silence

The other night I went dancing. The scene is still small and I'm pretty much always there, so I generally recognise most people I see when I enter a venue. People I know well, people I know by face but not by name, people I love to dance with, people who are in massive demand that I have to fight to dance with. Then there are the people I will not dance with again under any circumstances.

This dance shitlist is small and not based on dance quality. I can easily dance with someone who's not very good. To get on the shitlist you either have to dance in a way that's physically painful to your partner, or be seriously creepy. For example, my shitlist contains the following names:

Ass Groper: guy spent most of the dance just shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, then suddenly reached out and started rubbing my ass.

Spine Trumpet: whose idea of leading is to hold me uncomfortably tightly and poke me in the back and/or hands, leaving me in some pain and also once with a bruise on my wrist.

Crotch Lead: WORST DANCE EVER OH MY GOD I WILL NEVER GET OVER IT.

This time I saw the most recent addition to my Do Not Dance list: the Skirtlifter. When I danced with him a couple of months ago, he held my hand quite low against my leg, and then using my hand as a sort of cover he physically lifted up my skirt and started stroking my thigh. I went Eek and tensed up my hand to force him away, he said, "Mmmm, just as good as I remember," and I fought back the urge to throw up on his shoulder. There will be no more dances with this guy.

I told people about him. There is a creepy guy, he did a creepy thing, would recommend you avoid. And said people, after going, "Ew," would say, "Did you say anything?" or "I hope you smacked him."

Well, no, I didn't. I froze up and tried to work out how I could get out of this with the least amount of fuss.

We are socialised to believe that nothing is a problem until someone draws attention to it, and therefore that the act of stating the problem out loud is what creates it. So when people complain about something that's made them uncomfortable, they're making a scene, creating drama, forcing everyone else to be aware of something unpleasant when they were quite happy in their ignorance, thanks. So we are tacitly encouraged to keep quiet, try and make the problem go away as politely and diplomatically as possible, without letting anyone know the problem was ever there, including and perhaps especially the perpetrator (because they can't have meant it, they were probably trying to be nice, it was only a joke, it didn't actually hurt you, now, did it? Which leads to that lovely and familiar pattern where you're overreacting because it didn't hurt you, right up until you do get hurt, at which point you really ought to have done something about that, you know).

The idea that we aren't to upset Creepy Guy, that it's not nice to set boundaries with Creepy Guy or get him banned from places where he's been persistently creepy, is so ingrained at this point that it's very hard to fight against in the moment. I'm a lot stronger about boundaries than I used to be, but my instinctive reaction to being unexpectedly felt up was Oh God hand on thigh get it off very politely and then finish the dance and say thank you and walk away and never come back. Reprogramming myself not to do this is going to be pretty tough.

In the latter days of Crotch Lead's reign of doom and terror, I told several people that I'd had enough of hiding on the other side of the room and letting him take over my night. I told them that the next time he asked me to dance, I would say no, and also tell him why I was saying no. Most people, including the ones who'd said they'd just kick him in the nuts if he tried it or that he "wouldn't dare" dance with them like that, looked completely taken aback. "No thank you, the way you dance makes me really uncomfortable" shouldn't be such a radical statement, but there is something about a person (particularly a woman) openly and bluntly refusing to do something she's not comfortable with that feels almost transgressive. In the end I didn't say anything, mostly because he never did ask me again. But that, in turn, was mostly because I never really did stop hiding from him.

Dance-wise, I am absolutely secure in my limits. I don't question whether I should be enjoying something more than I am or whether I'm overreacting to a certain hand placement. I am completely comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, as it were, and I won't subject myself to it again just to be nice or to seem more likable. But actually saying something directly, even to someone who clearly knows he's doing something inappropriate, still feels like it's beyond me, and I don't quite know why that is. It would be better for the scene if we spoke out. And the worst that could happen is - what? That the person in question mocks me for overreacting and won't dance with me again? That he mocks me to other people? That his feelings are very badly hurt by me taking his innocent groping the wrong way and never comes back? None of these are catastrophic things, and having Creepy Guy and his creepy friends avoid me or socials in general as determinedly as I avoid them would improve my evenings tremendously. And yet still I keep quiet.

