Writing about personal blogs yesterday reminded me of a little story I'd like to share with you on this lovely Thursday morning.
About ten years ago, I moved into a new flat. The girl already living there was someone I was friendly with but didn't know that well, and for my first weekend in the flat, she was away. The internet was set up but there was no WiFi (I am just THAT OLD) and my room was quite a long way away from the router. My new flatmate told me that while I waited for my super-extra-long cable to show up, I was welcome to use her computer. This I accepted gratefully (because my internet addiction was and is shameless) and about five minutes after getting my stuff set up, I went into her room to check my emails. I say emails, I mean diary sites. The internet basically was online journals to me in the mid-2000s. As it turned out, my new flatmate and I had that in common. Her homepage was her LiveJournal. Hey, I thought, LiveJournal! I have a LiveJournal! We should be LiveJournal buddies!
I read a couple of entries. Standard stuff about her day, her plans for the weekend, my moving in, grumbles about her course. Her writing had a voice - not the one I would have expected from knowing her personally, but that made it more interesting if anything. She clearly had an audience that she was writing to. I was enjoying myself, so I read a bit more of it. I thought it was the kind of journal that I'd probably go some way back into, once we were LiveJournal friends.
In amongst her daily happenings, she grumbled about a guy. I knew about this guy, because she grumbled about him all the time, from the very first conversation I had with her. He was not her boyfriend. Very definitely, deliberately and specifically not her boyfriend. There was a photo of him Blu-Tacked to her monitor. I knew all the stories she told, all the incidents she mentioned, up until the one where she talked about going to visit him. Here is a short dramatisation:
BRAIN: Oh, hey, that's why she wasn't in class that time. I didn't know he lived there. This all sounds a bit awkward and sad and... aww, they kissed! That's quite sw - HEY too much information here! I didn't need to -
[HAND moves mouse to the Close button and attempts to click. BRAIN intervenes]
BRAIN: Hang on, not yet. Wow, this is... specific. And surprisingly - YIKES, Flatmate, you did what now?
[HAND and BRAIN engage in a short wrestling match for control of the mouse]
BRAIN: I can't read this!
HAND: So let me get rid of it!
BRAIN: I CAN'T it's like it's got my soul in a headlock.
HAND: I'm shutting this down NOW.
BRAIN: But what happened when they got down off the - JESUS CHRIST
HAND: Release control of the mouse, Brain.
[BRAIN releases the mouse and HAND changes the screen]
BRAIN: I need to go and think about... things... that aren't.... things.
I should clarify at this stage that 30-year-old Jen wouldn't have thought the things in that journal were as horrific as 20-year-old Jen thought they were, though she'd still much rather not have had the guy's photo staring her in the face while she read them. I went about my own internet business, thinking, "Holy crap, Flatmate sure does like to overshare."
Completely forgetting that I'd been logged in to her journal as her.
When I got internet on my own computer and went to add her as a friend, I found no sign of any such entry, and I was slow enough to spend the first five minutes convinced that she'd had regrets about the overshare and deleted it. All the detail aside, it read like a public entry, but then of course it did. All of my private diary entries read like public ones, because that's how I write in that medium. I still refer to an imaginary reader as "you" and apologise for repeating myself and get sheepish when I write intimate stuff. I would hate for someone to read my private writing, and I really don't think I'd have read hers if I'd realised, but at the time I was barely aware that private LiveJournal entries were a thing and I really thought she was just monumentally indiscreet.
So, sorry, former flatmate. I accidentally read your private sex stuff and couldn't think about anything else whenever I looked at you for the whole time we were living together. And I sort of wish I hadn't remembered it now. Oops.
Thursday, 30 April 2015
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
blogs
I started blogging publicly again for three reasons. Firstly, I like writing. I'm much better at writing than I am at talking, and probably better at writing than thinking, to be honest. Secondly, I wanted to get rid of the fear of people reading what I write. It's a nothingy little personal blog, and it's never going to have much of a readership, but it's here and people can read it (and occasionally they do, and even more occasionally someone says something nice about it, and then my world gets a little bit brighter). Thirdly, I like these blogs. I like silly personal blogs that don't really have an audience to cater to and post about whatever the author wants to post about. I've read hundreds of things which say that nobody cares, nobody's interested in your dull day or your personal feelings, write about bigger things your audience can relate to. Well, I care. I'm interested in your dull day and your personal feelings, provided you can type legibly. I'm interested in the thing you do that I also do, the thing you do that I wouldn't do for a roomful of puppies, diamonds and ice cream, the thing that really pisses you off for no real reason. I'm interested in the happy things, the sad things, the weird things, the mundane things. Fuck trying to be relevant to the wider community, tell me about the time you went food shopping and you found a really weird-looking potato.
I read other people's personal blogs. If you're a Facebook friend of mine who likes to link to their blog posts, I've read yours. Certainly the posts you've linked, and probably back a bit further too. They're not all on my regular reading list, but the ones with an interesting voice - which is certainly more than half of them, to my mind - I go back to time and time again. You write about your fun-filled adventurous life? I read it. You write about your struggles with mental health and/or bereavement? I read it, and probably cry. You write about parenting a child I've never met? I read it. I know all about babywearing and extended breastfeeding and reusable nappies and different rates of child development and what horrendous things giving birth can do to a body, and I find it fascinating despite having all the maternal instinct of a fairy cake.
I also read the blogs of dance teachers I know, or know of. My dancer friends (and occasionally the teachers themselves, if I'm friends with them) will post links, and I read them all, because I love dance and I love other people's perspectives on dance. I often wonder if I should stop doing this, because I hate them all. OK, I don't hate them all. Quite a few of them are written by very professional people running a very professional blog on their very professional website, which don't colour my opinion on the authors as dance teachers at all. This is probably the best way to approach it unless you're an exceptional writer who has exactly the right instincts for this sort of thing. But I like personal stuff. I want to read opinions! ...riiiiight up until I read them, and then I hate them all.
Dance teachers are just people; people who look very pretty when they move and are good at teaching other people how to look pretty when they move. There's no reason to expect them to be able to present themselves well through the medium of the written word, or to want to take a critical eye to the state of their local scene and their own approaches. But I can't shake my unfair expectations. I want to read a dance teacher's personal opinion and feel like I would be encouraged, safe, and free in their scene. I want to read posts that express potentially controversial views while still being mindful of their authority and position. I want to read perspectives I haven't heard before, phrased eloquently and tactfully. I want to read staunch advocacy for scene safety and consent culture that includes concrete actions they've taken to embed this in scenes where they have responsibility. I'd also quite like them to be funny, because I like funny. Most of all I want to read what they write and be inspired to learn from them and dance with them.
It's a lot to ask. Too much. I'll never find a dance teacher who runs this kind of blog, and that's OK. In fact, it's probably for the best, since the combination of dancing and writing would probably be too much for me and I'd start following them to every festival they taught at like some kind of horrendous fangirl. But all the dance-teacher blogs I've read that express personal opinions, I hate. I hate them to the extent that I will actively avoid being taught by these people, and in some cases, actively avoid dancing with them. I don't want to learn from someone who will proclaim that nobody gets to call themselves a dancer unless they're Pina Bausch. I don't want my scene leader to be a drama llama. I don't want teachers who are so determined to be contrary, or so determined to oppose someone else's opinions on everything, that they write post after post of rude shit about perfectly well-accepted styles or choices that affect them in no way whatsoever. And I really, really don't want teachers who openly dismiss sexual assault, place the 'traditional' on a pedestal, and urge the cutting of slack for men while expressing disgust at women who complain (yes, I am going to link that post every time I write about dance, because it's either that or have a paraphrase of the exact same sentiment in every single post).
