Following my first ever acrobatics class:
My hips hurt.
My forearms hurt.
My neck and shoulders REALLY hurt.
My quads and hamstrings hurt.
My lower abs hurt.
A bunch of weird little muscles in weird places hurt.
But also two people lay down in front of me and I did a forward roll over them, which makes me practically a stuntwoman or something.
Tuesday, 31 March 2015
Monday, 30 March 2015
the critical voice, part one
(This is an experiment I'm trying. I don't know how long this series will last or even where I'm trying to take it, but I have a problem I'd like to work out and you can come with me, if you choose to.)
When I was little, my parents sent me to swimming lessons at our local pool. I quite liked the water, but swimming wasn't particularly intuitive to me, and I wasn't really getting it. I don't remember much at all about those lessons, until a few weeks in when the teacher then ordered all but three of us out of the pool and lined them up along the edge.
"Now," he said, pointing to the three of us still in the water, "you watch them swimming, and tell them what they're doing wrong."
They started with me. I don't think they ever got to the other two kids. The teacher called on various children to shout out what I was doing wrong, and since I still couldn't swim at all, there were a lot of things. My four-year-old brain became very quickly overloaded, at which point they all, teacher included, triumphantly chorused that I was putting my feet on the bottom of the pool.
"That's right! You can't swim like that, can you?"
This is still a fairly accurate description of the way the world looks to me sometimes. I'm trying to do something and the whole world is lined up on the edge of the swimming pool, waiting and encouraged to spot what I'm doing wrong and point it out to everyone. An unidentified someone is that swimming teacher, directing everyone's attention to me, telling them I'm probably the one that will screw up the most (I've forgiven most of the people who were callous to me as a child, but if I ever knowingly meet that swimming teacher, I will actually shout at him. Who the fuck thinks that's a good way to get a four-year-old to be a confident swimmer? I didn't learn to swim for another ten years, long after people had stopped trying to teach me). I thought for a long while that seeing the world as that swimming pool was the reason I am so stupidly, unreasonably self-critical, and it's only recently I've started to realise that's not the root of the problem.
A week or so ago, I typed "dealing with the critical voice" into a search engine, hoping to find something a bit more helpful than my therapist's exhortations to "be a bit nicer to yourself". There were a lot of descriptions of the critical voice, all way more nuanced than "kid at the side of the swimming pool". They described a critical voice positioning itself as supportive and encouraging, often saying nice things, recommending rewards, and generally sounding as much like a force for good as anything can.
My critical voice thinks I'm a great person. An embarrassingly great person. My critical voice tells me, with absolute sincerity, that I am incredibly smart and talented and there's nothing I can't do. My critical voice believes in my writing more than almost anyone I've ever met. It's convinced that I have it in me to be exceptional, and often when I read books that voice will be there, saying get a load of this crap. Can you believe this got published? You're so much better than this, when you get your novel written it's going to blow everyone away.
Sometimes I try something and I can't do it. My critical voice, which has already crafted several images of me doing that thing perfectly, says, Hmmm. That was bad. Try again. So I do, and I fail, and the voice says, That's strange. It really doesn't look that hard. I fail again, and it says Really? I mean, really? That's three times. Look how easy it is for other people to do this. You're definitely better than some of these people, but you can't even do this simple thing? Wow.
Eventually, I get upset and frustrated and discouraged, and the voice says, There, there. I'm sure it's an off-day. Let's get you something you like. How about sitting on your own and eating cake? You like those things.
I've written a few things that my critical voice is absolutely 100% happy with. Yes, it says. This, right here, this is the writer that you are. This is amazing. I knew you could do it. Problem is, that thing is usually a few pages of a novel. When I try to add more to it, the voice is sitting there saying no, no, this isn't right. Look at that awesome stuff you wrote. You're letting that writing down with this stuff. No, it's alright, I understand it might take a little while to get into the flow, I'll wait. Hmmm, I thought you'd have it by now. This is still all wrong. If anything it's getting worse. Maybe you should stop, you're obviously not in the right place tonight. Maybe have some cake, replenish a bit, reward yourself for trying.
I hate this bastard voice. It makes me feel like a massive egotist and a complete failure at the same time. This the first time I've tried to define it this way; I've been aware of it for a long time, but I always thought of it as two voices, one trying to be encouraging and the other beating me down. It makes sense that's it's the same voice, the same incredibly reasonable, logical voice, making a case for me to be the very greatest or the most useless, which is it going to be?
Writing my way through a problem has historically helped me solve it at least 90% of the time. But this isn't "we had this fight" or "do I choose this thing or the other thing?", this is a long-standing part of my psyche and I don't think one post is going to do it, unless it were four hundred years long (not including musical interludes). So I'm going to try and write my way through my critical voice over the course of a few weeks or months or however long it takes and see if I can find myself any answers.
When I was little, my parents sent me to swimming lessons at our local pool. I quite liked the water, but swimming wasn't particularly intuitive to me, and I wasn't really getting it. I don't remember much at all about those lessons, until a few weeks in when the teacher then ordered all but three of us out of the pool and lined them up along the edge.
"Now," he said, pointing to the three of us still in the water, "you watch them swimming, and tell them what they're doing wrong."
They started with me. I don't think they ever got to the other two kids. The teacher called on various children to shout out what I was doing wrong, and since I still couldn't swim at all, there were a lot of things. My four-year-old brain became very quickly overloaded, at which point they all, teacher included, triumphantly chorused that I was putting my feet on the bottom of the pool.
"That's right! You can't swim like that, can you?"
This is still a fairly accurate description of the way the world looks to me sometimes. I'm trying to do something and the whole world is lined up on the edge of the swimming pool, waiting and encouraged to spot what I'm doing wrong and point it out to everyone. An unidentified someone is that swimming teacher, directing everyone's attention to me, telling them I'm probably the one that will screw up the most (I've forgiven most of the people who were callous to me as a child, but if I ever knowingly meet that swimming teacher, I will actually shout at him. Who the fuck thinks that's a good way to get a four-year-old to be a confident swimmer? I didn't learn to swim for another ten years, long after people had stopped trying to teach me). I thought for a long while that seeing the world as that swimming pool was the reason I am so stupidly, unreasonably self-critical, and it's only recently I've started to realise that's not the root of the problem.
A week or so ago, I typed "dealing with the critical voice" into a search engine, hoping to find something a bit more helpful than my therapist's exhortations to "be a bit nicer to yourself". There were a lot of descriptions of the critical voice, all way more nuanced than "kid at the side of the swimming pool". They described a critical voice positioning itself as supportive and encouraging, often saying nice things, recommending rewards, and generally sounding as much like a force for good as anything can.
My critical voice thinks I'm a great person. An embarrassingly great person. My critical voice tells me, with absolute sincerity, that I am incredibly smart and talented and there's nothing I can't do. My critical voice believes in my writing more than almost anyone I've ever met. It's convinced that I have it in me to be exceptional, and often when I read books that voice will be there, saying get a load of this crap. Can you believe this got published? You're so much better than this, when you get your novel written it's going to blow everyone away.
Sometimes I try something and I can't do it. My critical voice, which has already crafted several images of me doing that thing perfectly, says, Hmmm. That was bad. Try again. So I do, and I fail, and the voice says, That's strange. It really doesn't look that hard. I fail again, and it says Really? I mean, really? That's three times. Look how easy it is for other people to do this. You're definitely better than some of these people, but you can't even do this simple thing? Wow.
Eventually, I get upset and frustrated and discouraged, and the voice says, There, there. I'm sure it's an off-day. Let's get you something you like. How about sitting on your own and eating cake? You like those things.
I've written a few things that my critical voice is absolutely 100% happy with. Yes, it says. This, right here, this is the writer that you are. This is amazing. I knew you could do it. Problem is, that thing is usually a few pages of a novel. When I try to add more to it, the voice is sitting there saying no, no, this isn't right. Look at that awesome stuff you wrote. You're letting that writing down with this stuff. No, it's alright, I understand it might take a little while to get into the flow, I'll wait. Hmmm, I thought you'd have it by now. This is still all wrong. If anything it's getting worse. Maybe you should stop, you're obviously not in the right place tonight. Maybe have some cake, replenish a bit, reward yourself for trying.