This shouldn't be a part of the scene. We should be able to deal with this when we see it, instead of defaulting to the strange and inefficient method of letting them dance with everyone in the scene until everybody is avoiding them and they stop coming back because all the women mysteriously vanish between songs (in effect, what happens is that the regulars all find out pretty quickly and Creepy Guy just spends months upsetting new dancers and putting them off the scene entirely). It should be normal and expected for dancers to set boundaries, and for those boundaries to be accepted by others. We shouldn't be managing Creepy Guy's potential hurt feelings first and foremost, driving other dancers away from the scene in the process, but that's what we do. It's easier to go with what we know, to not make a fuss, to underreact for as long as possible then feel bad when people start to get hurt.

I have no solution. But maybe seeing the problem is a start.

inspiration

So I allowed myself the weekend off to do important things (read: murder ALL OF MY MUSCLES at a two-day dance workshop), with the full intention of starting again all bright-eyed and fresh on Monday. At this point it appears to be Thursday. Note to self: make more effort.

It's September. The days have started to shrink but it's not quite autumn yet. When I sit in the office and look out of the window, I can feel the next four months coming up on me. I can feel the leaves drop. I can feel the shift from green to orange to grey, from bare arms to layers, from long evenings outside to leaving the office in the dark. It all feels quite nice until this thought path inevitably leads me on to Christmas, and then I have to stop for the sake of my sanity.

Before I get to Christmas, I get to NaNoWriMo.

My experience over the last ten years of attempting to produce 50,000 words of at least semi-readable prose every November is that either I get my idea now, or I don't get it at all. In the years where I've known what I'm going to write before the month starts, it's come from an image or two that I got in September. A child in a swimming pool, an argument in a bathroom, a woman sitting on a table in a bookshop, a motorbike accident, a man with a camera, two people sitting on a bench in the dark. That's usually all I need. With the image comes a mood, a feeling that I can access when I'm writing, and as I turn the image over in my mind, trying different directions and characters, the feeling tells me whether or not the story is working. Then when November comes, I have two or three scenes mapped out in my head, at least one character relationship that I understand, and a sense of the story's voice. These are the years when I like what I write.

More often than not, I don't get the image I connect to, and I greet November in a flailing panic.

Friend: You're doing NaNo again?
Me: Yep.
Friend: What's it about?
Me: I DON'T KNOW there's a mystery and there's a lot of yoghurt involved for some reason and my main characters are a bear and a fireman and France.
Friend: Your main character is France?
Me: Yes.
Friend: How?
Me: I DON'T KNOW it just happened please help.

Given all this, and given that I failed spectacularly last year (mostly due to homelessness), it would be nice to start November with a plan. But making a plan happen is next to impossible. I can't make myself connect to an idea. I've tried a few times to go into the NaNoWriMo forums and adopt a plot or a scene or a character that someone else has thought of and can't find a use for, and it just doesn't work, because I don't care about it. Even if the idea is amazing, if I don't know how I'm supposed to feel when I write it, it won't happen. I'll end up with a few forced and disjointed pages which are either so bad as to make me give up entirely, or so dull that I end up wandering off the point and my characters get stuck in a fish market for three chapters or start arguing about yoghurt or all put on robes and snipe at each other about the nature of questionhood or an iguana shows up in a yacht or someone loses a foot (all of these have happened. The yoghurt and foot things are apparently recurring themes in my work).

Friend: Don't worry about how good it is, just write.
Me: Yeah, I've tried that, and what I end up with is a mystery I don't understand and inexplicable threatening flamingos.
Friend: But you can edit that.
Me: If I edit out all the bad bits, there will be no remaining bits. It'll just be a list of names I thought were funny.

