, devastated and absolutely livid with rage. it was in many ways an unbearable eight years, wherein everything I love and hold dear and stand for seemed to be trampled under the foot of greed, stupidity, lies, and unspeakably inhumane acts.

I rejoiced when Obama was elected, staying up all night to hear his victory speech at about this time, six in the morning, bleary but as excited as I’d been in a long time. I knew he wouldn’t be the messiah to deliver us from all our country’s mistakes, much less all its ideologies I disagreed with, but still I rejoiced because for the first time in my adult life I didn’t have to feel so fucking ashamed of my country.

Because maybe I wasn’t surrounded by an invisible horde of people who were either unthinkably malevolent or unbelievably stupid. Maybe things were looking up after all.

I move here, and before all the relief and delight and novelty of hearing “President Obama” has worn off, I wake up this morning we find that Nick Griffin -- the execrable leader of the BNP, known in this house as the Bastard Nazi Party, the racist, fascist, xenophobic. homophobic, misogynist, frankly terrifying, entirely odious bunch -- has been elected as an MEP, a Member of European Parliament.

After a campaign of lies and hate (countered as much as possible by people I am happy to call friends, doing everything from hashtagging “thebnparetwats” on Twitter to handing out leaflets for Hope Not Hate), feeding on the worst nature of people who are losing their jobs and their livelihoods and looking for someone else to blame. As always, tribal nastiness will appeal to a certain number of the population, but it has never before been a force powerful enough to get these guys elected to represent us in the European Union.

There will be lots of analysis soon about what happened, how so many previously-Labour people managed to vote UKIP and the BNP, how the countercampaign worked and failed to, all that... But it won’t be from me. I couldn’t think straight anyway, and now...

Now I’m just once again living in a country where all the people I think of as anything like me are devastated and livid with rage at the political leaders supposedly intended to represent us. It all feels so familiar.

If I was any good, I’d be writing poems like this one, which was featured on the Writer’s Almanac today, rather than LJ entries like this

I turned off the predictive text on my phone -- I’m faster without it -- but it does have some kind of auto-complete feature where after you’ve typed three or four letters of a word, if you pause for a second it’ll suggest a word you might be starting. So if you want that word you can finish it with a single key press. Occasionally it goes a bit bonkers (whenever I start “Liverpool” it suggests “liveries”) but mostly it’s really cool.

In fact, that’s the word I came here to talk about. I just wrote a text that ended with the word “cool” and it’s suggested adding a bunch of apparent nonsense that would make it coolangatta.

Coolangatta?

I have never seen nor heard of any such word.

I miss you guys, I miss the internet. I miss exercise and getting to eat vegetables. (I must have gone to the bathroom a dozen times yesterday; I think my body is refusing to believe that any of this stuff I'm putting in it is food, so it's getting rid of it as quickly as possible. I can't say I blame it.)

I miss my friends, I miss my husband and my boyfriend. I miss trains and bike rides and doing stuff I want. I miss tea and Radio 4; I think I'm turning English, I really think so.

I'm kinda failing to cope here but much more gently. With so little expected of me it's easy to get by and not think about it too much, but I'm worried.

I get back Friday lunchtime; I'm hoping to go to the doctor that afternoon and see if I'm going back to work or getting signed off again. I don't know if I'm as sick as I was but I sure as hell don't want to go back to that job. If I was pushing pencils, if I had friendly co-workers, that might be one thing. But to go back to the job I have seems unthinkable, still. I dn't know what to do.

Being here satisfies some old hungers for me that go so long unsated, but now that I'm here I'm missing the parts of me that have to be left behind in Manchester because they don't fit in the rural Midwest. I don't want to stay; I don't want to go.

Dad and I were just back from a little bike ride, on my bike that's so much better than I remember it that it hurts to think of having to leave it here and I'm more determined than ever to find a way to send it to myself in Manchester.

The bikes were now resting against their kickstands in the other corner of the patio, so I still occasionally got a whiff of Machinery Shed, which I couldn't understand at all until I remembered that my dad had said that when he'd taken down and dusted off our bikes he'd found an old bottle of lube for the combine and used that on my bike's chain. The bike hasn't been used in five years; we haven't had a combine in ten years. "Probably not what you're meant to use on it," my dad said and shrugged. "But it works." I agreed at the time and now I'd have nothing else; I love that goddam smell.

It's a strange distinct smell, dirt and oil in a particular combination that I have so long now associated with my dad's tractors that now when I smell it I can't help but think I am somewhere I belong. This is real aromatherapy for me.

We sat outside on green plastic chairs on the patio. I brought up a cold beer for both of us; Dad brought out his little radio with John Gordon's voice crackling out of the static.

Top of the first, Slowey pitching well against the Indians. (We only have two starters who don't strike fear into my heart as soon as I hear they're pitching; he's one of 'em.)

When Mom got back we were going to light a bonfire in the little firepit my parents bought a year or two ago and make s'mores. Mom already had the marshmallows, graham crackers and Hershey's chocolate ready and waiting in a tupperware box on the table with our Miller Genuine Draft and the radio.

The sky still had most of its blue but already I saw the Moon looking benevolently down on us.

May it ever be so. Never mind that voice saying it won't, it can't, I know that, but still I let myself think may it ever.

In America, muffins don't stick to the cupcake papers any more.