I hate this bastard voice. It makes me feel like a massive egotist and a complete failure at the same time. This the first time I've tried to define it this way; I've been aware of it for a long time, but I always thought of it as two voices, one trying to be encouraging and the other beating me down. It makes sense that's it's the same voice, the same incredibly reasonable, logical voice, making a case for me to be the very greatest or the most useless, which is it going to be?
Writing my way through a problem has historically helped me solve it at least 90% of the time. But this isn't "we had this fight" or "do I choose this thing or the other thing?", this is a long-standing part of my psyche and I don't think one post is going to do it, unless it were four hundred years long (not including musical interludes). So I'm going to try and write my way through my critical voice over the course of a few weeks or months or however long it takes and see if I can find myself any answers.
Sunday, 29 March 2015
signs
Things have felt a little overwhelming today. But I have a three-day week followed by a four-day weekend, my schedule is nicely busy without being overcrowded, and I have a chocolate caterpillar that I don't intend to share with anyone. If any signs were to point to a less confusing time ahead, these would be those signs.
Saturday, 28 March 2015
missing
For a year and a half, the most important thing in my life was dance. I went to any and every dance class or social I got a sniff of, and as many festivals as I could afford (and some I couldn't). All of my friends were dancers, and I went to everything, dance-related or not, that they invited me to. It was my life's infrastructure. Well, I'm never free on Tuesdays or Thursdays, probably not Wednesdays either. Last Friday of every month is out. Second Sunday of every month is out. I don't know how healthy or sensible that was, but I was busy and happy and had no desire for change.
I've lost that recently. I went for well over a year without missing a single one of my Tuesday classes, and now I go to maybe half, if that. I haven't been to Thursday classes in months. I go to socials infrequently, and usually leave early. I sold my ticket for the one festival I was planning to go to. It's even hard to enjoy stupid bouncy dancing in my bedroom at the moment. I don't quite know how to cope without that, because it's one of my default comfort behaviours and has been since I was a kid, but dancing just isn't fun anymore.
Maybe it's the dance. I've got stuck. In terms of steps and moves, there's not a huge amount more I can learn, and in terms of technique, I've been learning from the same (excellent) teachers for two years, and if they haven't been able to explain it to me by now I'm probably not going to get it from them. Maybe I'm bored of the moves and the music and it's draining my love for dance as a whole.
Maybe it's the scene. Where we once had a group of people learning stuff and having fun, we now have competitions and auditions and troupes and teachers in training. People practise and rehearse rather than dance. Teachers pick favourites and don't know how to hide it. Friends and acquaintances have long, detailed conversations in which they try to pin down their exact dance level in relation to other people we know, and discuss dance like it's our profession, not our hobby. Maybe that's been sucking all the fun out of it.
Maybe it's my body. I'm frustrated at my limitations, limitations other people don't seem to have because they came into this dance with years of learning technique in a different discipline, rather than what I did, which was just show up to a class after spending the vast majority of my adult life sitting on my arse thinking about aubergines. I'm analysing every move I make, trying to persuade myself to take up other dances to get this technique stuff and make my dancing look prettier, so maybe I'm sucking all the fun out of it.
Maybe it's my priorities. When I started dancing I had a dying relationship, almost no friends in the city, and an ache for interaction that had been growing for years. Two years later I have a very healthy relationship and friends that I believe I would keep even if I never danced another step again, so maybe the need is gone. Maybe I never really loved dance as much as I thought I did.
Maybe it's my head. Anxiety is getting in the way of a lot of things right now. Maybe that's all this is, and when I learn how to control it, dancing will be fun again.
It might be any, or all, of these things. There isn't really a fix for any of them, at least not within my power right now, which leaves me without a passion acting as the driver for my life. I'm not good at handling life without that driver. For some reason I can't drive it myself, so it either goes careening off into some bushes or I freak out and stop the whole thing. I wrote in November about needing a new thing, and I've tried several since then. I've enjoyed them all enough to keep going with them; I have made an improbable number of cushion covers this month. But none of them have gripped me in the way I'm looking for. I think about what I've done and where I could go next - dressmaking! Kickboxing belts! - and I don't feel enthused, just scared and a bit sad.
There's something missing. I've tried to fill the empty place but it doesn't want to be filled. Is that because my love of dance will come back, somehow, and doesn't want anything else to crowd it out, or is this a bigger problem? I don't know. Either way, it kind of hurts.
I've lost that recently. I went for well over a year without missing a single one of my Tuesday classes, and now I go to maybe half, if that. I haven't been to Thursday classes in months. I go to socials infrequently, and usually leave early. I sold my ticket for the one festival I was planning to go to. It's even hard to enjoy stupid bouncy dancing in my bedroom at the moment. I don't quite know how to cope without that, because it's one of my default comfort behaviours and has been since I was a kid, but dancing just isn't fun anymore.
Maybe it's the dance. I've got stuck. In terms of steps and moves, there's not a huge amount more I can learn, and in terms of technique, I've been learning from the same (excellent) teachers for two years, and if they haven't been able to explain it to me by now I'm probably not going to get it from them. Maybe I'm bored of the moves and the music and it's draining my love for dance as a whole.
Maybe it's the scene. Where we once had a group of people learning stuff and having fun, we now have competitions and auditions and troupes and teachers in training. People practise and rehearse rather than dance. Teachers pick favourites and don't know how to hide it. Friends and acquaintances have long, detailed conversations in which they try to pin down their exact dance level in relation to other people we know, and discuss dance like it's our profession, not our hobby. Maybe that's been sucking all the fun out of it.
Maybe it's my body. I'm frustrated at my limitations, limitations other people don't seem to have because they came into this dance with years of learning technique in a different discipline, rather than what I did, which was just show up to a class after spending the vast majority of my adult life sitting on my arse thinking about aubergines. I'm analysing every move I make, trying to persuade myself to take up other dances to get this technique stuff and make my dancing look prettier, so maybe I'm sucking all the fun out of it.
Maybe it's my priorities. When I started dancing I had a dying relationship, almost no friends in the city, and an ache for interaction that had been growing for years. Two years later I have a very healthy relationship and friends that I believe I would keep even if I never danced another step again, so maybe the need is gone. Maybe I never really loved dance as much as I thought I did.
Maybe it's my head. Anxiety is getting in the way of a lot of things right now. Maybe that's all this is, and when I learn how to control it, dancing will be fun again.
It might be any, or all, of these things. There isn't really a fix for any of them, at least not within my power right now, which leaves me without a passion acting as the driver for my life. I'm not good at handling life without that driver. For some reason I can't drive it myself, so it either goes careening off into some bushes or I freak out and stop the whole thing. I wrote in November about needing a new thing, and I've tried several since then. I've enjoyed them all enough to keep going with them; I have made an improbable number of cushion covers this month. But none of them have gripped me in the way I'm looking for. I think about what I've done and where I could go next - dressmaking! Kickboxing belts! - and I don't feel enthused, just scared and a bit sad.
There's something missing. I've tried to fill the empty place but it doesn't want to be filled. Is that because my love of dance will come back, somehow, and doesn't want anything else to crowd it out, or is this a bigger problem? I don't know. Either way, it kind of hurts.
Friday, 27 March 2015
A Statute for those who are born in Parts beyond the Sea
For some reason I've been given access to a fancy legal database, and rather than take the opportunity to learn anything I just started searching it for things with funny names. 13th Century statutes and people called Oozageer and remarkably improbable neighbourhood disputes. I expect to have fun next week.
Thursday, 26 March 2015
blue
My laptop is dying. It's been dying very slowly for a good few years now. First it decided it didn't like sharing WiFi with other laptops and would freeze or shut itself off after two minutes online (I've never found out why this is, it's done it on a dozen different private networks). Then the screen died and I had to get an internal part replaced. Then it died entirely and a nerd magicked it back to life. Then the power cord died. Then the screen started going black when tilted at certain angles. Then all the white space stopped being white at all but two very specific and precise angles of the screen, one of which only exists fifty per cent of the time and the other of which requires the laptop to be practically shut. I haven't replaced it, because it turns out laptops are bastard expensive.
My boyfriend has been offering for months to lend me his old laptop. Which is a Mac.
Me: But I don't get Macs. There aren't any buttons and you scroll the wrong way and dragging and dropping is impossible.
Him: It's fine. They're just computers. They're very easy to use once you get used to the couple of differences.
He scrubbed all his stuff off the old Mac and gave it to me yesterday. Today I tried to do some work on it. Tried.
Me: Uh... help.
Him: What's up?
Me: It went blue.