It makes me sad, because now there are several amazing dancers I'll never feel comfortable dancing with. There are teachers whose lessons would just depress and discourage me after reading their thoughts on their students. There are scenes I wouldn't feel safe dancing in anymore. What's worse, these isolated opinions make me more wary of other teachers, whose thoughts I haven't read and whose views I haven't heard. Why would they be any different just because they don't write about it? I become convinced that it's easier to just not dance with teachers, because they'll be judging my technique and that's no fun, and maybe I should just dance with people who I know for a fact enjoy a dork-dance interlude.
Part of me thinks I should just avoid reading this stuff anymore. Stop reading and just start dancing. After all, they're all just people, and a lot of people have fucking terrible opinions on things. If I don't know someone's a judgemental arsehole, I can just dance with them and walk away none the wiser, right? I have more dance and less bad feeling in my life, everyone wins.
Except, if my dance teacher believes "men are the leads, women are the follows, that's the traditional way; I know people can do the other role, but let's not be pedantic about this" I want to know that. If I'm giving money to someone who is paying lip service to an inclusivity they don't really subscribe to, I want to know that. If I'm dancing in a place where the scene leaders protect creeps (and gropers, and people who have punched multiple people in the face) from repercussions, I definitely want to know that. I want to support safe, inclusive environments run by safe, inclusive teachers, and if that's not where I am, I need to have the knowledge to protect myself.
On a less dramatic level, I want to know about the people teaching me. The way this scene is set up - its size, its dance style, the devotion of its members - you have to like and respect your teachers. You have to buy into their philosophy, you have to trust what they're telling you, you have to understand where they're coming from, and you have to want to share a whisky with them afterwards. Otherwise, what's the point?
So I'm going to keep reading. Sometimes it will make me cross, but I want to know. And maybe if I read widely enough, I'll come across dancers - maybe not teachers, but dancers - who write about dance in a way that inspires me. And if not? I'll read whatever they want to write about. Hair, depression, ferrets, anything. I'm listening.
I read other people's personal blogs. If you're a Facebook friend of mine who likes to link to their blog posts, I've read yours. Certainly the posts you've linked, and probably back a bit further too. They're not all on my regular reading list, but the ones with an interesting voice - which is certainly more than half of them, to my mind - I go back to time and time again. You write about your fun-filled adventurous life? I read it. You write about your struggles with mental health and/or bereavement? I read it, and probably cry. You write about parenting a child I've never met? I read it. I know all about babywearing and extended breastfeeding and reusable nappies and different rates of child development and what horrendous things giving birth can do to a body, and I find it fascinating despite having all the maternal instinct of a fairy cake.
I also read the blogs of dance teachers I know, or know of. My dancer friends (and occasionally the teachers themselves, if I'm friends with them) will post links, and I read them all, because I love dance and I love other people's perspectives on dance. I often wonder if I should stop doing this, because I hate them all. OK, I don't hate them all. Quite a few of them are written by very professional people running a very professional blog on their very professional website, which don't colour my opinion on the authors as dance teachers at all. This is probably the best way to approach it unless you're an exceptional writer who has exactly the right instincts for this sort of thing. But I like personal stuff. I want to read opinions! ...riiiiight up until I read them, and then I hate them all.
Dance teachers are just people; people who look very pretty when they move and are good at teaching other people how to look pretty when they move. There's no reason to expect them to be able to present themselves well through the medium of the written word, or to want to take a critical eye to the state of their local scene and their own approaches. But I can't shake my unfair expectations. I want to read a dance teacher's personal opinion and feel like I would be encouraged, safe, and free in their scene. I want to read posts that express potentially controversial views while still being mindful of their authority and position. I want to read perspectives I haven't heard before, phrased eloquently and tactfully. I want to read staunch advocacy for scene safety and consent culture that includes concrete actions they've taken to embed this in scenes where they have responsibility. I'd also quite like them to be funny, because I like funny. Most of all I want to read what they write and be inspired to learn from them and dance with them.
It's a lot to ask. Too much. I'll never find a dance teacher who runs this kind of blog, and that's OK. In fact, it's probably for the best, since the combination of dancing and writing would probably be too much for me and I'd start following them to every festival they taught at like some kind of horrendous fangirl. But all the dance-teacher blogs I've read that express personal opinions, I hate. I hate them to the extent that I will actively avoid being taught by these people, and in some cases, actively avoid dancing with them. I don't want to learn from someone who will proclaim that nobody gets to call themselves a dancer unless they're Pina Bausch. I don't want my scene leader to be a drama llama. I don't want teachers who are so determined to be contrary, or so determined to oppose someone else's opinions on everything, that they write post after post of rude shit about perfectly well-accepted styles or choices that affect them in no way whatsoever. And I really, really don't want teachers who openly dismiss sexual assault, place the 'traditional' on a pedestal, and urge the cutting of slack for men while expressing disgust at women who complain (yes, I am going to link that post every time I write about dance, because it's either that or have a paraphrase of the exact same sentiment in every single post).
It makes me sad, because now there are several amazing dancers I'll never feel comfortable dancing with. There are teachers whose lessons would just depress and discourage me after reading their thoughts on their students. There are scenes I wouldn't feel safe dancing in anymore. What's worse, these isolated opinions make me more wary of other teachers, whose thoughts I haven't read and whose views I haven't heard. Why would they be any different just because they don't write about it? I become convinced that it's easier to just not dance with teachers, because they'll be judging my technique and that's no fun, and maybe I should just dance with people who I know for a fact enjoy a dork-dance interlude.
Part of me thinks I should just avoid reading this stuff anymore. Stop reading and just start dancing. After all, they're all just people, and a lot of people have fucking terrible opinions on things. If I don't know someone's a judgemental arsehole, I can just dance with them and walk away none the wiser, right? I have more dance and less bad feeling in my life, everyone wins.
Except, if my dance teacher believes "men are the leads, women are the follows, that's the traditional way; I know people can do the other role, but let's not be pedantic about this" I want to know that. If I'm giving money to someone who is paying lip service to an inclusivity they don't really subscribe to, I want to know that. If I'm dancing in a place where the scene leaders protect creeps (and gropers, and people who have punched multiple people in the face) from repercussions, I definitely want to know that. I want to support safe, inclusive environments run by safe, inclusive teachers, and if that's not where I am, I need to have the knowledge to protect myself.
On a less dramatic level, I want to know about the people teaching me. The way this scene is set up - its size, its dance style, the devotion of its members - you have to like and respect your teachers. You have to buy into their philosophy, you have to trust what they're telling you, you have to understand where they're coming from, and you have to want to share a whisky with them afterwards. Otherwise, what's the point?
So I'm going to keep reading. Sometimes it will make me cross, but I want to know. And maybe if I read widely enough, I'll come across dancers - maybe not teachers, but dancers - who write about dance in a way that inspires me. And if not? I'll read whatever they want to write about. Hair, depression, ferrets, anything. I'm listening.
Tuesday, 21 April 2015
politics
[A silent interaction between me and the Facebook settings following the sharing of the UKIP manifesto by someone I am unable to defriend]
I don't want to see this
This post will be hidden from your Newsfeed.
Thanks.
See less from Nigel Farage?
I didn't know you could do that. Yes please
Hide everything from Nigel Farage?
Yes please
You will no longer see any posts from Nigel Farage.
Thank you.
[continue browsing]
VOTE UKIP
dammit
I don't want to see this
This post will be hidden from your Newsfeed.
Thanks.
See less from Nigel Farage?
I didn't know you could do that. Yes please
Hide everything from Nigel Farage?
Yes please
You will no longer see any posts from Nigel Farage.
Thank you.
[continue browsing]
VOTE UKIP
dammit
Saturday, 18 April 2015
less
About a month ago I posted this list of all the things I'd done in the first two and a half months of the year. It's a lot of stuff. The last point is actually about 20 different things - posh dinners, cocktail nights, comedy gigs, operas, cinema trips, nights in the pub, blues dance socials, and a mystery birthday surprise where they locked a bunch of us in a room and we had to logic our way out again. It's almost all been great fun, but for someone battling anxiety and Joyous Recurring Fainting Disease, it's a LOT of stuff. Too much stuff?