It's true. I've had three now, and they're all the same. They don't tear my blueberry muffins apart like the ones I am used to; they slide away as easily as my concentration does when I hear about electoral reform these days. (It's not that I don't think it's a good thing, it's just that it turns my brain to mush.)

But it's not just better cupcake wrappers with anti-stick technology (you'll be thinking it's teflon but it might be some new anti-gravity thing, I wouldn't put it past the Americans). The kitchen in which you eat them is likely to be so big it has an island in the middle, cute little "breakfast bar" stools huddled around it. My parents got new countertops last year, replacing peeling formica from when the house was built in the late '60s with granite. Granite! The very living rock! The cabinets around it will all be solid wood, custom fitted. People don't try to sell you kitchens here like they do in Britain; the concept of it all being sort of out-of-the-box would seem strange.

The girl next to me on the plane home had a phone to call her mom when we landed (I was jealous). "Can you bring me a full set of clothes to change into?" she asked, and something about this question made me envision fluffy white socks dried in a tumble dryer with those anti-static sheets, a sweatshirt maybe from her recent days in high school sports, soccer or volleyball or something, a closet full of clothes in the pink bedroom she might have grown out of since going to college, but it was still waiting for her there... not re-"decorated" like rooms in English houses seem to be because there's better use for the room once you've gotten the kids out of it. Here there's the luxury of it lying dormant.

In America all the cars are scary, huge and looming and bulbous. I can't help thinking they're grotesque now, like canned goods with lids bulging up. Car botulism. I've learned to keep my mouth shut about this, though; I'm surrounded by people to whom all this is invisible; these are not huge hulking cars to them but just cars. The food is not salty or sugary, or with some sharp tang of preservatives, to them, it's just food. The adjectives are all invisible. To them, but not to me, not any more.

Or, as I remember thinking when I was in grade school and learning about math, when you look at a number like 1, there's a lot you're assuming about it. You're assuming it has a decimal point with as many zeros as you like after it. You could put a + sigh in front of it because you're assuming it's not negative. You could draw a line under it and make it a fraction, 1/1. That whole numbers carry with them these properties that can be invisible to me, yet surely always there even when I didn't know about them, struck me as profoundly eerie (and also yet more proof that math was out to get me; it's so slippery).

And this is eerie too, the invisible adjectives. The spacious houses, the huge cars, the additive-riddled food.

(Not that it matters what's in the food because Americans all go to the dentist every six months; kids like me have sealant put on our teeth as soon as the adult ones grow in, to prevent cavities. And I've never had one, and I consider the concept of having a tooth pulled one of the more horrifying things that could happen to me. Probably because anything worse just doesn't show up on my radar. My parents are relatively quite poor but still I had a life like this; the more I think about this the less sense it makes. I am grateful I suppose, but mostly disconcerted when I think about how few people can claim this kind of quality of life and what did I do to get to be one of them?)

It's weird because when I think about houses big enough to have a room for the TV away from the "nice" parts of the house, somewhere you can put your thick-white-socked feet up on the sturdy oak coffee table and watch some football on a Sunday afternoon with a big bowl of chips and a cold beer, it sounds so lovely and comforting and welcoming in a way I feel very vividly even though (to my mom's great dismay) we don't have a house big enough for that and I don't like beer that has to be cold in order to be drinkable.

On this level, America coddles you.

But when I think about the laughably low minimum wage and the increasing cost of increasingly-ineffective health insurance, when I think about the poor unemployment benefits and the lack of even the woefully-slashed benefits system that the UK has, America seems like a goddam scary place to me.

A high walk on a thin rope with no safety net below.

It's very weird to be back here. This contradictory combination is one of the reasons.

It's good to be back, always good to be back home. But it's weird.

Andrew came home from the shop with garibaldi biscuits for me.

“Because you’re going to America!” he explained. “And you might want some garibaldi biscuits, because I know you like them, and they don’t have any there!”

I was touched. I’ll be well-equipped for my week and a half in America. Don’t have my suitcase packed yet, and I’ll be in waiting at my gate in 12 hours, but hey, I’ve got biscuits.

I’ll have to bring my tea too; they have tea in America but it’s not the same really. I’d bring my lovely teapot if I could!

I listened to the second half of the Sheffield United/Burnley playoff game as I made chili this afternoon.

I thought Andrew’d be pleased that I was rooting for the team from the sexy side of the Pennines, though really what made them irresistible to me was simply the fact that I’ve heard much more about football in Sheffield (though I know they have two teams; the other one has one of my favorite names in English football) and I almost always cheer for the underdogs.

Even a Twitter friend telling me that Alistair Campbell is a Burnley supporter -- leading us both to imagine the horrible grin on his face if they won -- could not deter me from being glad to hear they got an early lead. And then as the game went on they kept it. When the full five minutes of added time drew to their agonizing close and the whistle was finally blown, Wembley erupted with the sounds of 36,000 bellowing Lancastrians.

Even I had to stop poking the lentils in order to appreciate this. I also stopped to tell shinydan the result, as I’d told him I was listening to the match.

The team from the smallest town ever to make it to the Premier League, the radio announcers said, its population apparently only about twice the number of their fans screaming and shouting in that stadium this afternoon. I had to grin.

Dan’s first reply to this news made me smile even more, though: Fancy going to see Pompey at Burnley next year, then?

Like he has to ask! I may have gotten a little excited.

I’ve never been to a Premiership-level game, and I can hardly imagine a better way to start than seeing Portsmouth in Burnley. I’m not even kidding, guys.