Him: Huh?
Me: I tried to save it and it went blue.
Him: It went blue?
Me: And all the words have gone.
[he investigates laptop]
Him: Yep, that's gone blue. I've no idea what you did there.
Me: I thought you said Macs were easy to use.
Him: Oh, fuck off.
My boyfriend has been offering for months to lend me his old laptop. Which is a Mac.
Me: But I don't get Macs. There aren't any buttons and you scroll the wrong way and dragging and dropping is impossible.
Him: It's fine. They're just computers. They're very easy to use once you get used to the couple of differences.
He scrubbed all his stuff off the old Mac and gave it to me yesterday. Today I tried to do some work on it. Tried.
Me: Uh... help.
Him: What's up?
Me: It went blue.
Him: Huh?
Me: I tried to save it and it went blue.
Him: It went blue?
Me: And all the words have gone.
[he investigates laptop]
Him: Yep, that's gone blue. I've no idea what you did there.
Me: I thought you said Macs were easy to use.
Him: Oh, fuck off.
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
advice
I used to make my living giving advice over the phone. My knowledge of the law was, and is, pretty solid. During my years on the phone, I dealt with the lot of the same quite specific problems on a regular basis. Below is an example of a conversation I had more than once with various callers, who were usually owners or HR managers of a company.
Caller: So in the office/on site/at the staff party, Person X punched Person Y in the face.
Me: What have you done so far?
Caller: We've suspended Person X. We're not sure what to do now.
Me: [explains disciplinary procedures]
Caller: Can we sack him?
Me: Generally speaking, it's considered to be within the range of reasonable responses to treat assaulting a colleague as gross misconduct.
This even happened once:
Caller: But some of our clients really like Person X, and I don't think they'd be too happy if we sacked him.
Me: You aren't obliged to sack him. But it may be worth bearing in mind that you have a duty of care to all your employees, and it's possible that being obliged to continue to work with someone who punched him in the face may lead Person Y to consider submitting a grievance or even potentially claiming constructive dismissal.
(Yes, I talked like this. I still do if you ask me this kind of question.)
I believe that sacking Person X when he punches Person Y in the face is a very reasonable thing to do, and this belief does not change one bit if that person is Jeremy Clarkson. You don't get to punch someone in the face at work and continue working there, unless you're trying to stop them committing an act of mass destruction or you work as a boxer or something. Being good at your job or popular with a lot of customers (whatever your opinion on Clarkson, he is clearly both those things) isn't and shouldn't be enough to give you leave to punch people in the face.
This has been your employment law update for March. Thank you.
Caller: So in the office/on site/at the staff party, Person X punched Person Y in the face.
Me: What have you done so far?
Caller: We've suspended Person X. We're not sure what to do now.
Me: [explains disciplinary procedures]
Caller: Can we sack him?
Me: Generally speaking, it's considered to be within the range of reasonable responses to treat assaulting a colleague as gross misconduct.
This even happened once:
Caller: But some of our clients really like Person X, and I don't think they'd be too happy if we sacked him.
Me: You aren't obliged to sack him. But it may be worth bearing in mind that you have a duty of care to all your employees, and it's possible that being obliged to continue to work with someone who punched him in the face may lead Person Y to consider submitting a grievance or even potentially claiming constructive dismissal.
(Yes, I talked like this. I still do if you ask me this kind of question.)
I believe that sacking Person X when he punches Person Y in the face is a very reasonable thing to do, and this belief does not change one bit if that person is Jeremy Clarkson. You don't get to punch someone in the face at work and continue working there, unless you're trying to stop them committing an act of mass destruction or you work as a boxer or something. Being good at your job or popular with a lot of customers (whatever your opinion on Clarkson, he is clearly both those things) isn't and shouldn't be enough to give you leave to punch people in the face.
This has been your employment law update for March. Thank you.
Tuesday, 24 March 2015
new office analysis
New office pros:
It has been officially certified as Not Falling Down
It is currently proudly displaying a Union Jack-painted washing machine in its reception, which is hilarious.
The doors are just normal doors and don't randomly malfunction and lock everyone in or out.
We are allowed ACTUAL BINS here. This is such a stupid thing to be happy about, but I might be happier about this than anything else. Why would you take all the bins, previous office? Why?
There is WiFi and a quiet room, and I have been given to understand that there is a free gym for general staff use.
Everybody is in such a state over the sudden move that they keep buying and passing out doughnuts for no real reason. I approve of this.
New office cons:
I am in a basement. Not just any basement. An Emergency Basement.
It is a little-used and therefore rather smelly Emergency Basement.
There is music leaking in from the post room all day, not loud enough to listen to but not quiet enough to ignore. It's about 95% terrible, which is sort of worse than if it was all terrible because the 5% keeps getting my hopes up.
The building is weird and twisty and non-signposted, so I have absolutely no idea where I am, how I got here, or how to get back out again.
The nearest "tea point" has no way of a) heating water or b) storing milk.
In lieu of security doors, they have rather scary security guards all over the place. Because of said security guards, I have to actually wear my security pass, with its picture of Scary Wonky Radioactive Oompa-Loompa Jen, at all times.
It really does smell quite bad. This bears repeating.
It has been officially certified as Not Falling Down
It is currently proudly displaying a Union Jack-painted washing machine in its reception, which is hilarious.
The doors are just normal doors and don't randomly malfunction and lock everyone in or out.
We are allowed ACTUAL BINS here. This is such a stupid thing to be happy about, but I might be happier about this than anything else. Why would you take all the bins, previous office? Why?
There is WiFi and a quiet room, and I have been given to understand that there is a free gym for general staff use.
Everybody is in such a state over the sudden move that they keep buying and passing out doughnuts for no real reason. I approve of this.
New office cons:
I am in a basement. Not just any basement. An Emergency Basement.
It is a little-used and therefore rather smelly Emergency Basement.
There is music leaking in from the post room all day, not loud enough to listen to but not quiet enough to ignore. It's about 95% terrible, which is sort of worse than if it was all terrible because the 5% keeps getting my hopes up.
The building is weird and twisty and non-signposted, so I have absolutely no idea where I am, how I got here, or how to get back out again.
The nearest "tea point" has no way of a) heating water or b) storing milk.
In lieu of security doors, they have rather scary security guards all over the place. Because of said security guards, I have to actually wear my security pass, with its picture of Scary Wonky Radioactive Oompa-Loompa Jen, at all times.
It really does smell quite bad. This bears repeating.
Monday, 23 March 2015
Sunday, expanded
Birthday month may be over but other people are still continuing to get older, and yesterday was my boyfriend's birthday. For various reasons I made most of his presents. I made him cushions (three. I got carried away), one of which had a picture of his face on it.
Him: [staring at cushion and laughing his head off] That's terrifying.
Me: I know.
Him: I love it. It's terrifying.
Me: I know it is. It's been sitting in my room just looking at me for several days.
Him: I sort of feel like I should leave it here.
Me: No way. You having a cushion with your face on it is funny. Me having a cushion with your face on it would just be creepy.
I also made him a cake shaped like a fruit market, because I miss when I used to make people cakes shaped like ridiculous things all the time. Presenting people with tanks and race tracks and beans on toast and pianos and snakes and Christopher Walken sat navs was fun; the recipient usually knew I made stupid cakes and was probably even expecting one, but they still wouldn't know quite what to say when they saw it.
We went for dinner. It was by far the most expensive dinner I've ever had in my life. If it had been half the cost it still would have been the most expensive dinner I'd ever had in my life by some way. I've never done fancy food and I don't really understand it, but it was what he wanted to do for his birthday, so off we went. I dressed head-to-toe 1920s and felt very pleased with myself. We had eight courses (plus a cheese board), all of which were very tasty. At least six of them I wouldn't have gone near a year or two ago. I feel like I'm growing. It was amazing food, and I do understand why it's a thing now, but I still can't get my head round choosing to spend that much money on one meal. But that's OK, it's his thing. It doesn't have to be mine.
(Also we had matched wine with the whole thing, plus some champagne, and I have not been my brightest and sparkliest today.)
Tomorrow I go to my new office. I am nervous, and not the good kind of nervous.
Him: [staring at cushion and laughing his head off] That's terrifying.
Me: I know.
Him: I love it. It's terrifying.
Me: I know it is. It's been sitting in my room just looking at me for several days.
Him: I sort of feel like I should leave it here.