...yes.
When I first noticed I was struggling and started thinking about how to fix it, I did the logical thing: thought back to last time I had a mental health problem. How did I fix it then? I went to therapy, I took up blues, I started going out socially. It revolutionised my life, and I was like a different person. Which is the point. When I started getting therapy back then, my entire social life consisted of going to a dance class once a week. I never saw any of those people outside of class, and I would have something to do at the weekend maybe once every two months. My mother would call me and ask, hopefully, what I'd been up to, and I'd feel like it was a victory if I could tell her we'd walked to the supermarket rather than getting our shopping delivered. Of course it was revolutionary when I started dancing blues and getting invited to socials; I'd basically done nothing and met no new people for years.
I'm not that person anymore. My last free weekend was in January and I don't have another one until June. Between now and my next free weekend I'm going to several dinners, birthday parties and dance socials, as well as my usual classes, an opera, a treasure hunt, a hen night, a visit home and a holiday to Morocco. I booked a few days off work to give myself a break, then realised I was still going to be busy on four out of five of those days. Going away already clashes with four other things I'd quite like to do. If I commit myself to a regular course or class on a weeknight, I immediately find something else I really want to do on that night.
Replacing the anxiety with New Things seemed like a good plan. It worked before. My head was so full of dance that I had no space to worry. But two free weekends in six months? Scheduling myself three, four, five nights a week? I'm exhausted. I'd set myself up a plan of acrobatics Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues or solo dance or balboa Wednesday, kickboxing Thursday. When the acrobatics course ended would switch to kickboxing Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues/solo/balboa Wednesday, balboa or ballet Thursday. That is a fucking insane plan. Heavy exercise four nights a week every week when I'm in somewhat crappy health to begin with? Of course, what then happens is that I'm too exhausted to go to one or more of my planned activities, and I lie in bed instead feeling crappy and unproductive and like I'm not doing enough. Which is exactly what I may or may not be doing right now.
It's difficult to cut things out, or cut things back. People remember aloud how things used to be, they make "hmmm" noises, they talk about how much fun all the things I'm doing are, and why would I ever want to give them up if I'm not... you know, getting sad again? I worry about it too, more than I should. Those were bad days; I don't want to repeat them. Sometimes my worry about that makes me sign up for yet more things to try and stave it off, as if this last one will be the one that pushes the anxiety out. What actually happens is that the anxiety just relocates itself to time I'm supposed to be sleeping, and then I get even more exhausted.
The fact is that as much as I love the people in my life, as much as I'm thrilled and grateful that they invite me to things and want to talk to me and spend time with me, as much as I love meeting a new person and discovering that we click, I am still super introverted. I can't appreciate the People Time if I don't get the Me Time, and right now I am getting zero guilt-free Me Time. The only time I spend with myself is time when I've flaked out of doing something, and then I spend the whole evening feeling shitty about the fact that I flaked. I need to do less. I need to have time for me. I need to do what I used to do; just walk to a field or a wood or a common and sit for a while, reading or listening to music or just thinking, losing track of the time and leaving when I felt like it, be that twenty minutes or four hours later.
I was on a train the other day, travelling through Somerset countryside, and I saw an old man standing on a bridge. He had a camera with him, resting on the bridge wall next to him, but he wasn't taking photos, just leaning on the wall and staring off. The sky was blue and there was nobody else in sight, except the people whizzing by on the railway, barely even there. It's been a long time since I wanted to be somebody else as much as I wanted to be that old West Country man on a railway bridge, watching the time pass by and knowing that it didn't matter.
...yes.
When I first noticed I was struggling and started thinking about how to fix it, I did the logical thing: thought back to last time I had a mental health problem. How did I fix it then? I went to therapy, I took up blues, I started going out socially. It revolutionised my life, and I was like a different person. Which is the point. When I started getting therapy back then, my entire social life consisted of going to a dance class once a week. I never saw any of those people outside of class, and I would have something to do at the weekend maybe once every two months. My mother would call me and ask, hopefully, what I'd been up to, and I'd feel like it was a victory if I could tell her we'd walked to the supermarket rather than getting our shopping delivered. Of course it was revolutionary when I started dancing blues and getting invited to socials; I'd basically done nothing and met no new people for years.
I'm not that person anymore. My last free weekend was in January and I don't have another one until June. Between now and my next free weekend I'm going to several dinners, birthday parties and dance socials, as well as my usual classes, an opera, a treasure hunt, a hen night, a visit home and a holiday to Morocco. I booked a few days off work to give myself a break, then realised I was still going to be busy on four out of five of those days. Going away already clashes with four other things I'd quite like to do. If I commit myself to a regular course or class on a weeknight, I immediately find something else I really want to do on that night.
Replacing the anxiety with New Things seemed like a good plan. It worked before. My head was so full of dance that I had no space to worry. But two free weekends in six months? Scheduling myself three, four, five nights a week? I'm exhausted. I'd set myself up a plan of acrobatics Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues or solo dance or balboa Wednesday, kickboxing Thursday. When the acrobatics course ended would switch to kickboxing Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues/solo/balboa Wednesday, balboa or ballet Thursday. That is a fucking insane plan. Heavy exercise four nights a week every week when I'm in somewhat crappy health to begin with? Of course, what then happens is that I'm too exhausted to go to one or more of my planned activities, and I lie in bed instead feeling crappy and unproductive and like I'm not doing enough. Which is exactly what I may or may not be doing right now.
It's difficult to cut things out, or cut things back. People remember aloud how things used to be, they make "hmmm" noises, they talk about how much fun all the things I'm doing are, and why would I ever want to give them up if I'm not... you know, getting sad again? I worry about it too, more than I should. Those were bad days; I don't want to repeat them. Sometimes my worry about that makes me sign up for yet more things to try and stave it off, as if this last one will be the one that pushes the anxiety out. What actually happens is that the anxiety just relocates itself to time I'm supposed to be sleeping, and then I get even more exhausted.
The fact is that as much as I love the people in my life, as much as I'm thrilled and grateful that they invite me to things and want to talk to me and spend time with me, as much as I love meeting a new person and discovering that we click, I am still super introverted. I can't appreciate the People Time if I don't get the Me Time, and right now I am getting zero guilt-free Me Time. The only time I spend with myself is time when I've flaked out of doing something, and then I spend the whole evening feeling shitty about the fact that I flaked. I need to do less. I need to have time for me. I need to do what I used to do; just walk to a field or a wood or a common and sit for a while, reading or listening to music or just thinking, losing track of the time and leaving when I felt like it, be that twenty minutes or four hours later.
I was on a train the other day, travelling through Somerset countryside, and I saw an old man standing on a bridge. He had a camera with him, resting on the bridge wall next to him, but he wasn't taking photos, just leaning on the wall and staring off. The sky was blue and there was nobody else in sight, except the people whizzing by on the railway, barely even there. It's been a long time since I wanted to be somebody else as much as I wanted to be that old West Country man on a railway bridge, watching the time pass by and knowing that it didn't matter.
Friday, 17 April 2015
on boundaries
I went dancing on Sunday. A lot of the regulars were out of the country, but it was a good crowd, I met several lovely new people, and was delighted to dance with almost everyone there. I say almost; there was one guy I prefer not to dance with (two if you count Mr Spine Trumpet, which now that we've built up a long and beautiful tradition of not dancing together, I do not). There's something about the way he behaves when we dance that makes me uncomfortable. It's not overtly creepy - he's not gropey and when he does say something it's far to the ambiguous side of being inappropriate, but I don't like it, and I see shades of the same thing when I happen to make eye contact with him off the dance floor. Usually dancing with one specific person isn't hard to avoid, but it was a quiet night, and when I turned to the bar to take a sip of my drink, out of the corner of my eye I could see him standing in front of me, slightly too close, and silent. Waiting for me to turn around and suddenly be staring him in the chest. I would be slightly startled, look up towards his face, where he would be smirking, and still silent. He wouldn't ask me to dance; he would assume that the dance contract was affirmed as soon as we made eye contact.