Writer's block, for me, isn't necessarily an inability to write anything at all. It's an inability to care about what I'm writing. There is nothing that comes close to the exhilaration I get when I understand the feeling in my head enough to wrap it up in words and put it onto a page, when I can see my setting clearly enough to recreate it for someone else using as few words as possible, when I stop thinking about sentences and structures because I'm not trying to make a story anymore, the story is there and it's real and I can feel it. It's been a long time since writing fiction felt that natural. 

All I can really do is be receptive, explore the unformed ideas that fly around just outside my head, and hope for something to settle. I miss it, and I'm ready for it. I'm ready to feel it, I'm ready to work at it, I'm ready to be absorbed so far into that I really get on my friends' nerves. I'm ready to write, dammit. I just need my story to find me in September.

fake

My former landlady has readvertised my room. She's put up the rent, glossed over the fact that the lounge is a box and neglected to mention that she actually lives there. I say neglected to mention; she explicitly claims that she doesn't live there.

We could report her. We will.

But first, we want to make fake profiles and ask her questions.

When I lived in her house, she knew me as an awkward, pedantic, legalistic bitch. I wanted everything in writing, took nothing on trust, and didn't ever seem to be in the house when she showed up unannounced (at first this was coincidence, but I will admit to hiding in my room on a couple of occasions because it amused me to be the Phantom Housemate). When it came time to leave, the others said, "You write the notice email. She's scared of you."

So when a naive young girl contacts her about the superawesome room in her superawesome house, she'll never see it coming.

I have my character all planned out. She'll be 22, fresh out of university, just got her first ever adult job in the big city, and wanting to move somewhere that's close to her boyfriend. She'll never have dealt with tenancies before; she won't know anything about deposits, or the protections she doesn't have if the landlord lives in the house. She'll be excited about the move, and not ask too many awkward questions. The only thing she'll want to know is whether other people are already in the house. She won't mind what the answer is, she can just feel that this is the place for her. But she'll ask the question.

Also, I'm going to spell everything badly. That'll be a challenge.

poetry

I've often wished that I liked poetry.

It seems like the sort of thing I ought to like. I ought to like to write it, or read it, or analyse it, or share it. I love to write in almost any other form, even if I'm not very good at it. When I accept I'm not good at writing a certain way, I still enjoy other people's rather more successful attempts at it; in fact I admire it more, as a skill I understand but don't possess. I ought to feel that way about poetry too. I ought to want to study it, to see underneath language, find the nuances, construct my own interpretation of the narrative. I've seen people on Facebook and on blogs I frequent post their favourite poems, poems that perfectly express their mood right now, poems that give the most amazing life advice. I ought to enjoy that.

But I don't. It just irritates me. It irritates me as a concept, and every single example I read irritates me on its own specific merits. I don't understand why this is. I've tried to come up with explanations before, when upset poets ask me what, exactly, is wrong with the medium they love so much. And since my degree was based around creative writing, there have been a lot of upset poets.

This happened more than once at uni:

Fellow student: Hey, if you've got some time, would you mind critiquing this poem I wrote?
Me: Really? Me?
Fellow student: Please. I really think it needs another set of eyes.
Me: I mean, I can do, but my critique is almost certainly going to be "is there any way to make this not a poem?"

Usually what I end up telling people is that I don't like what poetry does to language. The rhyme schemes feel tortured, the structures feel forced, the words feel out of place, and I find myself wishing that they'd just tell the fucking story already instead of trying to make it into a pretty shape and losing half the content in the process. Then this happens:

Them: Read this one. It's my very favourite poem. You cannot possibly read this beautiful thing and still hate poetry.
Me: Look, I can see that it's good in terms of what a poem is, but I still really wish it would go away.