Me: No way. You having a cushion with your face on it is funny. Me having a cushion with your face on it would just be creepy.
I also made him a cake shaped like a fruit market, because I miss when I used to make people cakes shaped like ridiculous things all the time. Presenting people with tanks and race tracks and beans on toast and pianos and snakes and Christopher Walken sat navs was fun; the recipient usually knew I made stupid cakes and was probably even expecting one, but they still wouldn't know quite what to say when they saw it.
We went for dinner. It was by far the most expensive dinner I've ever had in my life. If it had been half the cost it still would have been the most expensive dinner I'd ever had in my life by some way. I've never done fancy food and I don't really understand it, but it was what he wanted to do for his birthday, so off we went. I dressed head-to-toe 1920s and felt very pleased with myself. We had eight courses (plus a cheese board), all of which were very tasty. At least six of them I wouldn't have gone near a year or two ago. I feel like I'm growing. It was amazing food, and I do understand why it's a thing now, but I still can't get my head round choosing to spend that much money on one meal. But that's OK, it's his thing. It doesn't have to be mine.
(Also we had matched wine with the whole thing, plus some champagne, and I have not been my brightest and sparkliest today.)
Tomorrow I go to my new office. I am nervous, and not the good kind of nervous.
Sunday
(It's still Sunday. I just got home.)
Tonight I have had an eight course dinner, plus a cheese board. I have had seven glasses of wine, plus a champagne aperitif. I am too drunk to write. This is OK.
Tonight I have had an eight course dinner, plus a cheese board. I have had seven glasses of wine, plus a champagne aperitif. I am too drunk to write. This is OK.
Saturday, 21 March 2015
no time
Today I have made things. Birthday presents and birthday cake. I created birthdayness with my hands.
I went on an emergency shopping trip to John Lewis to buy some extra duck down cushion pads, which is possibly the most middle-class thing I've ever said in my life. Oxford Street on a Saturday lunchtime is a particular joy I could have done without. I don't find it quite as horrendous as most people say they do, but it nevertheless makes me into a horrible person inside my own head, hating everyone who stops or slows down or has a big bag or appears to be frightened of escalators.
Now I have to go out, to create birthdayness with my presence. And then tomorrow, I will create birthdayness by giving my boyfriend a handmade cushion with a picture of his face on it. Why not?
I went on an emergency shopping trip to John Lewis to buy some extra duck down cushion pads, which is possibly the most middle-class thing I've ever said in my life. Oxford Street on a Saturday lunchtime is a particular joy I could have done without. I don't find it quite as horrendous as most people say they do, but it nevertheless makes me into a horrible person inside my own head, hating everyone who stops or slows down or has a big bag or appears to be frightened of escalators.
Now I have to go out, to create birthdayness with my presence. And then tomorrow, I will create birthdayness by giving my boyfriend a handmade cushion with a picture of his face on it. Why not?
Friday, 20 March 2015
leaving
I left my office today, possibly forever.
Over the past four or so years, I've got very comfortable there, stupid high-rise rabbit warren that it is. It's familiar. Ingrained deeply enough into my brain that I can get to it, get around it and get away from it without ever having woken up properly. I can spend days, weeks, months on autopilot there, which I know isn't good for me but I've been struggling to persuade myself to give up that level of ease in exchange for uncertainty and scariness.
But the office is falling down (I might have mentioned), so we're being relocated for the short term until they find somewhere to put us for the medium term until they decide what to do in the long term. We've been advised that it'll take six months to stop the office falling down, and if everyone goes back, I'd like not to go with them.
The comfort is being taken from me. It'll be harder to get to work, the short term office will be much, much less pleasant (and "pleasant" would never have been a word I'd use to describe our building), and I won't really have my own space anymore. And since I'm going to be uncomfortable anyway, this might be the time to force myself to move on.
Over the past four or so years, I've got very comfortable there, stupid high-rise rabbit warren that it is. It's familiar. Ingrained deeply enough into my brain that I can get to it, get around it and get away from it without ever having woken up properly. I can spend days, weeks, months on autopilot there, which I know isn't good for me but I've been struggling to persuade myself to give up that level of ease in exchange for uncertainty and scariness.
But the office is falling down (I might have mentioned), so we're being relocated for the short term until they find somewhere to put us for the medium term until they decide what to do in the long term. We've been advised that it'll take six months to stop the office falling down, and if everyone goes back, I'd like not to go with them.
The comfort is being taken from me. It'll be harder to get to work, the short term office will be much, much less pleasant (and "pleasant" would never have been a word I'd use to describe our building), and I won't really have my own space anymore. And since I'm going to be uncomfortable anyway, this might be the time to force myself to move on.
Thursday, 19 March 2015
sick
I don't feel well. I don't know if it's the kind of not well that comes from stress, or from unkind office lighting, or from having a bug of some description, but everything in my head feels uneasy and strained, and my concentration is shot. I space out or feel woozy or get a wave of nausea and then it goes away, but every time I worry that's it, that's the one that means I'm really truly sick and won't be able to do any of the things I'm meant to be doing this weekend.
The roof of my mouth aches. I don't know what this means. I wish I understood my own body more, what causes an ache here or a pain there and the sort of things that can be done about. It's on my list of things to learn, but it's the kind of knowledge that scares me - as soon as I learn a little bit I'll start to see how much I don't know about myself, how much can go wrong, how many things I've been doing to hurt myself without knowing it. I know that if I choose to get deeper into it, I'll find answers to things I didn't even know there were questions for and things would make a lot more sense, but the fear is there nevertheless.
I doubt myself when I'm sick. I question whether I'm really sick, or whether my brain is just trying to convince me I'm sick because it doesn't want to do something. Being sick is something my depressed brain does when it's pretending to be my rational brain - I can't go out because I'm depressed, but it tells me I can't go out because I'm sick. Feel that twinge when you stepped. You're going to faint, you're going to be sick, you'd better get back in bed before something awful happens. I'm not particularly depressed at the moment, but my anxiety brain is alive and well and trying to make me afraid of the depression monster.
You need to do EVERYTHING. ALL the things. Right now.
Maybe I don't. Maybe I just need to let myself be sick.
The roof of my mouth aches. I don't know what this means. I wish I understood my own body more, what causes an ache here or a pain there and the sort of things that can be done about. It's on my list of things to learn, but it's the kind of knowledge that scares me - as soon as I learn a little bit I'll start to see how much I don't know about myself, how much can go wrong, how many things I've been doing to hurt myself without knowing it. I know that if I choose to get deeper into it, I'll find answers to things I didn't even know there were questions for and things would make a lot more sense, but the fear is there nevertheless.
I doubt myself when I'm sick. I question whether I'm really sick, or whether my brain is just trying to convince me I'm sick because it doesn't want to do something. Being sick is something my depressed brain does when it's pretending to be my rational brain - I can't go out because I'm depressed, but it tells me I can't go out because I'm sick. Feel that twinge when you stepped. You're going to faint, you're going to be sick, you'd better get back in bed before something awful happens. I'm not particularly depressed at the moment, but my anxiety brain is alive and well and trying to make me afraid of the depression monster.
You need to do EVERYTHING. ALL the things. Right now.
Maybe I don't. Maybe I just need to let myself be sick.
people-watching: men on a journey edition
I am stressed, and it's making it hard to write, but I promised. So here are some men I happened to see today.
A young man walking up a busy street looking lost, clutching a large handful of fresh mint.
A man in full Woody from Toy Story costume, Woody expression fixed on his face, wandering around the make-up department of John Lewis.
An old man with crazy curly hair, wearing an enormous hunting overcoat and a rhinestone-covered women's watch, standing on the tube apologising to everyone in a tone that was either profuse and well-mannered or straight-up bald-faced sarcasm, and I spent the entire journey trying to work out which.
A man with a baby strapped to his chest, attempting awkwardly to teach her about basic anatomy. He was thrilled when she seemed to understand him, but at the same time clearly perplexed about why such a thing should make him so happy.
A man sitting on the tube as it came into its final destination and continuing to sit as everyone else left. He was asked to move, and did so slowly and with a sigh, like he'd been expecting this but was nevertheless disappointed that it had happened.
(Also, I am one minute late posting this. I wrote it on Wednesday and haven't gone to bed, which makes it still Wednesday by all sensible laws.)
A young man walking up a busy street looking lost, clutching a large handful of fresh mint.
A man in full Woody from Toy Story costume, Woody expression fixed on his face, wandering around the make-up department of John Lewis.