I hate this. People whose faces I recognise but whose names I don't know asking me to dance by suddenly looming over me in silence? Nope. Nope nope nope. So what did I do? Completely ignored the fact that he was there, turned back towards the bar and poured myself a glass of water. He melted away again. Was this the best way to handle things? Probably not. But it was the best I could do in the moment.
The reason I started overthinking this minor interaction? I was reading this post at Captain Awkward, about a creepy guy using creepy pick-up artist techniques, and thinking "Wow, that's creepy, using horrible strategies like that to get around someone's boundaries". Several people in the comments (I actually recommend both the post and all the comments, because that site is made of unicorns) said, "Well done for getting away now. It would have been so much worse if you'd actually ended up dating him." It would, wouldn't it? Imagine dating a guy who...
HOLY SHIT I TOTALLY DID
I'd forgotten. My memories of the guy when he was my friend were all good ones. More than once, when we were still dating and afterwards, I thought to myself, "It was so great being friends with him. It's a shame he changed so much after we started dating." But reading that letter, reading about a guy commenting on her body language and how guarded she was, reading the comments about PUA techniques, I suddenly remembered that he did that all the time when we were friends.
"You're standing there with your arms folded. That's a very defensive gesture. What makes you so defensive?"
"You're turning your body away from me. Why is that? Makes it seem like you're nervous. What have you got to be nervous about?"
"How come you're looking away? Are you scared? Look at me."
People analysing me has always made me massively uncomfortable, and when folding my arms EVEN MORE didn't help, I tried standing differently to get him to shut up. Which he did not. "Hey, you've got your arms down today, you're more open. That's good."
Then I remembered an exchange that happened shortly before we started going out.
Him: Those guys over there were asking if you and I were a couple.
Me: ...OK.
Him: I told them you'd probably scratch their eyes out if they said that in front of you.
Me: ...uh...
Him: I mean, no offense, you're very attractive and all, but... [pulls face] no.
Me: ...OK.
I remembered going home and writing in my DeadJournal (yes, DeadJournal. Teen Goth Jen had a DeadJournal, the existence of which I'd also completely forgotten up to this point) about what he'd said, and how I'd had a slight feeling of "oh, charming" but mostly a massive sense of relief because he'd said he wasn't attracted to me and I wasn't attracted to him either and it was great that everything was clear now and I didn't have to worry about the weird vibes anymore. Then we started dating shortly afterwards because he was smart and funny and that was what was important, right?
DUDE, YOU WERE FUCKING NEGGING ME.
(I asked him about that exchange a few times when we were dating. He would either flat-out deny it happened or embark on a long melodramatic display of What An Awful Person I Must Be To Say Things You Interpreted In Such A Way.)
I tell these two largely unrelated stories because remembering the second one made me feel (after I'd got over the minor urge to go and find him and yell WHAT THE SHIT WAS UP WITH THE FUCKING NEGGING OF THE SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL, DUDE) a hell of a lot better about the first one. That second story just wouldn't happen now. I wouldn't stay friends with a guy who gave me updates on my own body language every time he saw me and offered his various opinions and approval on the way my shoulders were facing. I would sit far, far away from that guy, and he would call me a stuck-up bitch to his friends, and everybody would be much better off. It wasn't until I started dancing that I realised I was even allowed to have boundaries, much less that I could enforce them, and though my methods aren't perfect yet, the knowledge that I have the power to get away from situations and people that make me uncomfortable does a lot for my peace of mind.
I deleted multiple versions of a paragraph justifying why I ignored Mr Loom-and-Smirk, because that's not the point of this story and I've written about such things previously (please see here for my feelings on creepy dance guys and women's socialisation to be silent, and here for my feelings on being told to "cut him some slack"). I don't want to set myself a benchmark of behaving perfectly in every situation because that's not fair; in an ideal situation I would have behaved differently, but then so would he. We all have imperfect ways of handling things and that has to be OK. Having this idea of The Perfect Human What I Am Going To Become in my head is immensely damaging and I'm trying my best to get rid of it. Dismantle unreasonable perfectionism, build comfortable boundaries - this is my plan for the next eight hundred years (or however bloody long it takes to do these things).
I have grown as a human this week. Or rather, the space around me has grown, making me a slightly more comfortable human. I think that's probably better.
I hate this. People whose faces I recognise but whose names I don't know asking me to dance by suddenly looming over me in silence? Nope. Nope nope nope. So what did I do? Completely ignored the fact that he was there, turned back towards the bar and poured myself a glass of water. He melted away again. Was this the best way to handle things? Probably not. But it was the best I could do in the moment.
The reason I started overthinking this minor interaction? I was reading this post at Captain Awkward, about a creepy guy using creepy pick-up artist techniques, and thinking "Wow, that's creepy, using horrible strategies like that to get around someone's boundaries". Several people in the comments (I actually recommend both the post and all the comments, because that site is made of unicorns) said, "Well done for getting away now. It would have been so much worse if you'd actually ended up dating him." It would, wouldn't it? Imagine dating a guy who...
HOLY SHIT I TOTALLY DID
I'd forgotten. My memories of the guy when he was my friend were all good ones. More than once, when we were still dating and afterwards, I thought to myself, "It was so great being friends with him. It's a shame he changed so much after we started dating." But reading that letter, reading about a guy commenting on her body language and how guarded she was, reading the comments about PUA techniques, I suddenly remembered that he did that all the time when we were friends.
"You're standing there with your arms folded. That's a very defensive gesture. What makes you so defensive?"
"You're turning your body away from me. Why is that? Makes it seem like you're nervous. What have you got to be nervous about?"
"How come you're looking away? Are you scared? Look at me."
People analysing me has always made me massively uncomfortable, and when folding my arms EVEN MORE didn't help, I tried standing differently to get him to shut up. Which he did not. "Hey, you've got your arms down today, you're more open. That's good."
Then I remembered an exchange that happened shortly before we started going out.
Him: Those guys over there were asking if you and I were a couple.
Me: ...OK.
Him: I told them you'd probably scratch their eyes out if they said that in front of you.
Me: ...uh...
Him: I mean, no offense, you're very attractive and all, but... [pulls face] no.
Me: ...OK.
I remembered going home and writing in my DeadJournal (yes, DeadJournal. Teen Goth Jen had a DeadJournal, the existence of which I'd also completely forgotten up to this point) about what he'd said, and how I'd had a slight feeling of "oh, charming" but mostly a massive sense of relief because he'd said he wasn't attracted to me and I wasn't attracted to him either and it was great that everything was clear now and I didn't have to worry about the weird vibes anymore. Then we started dating shortly afterwards because he was smart and funny and that was what was important, right?
DUDE, YOU WERE FUCKING NEGGING ME.
(I asked him about that exchange a few times when we were dating. He would either flat-out deny it happened or embark on a long melodramatic display of What An Awful Person I Must Be To Say Things You Interpreted In Such A Way.)
I tell these two largely unrelated stories because remembering the second one made me feel (after I'd got over the minor urge to go and find him and yell WHAT THE SHIT WAS UP WITH THE FUCKING NEGGING OF THE SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL, DUDE) a hell of a lot better about the first one. That second story just wouldn't happen now. I wouldn't stay friends with a guy who gave me updates on my own body language every time he saw me and offered his various opinions and approval on the way my shoulders were facing. I would sit far, far away from that guy, and he would call me a stuck-up bitch to his friends, and everybody would be much better off. It wasn't until I started dancing that I realised I was even allowed to have boundaries, much less that I could enforce them, and though my methods aren't perfect yet, the knowledge that I have the power to get away from situations and people that make me uncomfortable does a lot for my peace of mind.