I don't really have reasons for hating poetry. I couldn't provide you with an empirical argument for its being a bad or unworthy art form. I would probably argue that most of the world's poetry is objectively bad, but then most of the world's writing is objectively bad, and something being of objectively terrible quality has never precluded the possibility of it being enjoyable. I just don't like it, in much the same way I don't like cabbage or Sex on Fire or comedies for which the word 'excruciating' is deployed as a compliment. It just upsets me, and there is no good reason for it.

I've been told I'm missing out on so much. I've been told that I'm blinkered, that I have no romance in my soul. Once I was told that it was no wonder I didn't like it since English is a horrible language and I might learn to understand poetry if only I could become fluent in French. I turned the lack of romance into a point of pride for a while. Yes, I am unromantic. I am the most unromantic person ever. I hate poetry with all of my cold, stony, untouchable heart. 

Perhaps there is hope for me. Perhaps when my midlife crisis hits I'll suddenly fall in love with poetry in all its glorious forms. Perhaps when I become a little well-known for writing, it'll be my poetry that people respond to. Perhaps the word 'poet' will precede my name wherever it goes. Perhaps.

But I doubt it, because frankly, poetry is bollocks.

loss

I’m finding starting again a challenge, so I went back to the writer’s block prompts.

"What have you lost?"

I know what kind of post is supposed to come from a prompt like that. Tales of regret, of aching, of an emptiness that’s bittersweet because you know that really, things are better now. People who drifted away, dreams that couldn’t survive a lifestyle change. Loss of innocence, loss of optimism, loss of naïveté, loss of the old self while trying to discover a new one.

What came to my mind instead was, "I can never remember where I put anything."

I lose earrings. I lose paperwork. I lose cables. I lose socks. I lose books. I lose memory cards. I have bought Abre los Ojos on DVD four times, and each time I’ve managed to lose it before I’ve been able to watch it. Once I lost a printer. It was in my room for six months and I couldn’t find it. I say once; I’ve lost that printer twice. In the same room. Eventually I just gave up and got rid of it.

It’s the kind of problem I really don’t know how to correct. My memory for things that aren’t "what did I do with that T-shirt?" is so good that it’s actually a huge pain in the neck. I can’t just put things back in the same place every time because I usually lose things before they get a place. Or, sometimes, I put the thing back in its place, and when I return to the place the thing is no longer in it. The thing then turns up somewhere entirely logical, like inside a flowerpot or attached to the underside of a curtain or wrapped in an empty chocolate wrapper and shoved between the oven and the washing machine. I don’t have the techniques to fight this kind of Possession Gremlin.

On the other hand, sometimes I find things. When I moved house, I found two books I hadn’t read, an unopened bottle of truffle oil, three eyeliners, a Czech phrase book, a raspberry beret and a swizzle stick with a watermelon on it. I’m not saying all this is quality stuff. Some of it is the exact opposite of quality. But since I’m clearly stuck being the person that loses everything, I may as well take a small amount of joy in regarding my bedroom as a really shit treasure hunt. Ill-fitting camera lens filters! Fridge magnets shaped like aubergines! Every colour of Revlon Lip Butter in the world (literally. I went to California and bought all the ones they don’t sell here)! A golf tee, for some inexplicable reason! Half a bag of Viennese truffles!

So there are worse problems I could have. But still rather a pain in the bum.

September

I only wrote once in August. A combination of the stress of moving house, lacking access to internet and then lacking access to computers entirely seems like a pretty good excuse, but while it certainly made things more difficult, I could have posted if I’d really been committed to it. I just... didn’t. It’s alarming how easy it is to just not write, and I need to put in more of an effort to form better habits.

So, September daily blogging is going to be a thing (except this weekend, when I am legitimately quite busy learning things and using my body to do things that aren’t sit in front of a screen and complain). And probably October daily blogging will be a thing too. Then November will roll around and I'll be writing frantic posts multiple times a day to distract myself from the shitness of, or possibly complete lack of, my novel. Probably from under the bed, even though I no longer have a bed with space under it.