An old man with crazy curly hair, wearing an enormous hunting overcoat and a rhinestone-covered women's watch, standing on the tube apologising to everyone in a tone that was either profuse and well-mannered or straight-up bald-faced sarcasm, and I spent the entire journey trying to work out which.
A man with a baby strapped to his chest, attempting awkwardly to teach her about basic anatomy. He was thrilled when she seemed to understand him, but at the same time clearly perplexed about why such a thing should make him so happy.
A man sitting on the tube as it came into its final destination and continuing to sit as everyone else left. He was asked to move, and did so slowly and with a sigh, like he'd been expecting this but was nevertheless disappointed that it had happened.
(Also, I am one minute late posting this. I wrote it on Wednesday and haven't gone to bed, which makes it still Wednesday by all sensible laws.)
Tuesday, 17 March 2015
...but the plan
[Note: post is about current emotional state. Post may read as whiny and/or daft]
I went to therapy today. My therapist wrote an agenda for the session on the whiteboard, as he always does, and we started talking. About fifteen minutes before the end of the session I realised that we were still on item two of four and there was no way we were going to get to the other two things today. This is an entirely normal thing to happen, but it stressed the hell out of me. I stopped listening to anything he was saying because I couldn't get past how he wasn't sticking to the plan, dammit. Then I started trying to justify my reactions in my head.
He did this last week as well. With those same two things! One of which I asked to talk about! We are never going to get to those things. Why is he still talking about this thing? We should be done with this thing. Nobody cares about this thing! Why did he spend over half the session on the homework and telling me about the lizard brain again? Why does he even write these agendas if he's not going to stick to them?
This carried on until I got frustrated enough to burst into tears, which of course he asked about, and professional therapist though he might be, I could see that he had absolutely no idea what my problem was. He's usually great at listening to me, but he couldn't understand that I wasn't upset about us not dealing with those specific subjects so much as I was upset about the fact that he said we would. He said.
This afternoon I took a meeting at work. The chair is crap at chairing meetings, so I never expect them to run to the time we set out in advance. But this time, just before discussion of the final item started, someone asked him how long it would take so that he could plan his journey home. "Oh, about fifteen, twenty minutes," said the chair. "We're definitely not going to need the whole half hour." OK, I thought, good. That's a plan now. He obviously knows what needs to be said. In practice, this last point took an hour and a half. Even though he said. Most of it wasn't relevant so I didn't have anything to do except sit there and freak out. I drank an entire decanter of water trying not to cry.
It's ridiculous, and I know it's ridiculous. Being pissed off that he wasted an hour and a half of my life is normal. Freaking out about how that wasn't the plan and why was nobody else bothered about the plan is rather less normal. But I'm doing it all the time. I do it when a friend tells me they'll do something and then don't do it. I do it when my boyfriend and I agree a plan and then don't immediately start doing the planned thing. I do it when the train says it's ready to depart and then fails to depart.
I don't really know what to do about it either. There doesn't seem to be any advice on how to stop this because people don't generally think it's a thing. But it is a thing, and it's in my head and I can't get it out. Gah.
Monday, 16 March 2015
annoying things about my office falling down
- My office is falling down, and I don't consider falling down to be the ideal state for an office I have to work in.
- My office fell down last year as well, but they hastily patched it up and decided it would probably be fine for a couple of hundred people to keep working in it.
- It was discovered that the office was falling down (still falling down, or a whole new falling down, I'm not sure) because they did a refit to allow one of the bigwigs to have a bigger office, a sofa, and a 40-inch TV.
- That refit was over a year in the planning, and everybody decided not to check if the office was falling down, or if any building work would make the office fall down more, until they started drilling into things.
- Immediate evacuation of the falling-down office has been advised, but apparently it's not falling down badly enough for us to not have to work here until they find somewhere else to put us.
- Most of us will probably be moving to the offices of our sponsor department, who have been imposing ever-increasing space restrictions on us but have 50 spare desks just lying around waiting, presumably, for an emergency like this.
- The closest tube to the sponsor office is a scary busy one, and I have a history of losing consciousness (falling down, if you will) on scary busy tubes.
- The powers that be have informed non-London parts of the organisation that the reason for this immediate and unplanned evacuation is that the office (which, may I remind you, is falling down) is "quite expensive".
- It has been suggested to us by mid-level higher-ups that we not make a fuss about the office falling down, because the higher-level higher-ups don't like it when people make a fuss about silly things like offices falling down.
- All the doors to offices and kitchens have been locked and taped up with stripy hazard tape.
- I do not appear to be in possession of any stripy hazard tape.
- We are obligated to fix, but may choose not to return to, the office that's falling down, which annoys me because of a) uncertainty and b) unnecessary effort.
- The idea of buildings falling down in general unnerves me, because inside is where it's safe and I don't like the thought of inside suddenly not being there anymore.
- I am sitting twenty-two floors up, and if the office falls down our fate will be somewhat worse than "exposure to traffic noise and March weather".
- Sitting twenty-two floors up and being told the office is falling down fills me with the need to write unnecessarily dramatic sentences about "fate".
- Thinking about my office falling down while I'm in it is making me eat anxiety chocolate I don't want.
- Seriously, why am I sitting in an office that's been declared "about to fall down"?
- This just happened:
Me: Why are we sitting in an office that's about to fall down?
Manager: Well, I suppose it's not really falling down.
Me: So why are we evacuating?
Manager: Because the building's falling down.
...and I feel at once too smart and not smart enough for this level of logic.
- My office fell down last year as well, but they hastily patched it up and decided it would probably be fine for a couple of hundred people to keep working in it.
- It was discovered that the office was falling down (still falling down, or a whole new falling down, I'm not sure) because they did a refit to allow one of the bigwigs to have a bigger office, a sofa, and a 40-inch TV.
- That refit was over a year in the planning, and everybody decided not to check if the office was falling down, or if any building work would make the office fall down more, until they started drilling into things.
- Immediate evacuation of the falling-down office has been advised, but apparently it's not falling down badly enough for us to not have to work here until they find somewhere else to put us.
- Most of us will probably be moving to the offices of our sponsor department, who have been imposing ever-increasing space restrictions on us but have 50 spare desks just lying around waiting, presumably, for an emergency like this.
- The closest tube to the sponsor office is a scary busy one, and I have a history of losing consciousness (falling down, if you will) on scary busy tubes.
- The powers that be have informed non-London parts of the organisation that the reason for this immediate and unplanned evacuation is that the office (which, may I remind you, is falling down) is "quite expensive".
- It has been suggested to us by mid-level higher-ups that we not make a fuss about the office falling down, because the higher-level higher-ups don't like it when people make a fuss about silly things like offices falling down.
- All the doors to offices and kitchens have been locked and taped up with stripy hazard tape.
- I do not appear to be in possession of any stripy hazard tape.
- We are obligated to fix, but may choose not to return to, the office that's falling down, which annoys me because of a) uncertainty and b) unnecessary effort.
- The idea of buildings falling down in general unnerves me, because inside is where it's safe and I don't like the thought of inside suddenly not being there anymore.
- I am sitting twenty-two floors up, and if the office falls down our fate will be somewhat worse than "exposure to traffic noise and March weather".
- Sitting twenty-two floors up and being told the office is falling down fills me with the need to write unnecessarily dramatic sentences about "fate".
- Thinking about my office falling down while I'm in it is making me eat anxiety chocolate I don't want.
- Seriously, why am I sitting in an office that's been declared "about to fall down"?
- This just happened:
Me: Why are we sitting in an office that's about to fall down?
Manager: Well, I suppose it's not really falling down.
Me: So why are we evacuating?
Manager: Because the building's falling down.
...and I feel at once too smart and not smart enough for this level of logic.
Sunday, 15 March 2015
so far
In the first two and a half months of 2015, I have:
Been to four different countries
Learned to sew
Gone to a therapist
Switched to a different therapist who doesn't tell me to solve my problems by bothering strangers in Tesco
Taken up kickboxing
Made a birthday present
Started seeing an osteopath
Cleared most of the extraneous crap out of my bedroom
Made a couple of hard but sensible decisions
Organised a birthday party
Accidentally found myself in a beginner pole dancing class and been hilariously awful at it
Booked onto an acrobatics course
Booked onto a dressmaking course
Not freaked out on being served a plateful of fish with heads (there is much more to be written about this one)
Been to various dinners, shows, and dances in a variety of company
(It's easy, at the moment, for me to convince myself I'm not doing very much, not being productive enough, not learning enough, letting life pass me by. I'm writing this down to show myself that I've actually done a hell of a lot and really don't need to speed up or try to cram more stuff in. I'm doing OK and don't need to keep endlessly asking more of myself.)