I deleted multiple versions of a paragraph justifying why I ignored Mr Loom-and-Smirk, because that's not the point of this story and I've written about such things previously (please see here for my feelings on creepy dance guys and women's socialisation to be silent, and here for my feelings on being told to "cut him some slack"). I don't want to set myself a benchmark of behaving perfectly in every situation because that's not fair; in an ideal situation I would have behaved differently, but then so would he. We all have imperfect ways of handling things and that has to be OK. Having this idea of The Perfect Human What I Am Going To Become in my head is immensely damaging and I'm trying my best to get rid of it. Dismantle unreasonable perfectionism, build comfortable boundaries - this is my plan for the next eight hundred years (or however bloody long it takes to do these things).
I have grown as a human this week. Or rather, the space around me has grown, making me a slightly more comfortable human. I think that's probably better.
Thursday, 16 April 2015
technology
Many years ago in the past...
[I am having dinner with my father]
Me: Speaking of birthdays, Mum said she wants an iPod this year.
Dad: She wants a... what?
Me: An iPod.
Dad: Oh! An iPod. Not an iPhone or an iPad.
Me: No, just the iPod.
Dad: ...you know what's good? This Dongle.
Me: Huh?
Dad: That's technology, isn't it?
Skipping forward to last Tuesday...
Dad: While you're home, I wonder if you could help me with some technology business.
Me: Sure, what's not working?
Dad: Well. For our birthday, we ended up with a thing called a Hudl.
Me: Oh, I hear they're good.
Dad: Yes. For the email and such. However, what it doesn't have is this thing called WiFi.
Me: Uh huh.
Dad: So. One has bought... a WiFi machine. But one doesn't know quite what one is meant to do with it.
Me: [helpless giggling]
Dad: What does it do?
Me: It's like a Dongle you don't have to plug in.
Dad: OH! It's like a Dongle! And they've made it wireless? Well. That's jolly good then.
Things I love about this:
1. My father, who took the best part of a decade to learn to send a text message by himself, knows all about Dongle.
2. My father knows absolutely nothing about any piece of technology that isn't Dongle.
3. My father lapses into the royal 'we' when unsure of himself.
4. Once I'd got the mobile WiFi working, I set him up on Twitter and made him follow Beyoncé.*
Then my mother came home.
Mum: While you're home, could you take a look at my new tablet?
Me: What's wrong with it?
Mum: Little things appear in the top left corner, and I swipe down, and it starts doing things.
Me: What things?
Mum: I don't know! Things!
Me: Oh, it's just trying to install a system update.
Mum: What?? What does that do? Do I want that? Help.
I do love that I, as someone who has been known to accidentally turn everything blue when using a laptop, still get to go back to my parents' and become the All-Knowing Technology Wizard. Especially when I don't even have a tablet. When both my parents have a piece of technology that I don't have, it makes me feel hopelessly out of date and like I should maybe get one too, but honestly I have no idea what I'd do with it. It just seems like a really big smartphone that can't call anyone. But maybe I just don't understand technology either.
*Text from father two days later: "And it appears that something called Roxie Rocks is following me."
[I am having dinner with my father]
Me: Speaking of birthdays, Mum said she wants an iPod this year.
Dad: She wants a... what?
Me: An iPod.
Dad: Oh! An iPod. Not an iPhone or an iPad.
Me: No, just the iPod.
Dad: ...you know what's good? This Dongle.
Me: Huh?
Dad: That's technology, isn't it?
Skipping forward to last Tuesday...
Dad: While you're home, I wonder if you could help me with some technology business.
Me: Sure, what's not working?
Dad: Well. For our birthday, we ended up with a thing called a Hudl.
Me: Oh, I hear they're good.
Dad: Yes. For the email and such. However, what it doesn't have is this thing called WiFi.
Me: Uh huh.
Dad: So. One has bought... a WiFi machine. But one doesn't know quite what one is meant to do with it.
Me: [helpless giggling]
Dad: What does it do?
Me: It's like a Dongle you don't have to plug in.
Dad: OH! It's like a Dongle! And they've made it wireless? Well. That's jolly good then.
Things I love about this:
1. My father, who took the best part of a decade to learn to send a text message by himself, knows all about Dongle.
2. My father knows absolutely nothing about any piece of technology that isn't Dongle.
3. My father lapses into the royal 'we' when unsure of himself.
4. Once I'd got the mobile WiFi working, I set him up on Twitter and made him follow Beyoncé.*
Then my mother came home.
Mum: While you're home, could you take a look at my new tablet?
Me: What's wrong with it?
Mum: Little things appear in the top left corner, and I swipe down, and it starts doing things.
Me: What things?
Mum: I don't know! Things!
Me: Oh, it's just trying to install a system update.
Mum: What?? What does that do? Do I want that? Help.
I do love that I, as someone who has been known to accidentally turn everything blue when using a laptop, still get to go back to my parents' and become the All-Knowing Technology Wizard. Especially when I don't even have a tablet. When both my parents have a piece of technology that I don't have, it makes me feel hopelessly out of date and like I should maybe get one too, but honestly I have no idea what I'd do with it. It just seems like a really big smartphone that can't call anyone. But maybe I just don't understand technology either.
*Text from father two days later: "And it appears that something called Roxie Rocks is following me."
Friday, 10 April 2015
vague
When I decided to do a daily blogging challenge again, I made very few rules for myself. Length of post doesn't matter. Inherent social value of post doesn't matter. Chance that post will make me look like the enormous dork I am doesn't matter. Essentially I have three rules:
Do not allow blog to be taken over by posts on social politics, since that way lies anger and sadness.
Do not write unnecessarily revealing posts about people I'm still in touch with.
Do not be vague.
Vague writing is one of the traps I fall into most easily, especially when I feel under pressure to write something NOW because of blogging challenges or NaNoWriMo. I don't have an idea in my head, no story to tell or point to make, so I just start writing anything in the hopes that the story or point will just make itself apparent before I get to the end. I do this even though I have hundreds of pages of evidence that it doesn't work.
I have two entire novels made of nothing but Vague. In 2010 I started writing with the image of a searchlight down a dark street and a woman with a nail through her foot. I wrote 60,000 words, coming up with two main characters I quite liked, an immediate setting I really liked, a world with a lot of gaps in, and a plot that... well, I never managed to identify the plot. There were people in robes having secret meetings, who started out knowing everything then turned out to know nothing, but then maybe they were just pretending to be know-nothing-know-it-alls, but then maybe the leader knew things and nobody else did, but then maybe she didn't actually know things but thought she did. At no point did I work out what this knowledge they did or didn't have was. I couldn't think of what it might be, so I wrote in another layer of vague mystery to give myself more time. The more layers of vagueness I added, the more difficult it was to think of specifics that fit what was already on the page, so I panicked and added another layer of vague. (I did a similar thing the following year and ended up turning what started out as a small-time family drama into two people with one face and one guy with four faces, all for absolutely no discernible reason.)
Vague blog posts are too short to keep building up layers of mystery, so I just come up with an opening sentence that sounds more meaningful than it is, then either ride a metaphor just past its logical conclusion, or write about something I'm feeling in an obtuse enough way that it doesn't really resemble what I'm feeling anymore. I might address these posts to a non-specific "you", thus implying a universal truth or at least something I intended a wider audience to relate to, even though I know that making something more vague doesn't make it more relatable. I know that non-specific posts about how it can be quite painful to care about somebody aren't actually any more interesting or worthwhile than posts about what happened to me today or that guy I saw on the tube, but it's still a struggle to convince myself not to write that.
Part of me is hung up on the idea of being deep, having a blog full of Serious Thoughts that people will read and say "my, what a lot of extremely relevant and universally applicable Serious Thoughts you have". The Serious Deep Thoughts I've stopped myself writing and posting are often a lot more shallow than the posts I've written about absurd landlords, and they're certainly less interesting to read, but try explaining that to the tiny embarrassing voice in my head that wants to be known as a Thinker.
Voice: Don't be so trivial. Write about great loss!
Me: I have no thoughts about great loss. Except "it's bad".
Voice. Make something up.
Me: Um. It's bad... like a vulture? Or a puffin that's taken a drastically wrong turn in life?
Voice: ...puffins?
Me: I panicked and went to puffins.
Voice: Step away from the blog and don't come back until you're feeling less daft.
And then I don't write, because I don't have any thoughts on your life. I don't know what you've been through. All I can think about is that time I went to a free music festival and put a curse on Toploader because they were being rude to the autograph hunters (and because they released THE WORST FUCKING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER I will accept no dissent on this matter) that my schoolfriends to this day believe actually worked, but nobody wants to hear that story.
I think this time, with a lot of conscious effort, I'm avoiding this pretty well. (So far.) But if you do see a bunch of empty words about feelings I may or may not have had relating to an unspecific happening, feel free to give me a kick up the blog.
Do not allow blog to be taken over by posts on social politics, since that way lies anger and sadness.
Do not write unnecessarily revealing posts about people I'm still in touch with.
Do not be vague.
Vague writing is one of the traps I fall into most easily, especially when I feel under pressure to write something NOW because of blogging challenges or NaNoWriMo. I don't have an idea in my head, no story to tell or point to make, so I just start writing anything in the hopes that the story or point will just make itself apparent before I get to the end. I do this even though I have hundreds of pages of evidence that it doesn't work.
I have two entire novels made of nothing but Vague. In 2010 I started writing with the image of a searchlight down a dark street and a woman with a nail through her foot. I wrote 60,000 words, coming up with two main characters I quite liked, an immediate setting I really liked, a world with a lot of gaps in, and a plot that... well, I never managed to identify the plot. There were people in robes having secret meetings, who started out knowing everything then turned out to know nothing, but then maybe they were just pretending to be know-nothing-know-it-alls, but then maybe the leader knew things and nobody else did, but then maybe she didn't actually know things but thought she did. At no point did I work out what this knowledge they did or didn't have was. I couldn't think of what it might be, so I wrote in another layer of vague mystery to give myself more time. The more layers of vagueness I added, the more difficult it was to think of specifics that fit what was already on the page, so I panicked and added another layer of vague. (I did a similar thing the following year and ended up turning what started out as a small-time family drama into two people with one face and one guy with four faces, all for absolutely no discernible reason.)
Vague blog posts are too short to keep building up layers of mystery, so I just come up with an opening sentence that sounds more meaningful than it is, then either ride a metaphor just past its logical conclusion, or write about something I'm feeling in an obtuse enough way that it doesn't really resemble what I'm feeling anymore. I might address these posts to a non-specific "you", thus implying a universal truth or at least something I intended a wider audience to relate to, even though I know that making something more vague doesn't make it more relatable. I know that non-specific posts about how it can be quite painful to care about somebody aren't actually any more interesting or worthwhile than posts about what happened to me today or that guy I saw on the tube, but it's still a struggle to convince myself not to write that.
Part of me is hung up on the idea of being deep, having a blog full of Serious Thoughts that people will read and say "my, what a lot of extremely relevant and universally applicable Serious Thoughts you have". The Serious Deep Thoughts I've stopped myself writing and posting are often a lot more shallow than the posts I've written about absurd landlords, and they're certainly less interesting to read, but try explaining that to the tiny embarrassing voice in my head that wants to be known as a Thinker.
Voice: Don't be so trivial. Write about great loss!
Me: I have no thoughts about great loss. Except "it's bad".
Voice. Make something up.
Me: Um. It's bad... like a vulture? Or a puffin that's taken a drastically wrong turn in life?
Voice: ...puffins?
Me: I panicked and went to puffins.
Voice: Step away from the blog and don't come back until you're feeling less daft.
And then I don't write, because I don't have any thoughts on your life. I don't know what you've been through. All I can think about is that time I went to a free music festival and put a curse on Toploader because they were being rude to the autograph hunters (and because they released THE WORST FUCKING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER I will accept no dissent on this matter) that my schoolfriends to this day believe actually worked, but nobody wants to hear that story.
I think this time, with a lot of conscious effort, I'm avoiding this pretty well. (So far.) But if you do see a bunch of empty words about feelings I may or may not have had relating to an unspecific happening, feel free to give me a kick up the blog.
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
the critical voice, part two
The other day I sat down at my computer and Googled, "How to have fewer thoughts."
Google: Umm. I can do, "How to have fewer negative thoughts", if you want?
Me: I appreciate the sentiment, but that's not really what I want.
Google: Sure it is. That's what everyone wants.
Me: Fewer negative thoughts would be great, but what I want is to think less in general.
Google: I don't get it.
Me: There's too much stuff in my brain and I want to get some of it out. I don't want to turn negative thoughts in positive thoughts, I want to turn thoughts into lack of thoughts.
Google: If you don't want inspirational blogs on the power of positive thinking and some pictures of trees at sunset, I can't help you.
Me: Well, thanks anyway.
Google: I AM WATCHING YOU.
There have certainly been times in my life when "fewer negative thoughts" would have been the best thing for my quality of life, but right now that's not exactly my problem. My critical voice likes to morph and change with me, to make sure it's always at optimum levels of unhelpfulness. When I'm depressed, it sighs and tells me there's just no point, no point to going out or standing up or opening the curtains or operating on a normal human sleep schedule because it's not like I'd accomplish anything by doing so, is it? When I'm anxious, it lists all the things that could go wrong because I don't do things properly or understand human beings, or just because I have rotten luck and so why wouldn't my entire family die in a car accident on their way down to see me? When I'm happy, it doesn't have much to say so it just spins round and round really fast like an excitable kid to make me feel a bit dizzy if I stop doing things. Right now, when I am anxious but in the throes of getting a grip, it wants to fix everything. EVERYTHING.
Hey there, money issues? Let's make a complicated spreadsheet! Concerned about weight? Let's make a diet plan! Not feeling great about living arrangements? Detailed rental accommodation home improvements! Feeling sluggish? Sign up for every single exercise class you can find! Hate your job? Get a new one! Bored? Learn everything! Confused? Sit down and try and untangle that boxful of matted chain necklaces you call a mind while I throw new ones into the mix every 40 seconds because necklaces are shiny and fun!
Most of this stuff, in an of itself, is constructive and useful and a good idea. I don't think any of the things I've done or tried to do in the name of fixing myself are bad ideas. Sorting out my snacking at work and researching job opportunities and making a budget plan and signing up for kickboxing and acrobatics classes and seeking therapy and seeing an osteopath and making a commitment to write daily and trying to work through my mental blocks are all, individually, good and positive steps.
The problem is that I'm trying to do it all at once, and it's exhausting. My critical voice says that all of these things are just a tiny change and it's just one hour out of my week, just one more thing to remember, come on, what are you complaining about? But it's just a tiny change over and over again, forty or fifty times a day, and every thought I have spawns three or four more thoughts about what I can do to fix that thought I just had. So I'm doing an exhausting amount of stuff, but because it's just a tiny change I can't actually see any difference in any of the problems I'm having. I haven't sorted my finances or lost any weight or made my bedroom pretty or felt any healthier or got a new job or untangled my mind.
What I have done is mostly cleared my overdraft and got a tiny savings account and stopped hoarding snacks in my desk drawer and done a thorough clear-out of my bedroom and sorted out my back and shoulders and made cushions and learned to alter my clothes and started proper exercising multiple times a week and been abroad a bunch of times and seen shows and eaten bastard expensive dinners and laughed with my friends until I cried, but none of that seems to count because it hasn't solved the problems I went in to solve (magically have a bunch of disposable income every month! Be three stone lighter! Acquire an interesting and flexible and well-paid job! BE EXCELLENT AT EVERYTHING!), and also because it hasn't created any space in my mind. Everything is trying to get through the door at once, much like that thing on The Simpsons where Mr Burns has every disease ever.