Been to four different countries
Learned to sew
Gone to a therapist
Switched to a different therapist who doesn't tell me to solve my problems by bothering strangers in Tesco
Taken up kickboxing
Made a birthday present
Started seeing an osteopath
Cleared most of the extraneous crap out of my bedroom
Made a couple of hard but sensible decisions
Organised a birthday party
Accidentally found myself in a beginner pole dancing class and been hilariously awful at it
Booked onto an acrobatics course
Booked onto a dressmaking course
Not freaked out on being served a plateful of fish with heads (there is much more to be written about this one)
Been to various dinners, shows, and dances in a variety of company
(It's easy, at the moment, for me to convince myself I'm not doing very much, not being productive enough, not learning enough, letting life pass me by. I'm writing this down to show myself that I've actually done a hell of a lot and really don't need to speed up or try to cram more stuff in. I'm doing OK and don't need to keep endlessly asking more of myself.)
Saturday, 14 March 2015
people watching: mindfulness
The man in front of me stepped off the escalator and approached the ticket barrier. He stopped in front of it, and took a moment. Here he was. Here the ticket barrier was.
He took out his Oyster card. Another moment.
He laid it, with slow, assured precision, on the card reader.
The machine beeped and the gates swung open. He took another moment and nodded to the machine. Not a gesture of thanks; just an acknowledgement that all was as it should be in the world. He strode through, fully satisfied with his experience.
I wanted to be charmed, but mostly I was just irritated that he'd made me fifteen seconds later than I otherwise would have been.
He took out his Oyster card. Another moment.
He laid it, with slow, assured precision, on the card reader.
The machine beeped and the gates swung open. He took another moment and nodded to the machine. Not a gesture of thanks; just an acknowledgement that all was as it should be in the world. He strode through, fully satisfied with his experience.
I wanted to be charmed, but mostly I was just irritated that he'd made me fifteen seconds later than I otherwise would have been.
Friday, 13 March 2015
there is no justice
...THERE'S JUST ME.
Terry Pratchett has died, and I feel like I ought to say something.
Celebrity deaths don't generally have much of an impact on me, even if I liked what they did and what they said. I feel sadness, but it's sadness about death as a concept, sadness because people have lost someone they love. I don't feel sadness for myself, as if I've lost something. The one exception to this was Linda Smith, who I still miss as strongly as though I actually knew her.
But now Terry Pratchett has died. And it kind of hurts. I can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound monumentally dorky, so I'm just going to go ahead and sound monumentally dorky.
Terry Pratchett was my very favourite author, as he is for many people. He occupied that space where so many people loved him that it wasn't considered the thing to write positive reviews. The ones I remember reading all said "oh, this silly little piece of genre fiction is very silly, isn't it? There is absolutely nothing to criticise so I shall praise it with all the condescension I can muster, because despite being excellent, it's not a real book. It's not literature."
Susan hated literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
I don't write fantasy. I've tried, and I can cobble together something OK-ish, but it's not what I'm good at. Where Pratchett influenced me most was in my general philosophy of life (I KNOW I KNOW I AM SUCH A DORK I'M SORRY).
I read the Witches books as a teenage baby Wiccan who had read many books on the subject of being a Wiccan and knew that one was supposed to have a large supply of ceremonial tools that one used solely for ritual and spellcasting purposes. I had two or three boxes full of supplies that I'd put together from the lists I'd read; most of it had never been used, but I'd done my research and I knew that this was the way to do things right. Pratchett's Witches were not this kind of witch.
She took the breadknife. It did all the things the other knife could do, plus you could cut bread with it.
Pratchett's Witches changed me. I stopped accumulating stuff and following stupid complicated spells (spell recipes? Spell instructions? There must be a word for this, surely), stopped having weird rules about what could be used for which thing, and after not too long a time stopped calling myself Wiccan entirely. I decided that spirituality and common sense weren't incompatible. I changed my approach to reading Tarot cards and started treating them as a focal point for a problem-solving session.
Cardboard isn't very bright.
I'd spent a lot of time in unhelpful corners of the internet, reading about life and religion and philosophy and things that were right or wrong from the perspective of other inexperienced teenagers and getting thoroughly confused by it all, when I read Carpe Jugulum and had a lightbulb moment.
"And sin, young man, is when you treats other people as things. That's it. That's all sin is."
"Surely there are worse crimes."
"But they starts with thinking of people as things..."
Life made so much more sense after reading that (YES I WAS AM AND SHALL ALWAYS REMAIN A DORK). I am a different person for Pratchett's Witches, and I feel a loss in my life now that the mind which created them has gone.
I met Pratchett once. He signed my book and said something polite. I had a mild freak-out and babbled something about Primark. He nodded patiently and waited for me to get out of the way of the queue. I was touched. And also a dork.
So thank you, Sir Terry, for everything you wrote. You changed me. I hope Death was as you pictured him.
Terry Pratchett has died, and I feel like I ought to say something.
Celebrity deaths don't generally have much of an impact on me, even if I liked what they did and what they said. I feel sadness, but it's sadness about death as a concept, sadness because people have lost someone they love. I don't feel sadness for myself, as if I've lost something. The one exception to this was Linda Smith, who I still miss as strongly as though I actually knew her.
But now Terry Pratchett has died. And it kind of hurts. I can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound monumentally dorky, so I'm just going to go ahead and sound monumentally dorky.
Terry Pratchett was my very favourite author, as he is for many people. He occupied that space where so many people loved him that it wasn't considered the thing to write positive reviews. The ones I remember reading all said "oh, this silly little piece of genre fiction is very silly, isn't it? There is absolutely nothing to criticise so I shall praise it with all the condescension I can muster, because despite being excellent, it's not a real book. It's not literature."
Susan hated literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
I don't write fantasy. I've tried, and I can cobble together something OK-ish, but it's not what I'm good at. Where Pratchett influenced me most was in my general philosophy of life (I KNOW I KNOW I AM SUCH A DORK I'M SORRY).
I read the Witches books as a teenage baby Wiccan who had read many books on the subject of being a Wiccan and knew that one was supposed to have a large supply of ceremonial tools that one used solely for ritual and spellcasting purposes. I had two or three boxes full of supplies that I'd put together from the lists I'd read; most of it had never been used, but I'd done my research and I knew that this was the way to do things right. Pratchett's Witches were not this kind of witch.
She took the breadknife. It did all the things the other knife could do, plus you could cut bread with it.
Pratchett's Witches changed me. I stopped accumulating stuff and following stupid complicated spells (spell recipes? Spell instructions? There must be a word for this, surely), stopped having weird rules about what could be used for which thing, and after not too long a time stopped calling myself Wiccan entirely. I decided that spirituality and common sense weren't incompatible. I changed my approach to reading Tarot cards and started treating them as a focal point for a problem-solving session.
Cardboard isn't very bright.
I'd spent a lot of time in unhelpful corners of the internet, reading about life and religion and philosophy and things that were right or wrong from the perspective of other inexperienced teenagers and getting thoroughly confused by it all, when I read Carpe Jugulum and had a lightbulb moment.
"And sin, young man, is when you treats other people as things. That's it. That's all sin is."
"Surely there are worse crimes."
"But they starts with thinking of people as things..."
Life made so much more sense after reading that (YES I WAS AM AND SHALL ALWAYS REMAIN A DORK). I am a different person for Pratchett's Witches, and I feel a loss in my life now that the mind which created them has gone.
I met Pratchett once. He signed my book and said something polite. I had a mild freak-out and babbled something about Primark. He nodded patiently and waited for me to get out of the way of the queue. I was touched. And also a dork.
So thank you, Sir Terry, for everything you wrote. You changed me. I hope Death was as you pictured him.
Thursday, 12 March 2015
seven
I've been struggling to write lately, so in the hope of brute-forcing my way through it, I intend to do a seven-week stretch of daily blogging taking me to the end of April. I am not expecting length or quality of myself, just words on a page to remind myself how words on a page work.