"So, what you're saying is, I'm indestructible?"
"Oh my, no. In fact, even a slight breeze could..."
"Indestructible."
Except that it's the opposite of that, because I want the things to be able to get through the door, and the fact that everything's squished itself in there at once means I'm not really able to progress with anything. Critical voice response to this is:
OK, good. Spotted a problem. How do we fix this? By picking one thing and REALLY trying to make that happen. While just making one tiny change to everything else. I mean, it's ALL important and you can't just LEAVE it to focus on this one thing, can you?
And this is why I need fewer thoughts.
Google: Umm. I can do, "How to have fewer negative thoughts", if you want?
Me: I appreciate the sentiment, but that's not really what I want.
Google: Sure it is. That's what everyone wants.
Me: Fewer negative thoughts would be great, but what I want is to think less in general.
Google: I don't get it.
Me: There's too much stuff in my brain and I want to get some of it out. I don't want to turn negative thoughts in positive thoughts, I want to turn thoughts into lack of thoughts.
Google: If you don't want inspirational blogs on the power of positive thinking and some pictures of trees at sunset, I can't help you.
Me: Well, thanks anyway.
Google: I AM WATCHING YOU.
There have certainly been times in my life when "fewer negative thoughts" would have been the best thing for my quality of life, but right now that's not exactly my problem. My critical voice likes to morph and change with me, to make sure it's always at optimum levels of unhelpfulness. When I'm depressed, it sighs and tells me there's just no point, no point to going out or standing up or opening the curtains or operating on a normal human sleep schedule because it's not like I'd accomplish anything by doing so, is it? When I'm anxious, it lists all the things that could go wrong because I don't do things properly or understand human beings, or just because I have rotten luck and so why wouldn't my entire family die in a car accident on their way down to see me? When I'm happy, it doesn't have much to say so it just spins round and round really fast like an excitable kid to make me feel a bit dizzy if I stop doing things. Right now, when I am anxious but in the throes of getting a grip, it wants to fix everything. EVERYTHING.
Hey there, money issues? Let's make a complicated spreadsheet! Concerned about weight? Let's make a diet plan! Not feeling great about living arrangements? Detailed rental accommodation home improvements! Feeling sluggish? Sign up for every single exercise class you can find! Hate your job? Get a new one! Bored? Learn everything! Confused? Sit down and try and untangle that boxful of matted chain necklaces you call a mind while I throw new ones into the mix every 40 seconds because necklaces are shiny and fun!
Most of this stuff, in an of itself, is constructive and useful and a good idea. I don't think any of the things I've done or tried to do in the name of fixing myself are bad ideas. Sorting out my snacking at work and researching job opportunities and making a budget plan and signing up for kickboxing and acrobatics classes and seeking therapy and seeing an osteopath and making a commitment to write daily and trying to work through my mental blocks are all, individually, good and positive steps.
The problem is that I'm trying to do it all at once, and it's exhausting. My critical voice says that all of these things are just a tiny change and it's just one hour out of my week, just one more thing to remember, come on, what are you complaining about? But it's just a tiny change over and over again, forty or fifty times a day, and every thought I have spawns three or four more thoughts about what I can do to fix that thought I just had. So I'm doing an exhausting amount of stuff, but because it's just a tiny change I can't actually see any difference in any of the problems I'm having. I haven't sorted my finances or lost any weight or made my bedroom pretty or felt any healthier or got a new job or untangled my mind.
What I have done is mostly cleared my overdraft and got a tiny savings account and stopped hoarding snacks in my desk drawer and done a thorough clear-out of my bedroom and sorted out my back and shoulders and made cushions and learned to alter my clothes and started proper exercising multiple times a week and been abroad a bunch of times and seen shows and eaten bastard expensive dinners and laughed with my friends until I cried, but none of that seems to count because it hasn't solved the problems I went in to solve (magically have a bunch of disposable income every month! Be three stone lighter! Acquire an interesting and flexible and well-paid job! BE EXCELLENT AT EVERYTHING!), and also because it hasn't created any space in my mind. Everything is trying to get through the door at once, much like that thing on The Simpsons where Mr Burns has every disease ever.
"So, what you're saying is, I'm indestructible?"
"Oh my, no. In fact, even a slight breeze could..."
"Indestructible."
Except that it's the opposite of that, because I want the things to be able to get through the door, and the fact that everything's squished itself in there at once means I'm not really able to progress with anything. Critical voice response to this is:
OK, good. Spotted a problem. How do we fix this? By picking one thing and REALLY trying to make that happen. While just making one tiny change to everything else. I mean, it's ALL important and you can't just LEAVE it to focus on this one thing, can you?
And this is why I need fewer thoughts.
Monday, 6 April 2015
stamps
[at the supermarket]
Me: Can I get stamps here?
Cashier: [blank stare] ...stamps?
Me: Yeah.
Cashier: Huh?
Me: [waving birthday card helplessly] Stamps. To send this.
Cashier: Um. Ah. George! GEORGE!
George: What?
Cashier: Do we have stamps?
George: Stamps? What stamps?
Me: [waving birthday card] Stamps?
[a moment later]
George: Oh, stamps! Postage stamps!
Me: Yes!
George: You can get them at the kiosk.
Me: Thanks.
Cashier: I thought you wanted to stamp a smiley face in the card.
Me: I just want to post it.
Cashier: Post?
[Exit Jen, feeling very, very old]
Me: Can I get stamps here?
Cashier: [blank stare] ...stamps?
Me: Yeah.
Cashier: Huh?
Me: [waving birthday card helplessly] Stamps. To send this.
Cashier: Um. Ah. George! GEORGE!
George: What?
Cashier: Do we have stamps?
George: Stamps? What stamps?
Me: [waving birthday card] Stamps?
[a moment later]
George: Oh, stamps! Postage stamps!
Me: Yes!
George: You can get them at the kiosk.
Me: Thanks.
Cashier: I thought you wanted to stamp a smiley face in the card.
Me: I just want to post it.
Cashier: Post?
[Exit Jen, feeling very, very old]
Sunday, 5 April 2015
connection
My internet is extremely sporadic, so I'm rushing to write a post before it dies again.
I've made progress today, I think. Things are tidier and I have a better sense of what I'm doing, at least in the short term. (Now I can't think of what else to say about this that's short and stands a chance of me beating out internet death. Those two lines clearly aren't a post in and of themselves, but if I start writing about lists and priorities and meditation and health and support then I run the risk of taking several hours, thereby missing both the short window of working internet and my daily blogging deadline.)
(I might be feeling like I'm making progress, but I have as yet not discovered how not to be incredibly neurotic about everything.)
I've made progress today, I think. Things are tidier and I have a better sense of what I'm doing, at least in the short term. (Now I can't think of what else to say about this that's short and stands a chance of me beating out internet death. Those two lines clearly aren't a post in and of themselves, but if I start writing about lists and priorities and meditation and health and support then I run the risk of taking several hours, thereby missing both the short window of working internet and my daily blogging deadline.)
(I might be feeling like I'm making progress, but I have as yet not discovered how not to be incredibly neurotic about everything.)
Saturday, 4 April 2015
a short song about The Rock
This is The Rock's diet plan. And now this is all I can hear is:
"No one eats like The Rock
Gets through meat like The Rock
No one eats seven meals and no sweets like The Rock..."
The Rock is, after all, roughly the size of a barge. I'm trying my best not to rewrite the whole thing, but...
"No one shouts like The Rock
or works out like The Rock
No one steers clear of salmon and trout like The Rock
I use white cod in all of my overfishing!