The fact that I haven't been able to write fiction for so long bothers me. All I managed last year was eight straight pages of incidental dialogue, and I had a similar problem the year before. My creative energy is all being channelled into increasingly stupid schemes, imagining a webcomic I have no way of actually drawing because I suck at it, and rewriting I Will Survive to be about whatever the last sentence someone just said to me was (I have landlord I Will Survive, ketchup I Will Survive, Satan's minions I Will Survive. It's getting really hard to do now that I've buried the actual lyrics under all my stupid rewritten versions). I want to have a story this year. Even if it's not all written down, even if the words I write don't quite add up to the story in my head, I want a story. I want characters and a plot and at least one page that doesn't make me want to break the nearest three objects with my head. So I hope that somewhere in the next seven weeks, I'm able to post something I made up. Two sentences, a paragraph, whatever. Just... something.
I will also probably invent some kind of ongoing project or series, in case I get stuck.
The fact that I haven't been able to write fiction for so long bothers me. All I managed last year was eight straight pages of incidental dialogue, and I had a similar problem the year before. My creative energy is all being channelled into increasingly stupid schemes, imagining a webcomic I have no way of actually drawing because I suck at it, and rewriting I Will Survive to be about whatever the last sentence someone just said to me was (I have landlord I Will Survive, ketchup I Will Survive, Satan's minions I Will Survive. It's getting really hard to do now that I've buried the actual lyrics under all my stupid rewritten versions). I want to have a story this year. Even if it's not all written down, even if the words I write don't quite add up to the story in my head, I want a story. I want characters and a plot and at least one page that doesn't make me want to break the nearest three objects with my head. So I hope that somewhere in the next seven weeks, I'm able to post something I made up. Two sentences, a paragraph, whatever. Just... something.
I will also probably invent some kind of ongoing project or series, in case I get stuck.
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
storybook
I was the weird kid who liked books. I came to school
already knowing how to read, and I read everything. Everything we were
assigned, anything I was given, anything I might have found myself next to in a
quiet moment. When I was about seven years old, I spent many an instructive
hour lying on my nan’s bed reading her Bible, having exhausted all the kids’
books in her house.
[several years later]
Mum: We all thought you were finding religion.
Me: What? Have you read that thing? Everyone is horrible to everyone and everyone dies. And God is an arsehole.
Mum: Why did you read the whole book, then?
Me: It was a book.
I knew exactly how stories worked. The structures, patterns and flow became second nature to me, and I started to think in stories, silently narrating mundane things that happened to me and wondering at what point in the book this particular mundane thing would occur if my life were a story that others might read. I understood adventure and mystery and romance, at least as they related to storytelling. I didn’t really understand romance. Boys were weird and they picked on me. As I hit my teens and started reading a few contemporary romance novels, I concluded that romance was a slightly unpleasant thing that existed between an annoying woman and an arrogant man who didn’t like each other very much. But it was still something I wanted, because it seemed as though I ought to want it, such was the importance given to it by everyone and everything around me.
When I was seventeen, my storybook came along. I met a boy at my Saturday job in the supermarket, and after a few months of talking bollocks and very definitely not flirting, we were a couple. We went from ‘friends’ to ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ almost immediately. It wasn’t long before he bought me a ring and we planned to get married.
It didn’t work out, and the reasons for it not working out are the kind that make it very difficult to tell this story from the perspective I’m about to tell it. It’s difficult to tell this story from any perspective other than “Here is a list of six years’ worth of horrible things”. I’ve written that story before, and thousands of other people have written it too. It’s a common, unpalatable and necessary story. But I haven’t seen much of the story I’m about to tell: our relationship was a storybook, even though it didn’t follow the patterns and flow that I knew from what I’d read, because he seemed to be genuinely convinced that that’s what it was. The story of him, playing Man, and me, playing Woman, Falling in Love and living Happily Ever After.
When we fought, which was a lot, he would reach for the script of Man and Woman Fall in Love and flip to “Fight Scene”. Man would cast his eyes downward mournfully (Man did a lot of things mournfully). Man would speak slowly, evenly, in a voice suffused by grief that he and Woman were fighting. Man would respond to tearful complaints with “I know”, and launch into a grave, melodramatic speech about how Woman’s love was everything to him, and of course if she wanted to leave that was up to her, and he would simply live out the rest of his life as a lonely, shattered man, wouldn’t he? He would never find anyone else, just grieve for their love for ever and ever.
I want to be clear here: he said every last one of these things to me on a regular basis. There were times when pretty much this exact Fight Scene would happen multiple times a week. I don’t think we ever went longer than a month without it. Sometimes he would recite it even when we weren’t fighting. “Hey, Jen. Here’s what I’d be doing now if you left me.” There was manipulative intent, I’m sure, but I also think part of him really believed it, that he really thought this was what you were supposed to do. He would sometimes comment on what passers-by would think his income was based on his being with me, always viewing us from the outside and not the inside.
He came to realise that I didn’t really know the characters of Man and Woman, and would quite often attempt to educate me. The characters of Man and Woman are constant, and played by everyone. All men are Man, and all women are Woman. Their traits do not change. He would tell me stories about Man’s slavery to his own uselessness, his inherent inferiority to the emotionally strong Woman and his gratitude that she would put up with the terrible Man-behaviour that he knew was carved into his soul.
My favourite of these was during my second year of university, when he announced to me that my then-flatmate and sole good male friend (Woman does not have male friends) was in love with me.
“What are you basing that on?”
“Just trust me.”
“No.”
“Alright.” He sighed the sigh of a reluctant martyr. “There’s an unwritten code among men. When you’re introduced to another man and he’s with his girlfriend, you have to nod to him and take a step back. That shows you respect his territory, you’re not going to try and make a move on his girl.”
“Um.”
“When we met your friend from school that time, that’s what I did to her boyfriend, nodded and stepped back. It’s a sign of respect.”
“It’s – huh.”
“And when you introduced me to your flatmate, he didn’t do that. He folded his arms. He looked at me with folded arms. And that’s a challenge. That’s how I know he’s in love with you.”
“Because he folded his arms?”
“All men know this code. It’s just how it works. He didn’t show me that respect.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. Women just don’t understand men.”
This conversation happened nine years ago, and sometimes I’m still compelled to turn to men I know and say, “Hey, so when you meet another guy, do you take a deliberate step back from his girlfriend to show that you respect his ownership?” I have many male friends these days and I know that men are not Man, that Man was just that one specific weird guy, but I keep asking. Just in case.
As we got closer to the endgame of Happily Ever After, when I’d graduated and we could be openly engaged instead of hiding it from my mother (who had Views on people being engaged before they’d finished educating themselves), when he could see marriage and mortgage and babies within touching distance, when my reticence on the last two points didn’t make a dent in him, he began to see me as Woman rather than me more and more often. He was confused as to why I wasn’t playing it correctly, why I didn’t say or do or want the right things, and that’s where I stop being able to tell the story this way.
We broke up over the phone one day in mid-August, after previous attempts to break up in person had led to him listing the overwhelming amount of work I’d have to do to extricate myself from the relationship. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and tried to explain, again, what was wrong with us. He cut me off.
“It doesn’t matter. Nope, nope, no need to discuss it, you’ve made your decision. I’ll go now and you’ll never hear from me again. Goodbye.”
At that point we were almost breaking up every week. We almost broke up every time we spoke to each other. I was ill at the time, so ill that I barely left the house, and sometimes I pretended I was too ill to take any of his five daily phone calls (Every. Single. Day. For nearly six goddamn years) so that I didn’t have to almost break up with him again. Every time he made a speech like this, and every time he was expecting what normally happened, which was for me to phone back five minutes later yelling about how he never listened to me, to which he could whisper, “I know,” and with that out of my system we could get on with the happy business of having completely opposing life goals.
But this time, it was the last thing I ever heard him say. That low, whispered, dramatic “Goodbye” that he didn’t mean and I knew even at the time he didn’t mean. It was an empty threat, a babysitter closing the book with his finger on the right page, telling his misbehaving charge that if she was going to cry and say she didn’t like the story anymore, then he was just going to put the book away for good and then she’d never find out what happens, would she? I never found out what would have happened, though I can probably guess.
I expected this story to look different when I wrote it down. From the inside it looked like light absurdity, funny things that happened in a situation that wasn’t so funny, with the situation mostly excised. I was expecting it to read like the time I wrote about my wine-diluting landlord. But it doesn’t. Written down it’s still absurd, but sad and harsh. I’ve written elsewhere about the more destructive dynamics between my ex and me, and it’s not a fun read, but it at least makes some kind of sense. Anger is a motivator we’re all familiar with, even if we don’t experience it, so while it felt transgressive at the time to write publicly about scary experiences I’d had, that story – where I emerged triumphant from adversity – is a much more comfortable narrative than this one, which reads like two people having a relationship with nothing (and that’s not a reading I could reasonably dispute). But my storybook is long closed, and I don’t need to follow those conventions anymore. This is a story about a story, one that consumed everything while not ever really existing at all. It’s a sad, weird story that I needed to tell, despite its lack of Happily Ever After. There was an ending, and that’s enough.
[several years later]
Mum: We all thought you were finding religion.
Me: What? Have you read that thing? Everyone is horrible to everyone and everyone dies. And God is an arsehole.
Mum: Why did you read the whole book, then?
Me: It was a book.
I knew exactly how stories worked. The structures, patterns and flow became second nature to me, and I started to think in stories, silently narrating mundane things that happened to me and wondering at what point in the book this particular mundane thing would occur if my life were a story that others might read. I understood adventure and mystery and romance, at least as they related to storytelling. I didn’t really understand romance. Boys were weird and they picked on me. As I hit my teens and started reading a few contemporary romance novels, I concluded that romance was a slightly unpleasant thing that existed between an annoying woman and an arrogant man who didn’t like each other very much. But it was still something I wanted, because it seemed as though I ought to want it, such was the importance given to it by everyone and everything around me.
When I was seventeen, my storybook came along. I met a boy at my Saturday job in the supermarket, and after a few months of talking bollocks and very definitely not flirting, we were a couple. We went from ‘friends’ to ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ almost immediately. It wasn’t long before he bought me a ring and we planned to get married.
It didn’t work out, and the reasons for it not working out are the kind that make it very difficult to tell this story from the perspective I’m about to tell it. It’s difficult to tell this story from any perspective other than “Here is a list of six years’ worth of horrible things”. I’ve written that story before, and thousands of other people have written it too. It’s a common, unpalatable and necessary story. But I haven’t seen much of the story I’m about to tell: our relationship was a storybook, even though it didn’t follow the patterns and flow that I knew from what I’d read, because he seemed to be genuinely convinced that that’s what it was. The story of him, playing Man, and me, playing Woman, Falling in Love and living Happily Ever After.
When we fought, which was a lot, he would reach for the script of Man and Woman Fall in Love and flip to “Fight Scene”. Man would cast his eyes downward mournfully (Man did a lot of things mournfully). Man would speak slowly, evenly, in a voice suffused by grief that he and Woman were fighting. Man would respond to tearful complaints with “I know”, and launch into a grave, melodramatic speech about how Woman’s love was everything to him, and of course if she wanted to leave that was up to her, and he would simply live out the rest of his life as a lonely, shattered man, wouldn’t he? He would never find anyone else, just grieve for their love for ever and ever.
I want to be clear here: he said every last one of these things to me on a regular basis. There were times when pretty much this exact Fight Scene would happen multiple times a week. I don’t think we ever went longer than a month without it. Sometimes he would recite it even when we weren’t fighting. “Hey, Jen. Here’s what I’d be doing now if you left me.” There was manipulative intent, I’m sure, but I also think part of him really believed it, that he really thought this was what you were supposed to do. He would sometimes comment on what passers-by would think his income was based on his being with me, always viewing us from the outside and not the inside.
He came to realise that I didn’t really know the characters of Man and Woman, and would quite often attempt to educate me. The characters of Man and Woman are constant, and played by everyone. All men are Man, and all women are Woman. Their traits do not change. He would tell me stories about Man’s slavery to his own uselessness, his inherent inferiority to the emotionally strong Woman and his gratitude that she would put up with the terrible Man-behaviour that he knew was carved into his soul.
My favourite of these was during my second year of university, when he announced to me that my then-flatmate and sole good male friend (Woman does not have male friends) was in love with me.
“What are you basing that on?”
“Just trust me.”
“No.”
“Alright.” He sighed the sigh of a reluctant martyr. “There’s an unwritten code among men. When you’re introduced to another man and he’s with his girlfriend, you have to nod to him and take a step back. That shows you respect his territory, you’re not going to try and make a move on his girl.”
“Um.”
“When we met your friend from school that time, that’s what I did to her boyfriend, nodded and stepped back. It’s a sign of respect.”
“It’s – huh.”
“And when you introduced me to your flatmate, he didn’t do that. He folded his arms. He looked at me with folded arms. And that’s a challenge. That’s how I know he’s in love with you.”
“Because he folded his arms?”
“All men know this code. It’s just how it works. He didn’t show me that respect.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. Women just don’t understand men.”
This conversation happened nine years ago, and sometimes I’m still compelled to turn to men I know and say, “Hey, so when you meet another guy, do you take a deliberate step back from his girlfriend to show that you respect his ownership?” I have many male friends these days and I know that men are not Man, that Man was just that one specific weird guy, but I keep asking. Just in case.
As we got closer to the endgame of Happily Ever After, when I’d graduated and we could be openly engaged instead of hiding it from my mother (who had Views on people being engaged before they’d finished educating themselves), when he could see marriage and mortgage and babies within touching distance, when my reticence on the last two points didn’t make a dent in him, he began to see me as Woman rather than me more and more often. He was confused as to why I wasn’t playing it correctly, why I didn’t say or do or want the right things, and that’s where I stop being able to tell the story this way.
We broke up over the phone one day in mid-August, after previous attempts to break up in person had led to him listing the overwhelming amount of work I’d have to do to extricate myself from the relationship. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and tried to explain, again, what was wrong with us. He cut me off.
“It doesn’t matter. Nope, nope, no need to discuss it, you’ve made your decision. I’ll go now and you’ll never hear from me again. Goodbye.”
At that point we were almost breaking up every week. We almost broke up every time we spoke to each other. I was ill at the time, so ill that I barely left the house, and sometimes I pretended I was too ill to take any of his five daily phone calls (Every. Single. Day. For nearly six goddamn years) so that I didn’t have to almost break up with him again. Every time he made a speech like this, and every time he was expecting what normally happened, which was for me to phone back five minutes later yelling about how he never listened to me, to which he could whisper, “I know,” and with that out of my system we could get on with the happy business of having completely opposing life goals.
But this time, it was the last thing I ever heard him say. That low, whispered, dramatic “Goodbye” that he didn’t mean and I knew even at the time he didn’t mean. It was an empty threat, a babysitter closing the book with his finger on the right page, telling his misbehaving charge that if she was going to cry and say she didn’t like the story anymore, then he was just going to put the book away for good and then she’d never find out what happens, would she? I never found out what would have happened, though I can probably guess.
I expected this story to look different when I wrote it down. From the inside it looked like light absurdity, funny things that happened in a situation that wasn’t so funny, with the situation mostly excised. I was expecting it to read like the time I wrote about my wine-diluting landlord. But it doesn’t. Written down it’s still absurd, but sad and harsh. I’ve written elsewhere about the more destructive dynamics between my ex and me, and it’s not a fun read, but it at least makes some kind of sense. Anger is a motivator we’re all familiar with, even if we don’t experience it, so while it felt transgressive at the time to write publicly about scary experiences I’d had, that story – where I emerged triumphant from adversity – is a much more comfortable narrative than this one, which reads like two people having a relationship with nothing (and that’s not a reading I could reasonably dispute). But my storybook is long closed, and I don’t need to follow those conventions anymore. This is a story about a story, one that consumed everything while not ever really existing at all. It’s a sad, weird story that I needed to tell, despite its lack of Happily Ever After. There was an ending, and that’s enough.
Monday, 9 March 2015
hair logic
If right side = ringlets, then left side = frizz explosion
If left side = ringlets, then right side = flat to the ear then sticking out perpendicular to head
If left side = wavy, then right side = strange figure of eight shape
If right side = wavy, then left side = totally lank with weird kink halfway down
If left side = straight, then right side = frizz explosion
If right side = straight, then left side = unknown quantity THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED
If left side = ringlets, then right side = flat to the ear then sticking out perpendicular to head
If left side = wavy, then right side = strange figure of eight shape
If right side = wavy, then left side = totally lank with weird kink halfway down
If left side = straight, then right side = frizz explosion
If right side = straight, then left side = unknown quantity THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED
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