My, what a guy!
The Rock!"
(In case you were wondering, this is what the inside of my head looks like most of the time. Oh hey, a thing happened? Let me rewrite a song to be about that. What? No, can't talk now. I'm thinking of things that rhyme with cod. What do you mean, why? Why aren't you thinking of things that rhyme with cod?)
"No one eats like The Rock
Gets through meat like The Rock
No one eats seven meals and no sweets like The Rock..."
The Rock is, after all, roughly the size of a barge. I'm trying my best not to rewrite the whole thing, but...
"No one shouts like The Rock
or works out like The Rock
No one steers clear of salmon and trout like The Rock
I use white cod in all of my overfishing!
My, what a guy!
The Rock!"
(In case you were wondering, this is what the inside of my head looks like most of the time. Oh hey, a thing happened? Let me rewrite a song to be about that. What? No, can't talk now. I'm thinking of things that rhyme with cod. What do you mean, why? Why aren't you thinking of things that rhyme with cod?)
Friday, 3 April 2015
scenes from the middle class relationship
Him: How about truffle pasta with asparagus for dinner?
Me: Sure.
Him: I'm on a massive asparagus kick lately. Which is strange, because I'm normally quite seasonal with my veg and asparagus really isn't in season at all.
Me: That's one of the most middle class things I've ever heard.
Him: I met Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall once.
Mum: I'm not sure I can cope with this thing where he doesn't like Wetherspoons. Can you train him to like Wetherspoons?
Him: This area doesn't really have a local paper. So if I'm feeling posh I can read Ham and High, if I'm feeling a bit more riot-y I can read the Wood Green one.
Me: You indulge your riotous impulses by reading a slightly more downmarket local paper?
Him: Yes.
Me: All of this is getting written down.
Him: I know.
Him: It wasn't really about Christmas presents when I was little. If I'd been good all year, my dad would take me to the West End to see a show and go to the really nice cheese shop.
Me: Oh my God.
Him: Hey, I'm not the one constantly ranting about inferior types of pecorino.
Me: Seriously though, pecorino romano? What the hell is the point of pecorino romano?
Him: Ahem.
Me: I stand by that.
Me: Sure.
Him: I'm on a massive asparagus kick lately. Which is strange, because I'm normally quite seasonal with my veg and asparagus really isn't in season at all.
Me: That's one of the most middle class things I've ever heard.
Him: I met Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall once.
Mum: I'm not sure I can cope with this thing where he doesn't like Wetherspoons. Can you train him to like Wetherspoons?
Him: This area doesn't really have a local paper. So if I'm feeling posh I can read Ham and High, if I'm feeling a bit more riot-y I can read the Wood Green one.
Me: You indulge your riotous impulses by reading a slightly more downmarket local paper?
Him: Yes.
Me: All of this is getting written down.
Him: I know.
Him: It wasn't really about Christmas presents when I was little. If I'd been good all year, my dad would take me to the West End to see a show and go to the really nice cheese shop.
Me: Oh my God.
Him: Hey, I'm not the one constantly ranting about inferior types of pecorino.
Me: Seriously though, pecorino romano? What the hell is the point of pecorino romano?
Him: Ahem.
Me: I stand by that.
Thursday, 2 April 2015
adventures in housing, part eight
[Previously in this series: invasions, evictions, and something else that sounds snappy. Let's finish this thing.]
We started searching for our next home. I had dreams of moving back to the area where this story started, the area I'd lived in comfortably for two years, that had everything I needed and felt like home to me. At first my flatmates were willing to indulge me, and we looked at a few things around there. We got unreasonably attached to a flat we called Robert which they wouldn't let to us. We tried to make an offer on a place in a beautiful building with a lovely kitchen, but the lettings agent repeatedly refused to call us back after we expressed interest and let it to someone else instead. We saw a maisonette with an enormous roof terrace and beautiful living room, which came with a slightly terrifying landlord, a third bedroom barely big enough for a dog bed, and a single-person kitchen with no oven. We debated for days over taking a ratty little flat on an estate which stretched the upper limits of our budgets because I was so excited about proximity to a Zone 1 tube in the area I loved. After that, the other two gave up on my dream and started looking elsewhere.
The house we were leaving might have been owned by a crazy person, but it did have a clean and spacious kitchen and bathroom, and it was hard to go from that to the kinds of things that were on offer in any places that were even vaguely accessible. Sinks missing vital components, ovens that rattled ominously when anyone came within seven feet of them, toilets that appeared to contain the aftermath of someone setting fire to a crocodile. My flatmates, who didn't have quite the same dance-focused transport-dependent schedule, started looking further and further out to find nice places within our budget.
Them: What about this place?
Me: It's in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's so cheap!
Me: There's a reason.
The first Leytonstone place was easy enough to reject. It was a long way from the tube station (which was a long way from anything I considered to be civilisation), it was dark and cramped and unpleasant.
Estate agent: [pushes door open] This is the master bedroom.
Me: Huh.
Mostly-naked man on bed: Uh, hi.
Estate agent: Of course there's more light in here when the curtains are open.
Me: I - hmmm.
Mostly-naked man on bed: [nods to me and covers his lower half with duvet] Yep.
Me: OK, I think we're done here.
The second one was harder to turn down. It looked large and well-maintained and pretty in the photos, it was under budget, and it was three minutes' walk from the tube. We sat outside in the heat (hey, remember that? When it was all hot last summer?) waiting for the estate agent.
Me: Guys, I really don't want to live in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's really pretty and cheap!
Me: I go to a lot of late-night social stuff and getting back here would be an absolute nightmare. It would take hours.
Them: Well, we stay in a lot, so we want somewhere nice.
Me: I get that, but literally the one thing I said I wanted was somewhere accessible.
Them: But it's pretty and cheap.
Sitting outside that house, I felt dread build up in my stomach. I can't live here, no way. But if it's as pretty as it looks in the ad, they're going to want to take it, and I'm going to have to say no and then there'll be fights and they'll hate me. We waited, and I panicked, and we waited, and I panicked, and we waited, right up until the estate agent called my flatmate to say that one of their other properties had exploded and they wouldn't be coming after all (yes, there are two exploding properties within one year of housing drama. At least this one worked a tiny bit in my favour).
We stopped looking in Leytonstone, but time was running out yet again. We started looking for rooms on our own in case we needed a back-up.
We got another viewing. The house was on the side of London none of us had lived in. It was old fashioned and the landlord was slow-moving to the point that I thought he might have been doing it on purpose as a psychological experiment. But it was a house, and there were two full bathrooms between three of us, and fruit trees in the garden, and it was inconvenient but manageably inconvenient, and we would get a proper tenancy agreement, and we were the first people to see it and the slow-moving landlord liked us.
My flatmate was conflicted. She hated it. She couldn't even pinpoint why, except that it smelled funny. She really didn't want to live there, but we only had a week left until moving day. There was almost no chance we'd find somewhere else where we could all live together. She decided she couldn't take the risk, and we made the snail-landlord an offer. He accepted us.
We packed up for the move across London. Convinced that our ridiculous landlady or her proxy would comb the place looking for reasons to deduct from our deposit, we hired a cleaner then cleaned the whole place again twice after she'd gone. I broke a glass and panicked that she was going to charge £300 for it. We worried about the state of the pans, the bathroom grouting that wasn't done properly in the first place, any scuff or scratch mark we hadn't documented when we first got there. We were convinced we would be living in abject poverty for months while we tried to recover from the loss of our deposits.
The landlady's husband came to see us out. He seemed normal. He had completely normal conversations with both of my flatmates, but treated me like a slightly dangerous dog, trying not to speak to me or make eye contact or attract my attention with sudden movements. I wonder what she'd told him about me. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I was some kind of ghost that had acquired the ability to communicate with the living and get a bank account. We loaded up our van, said goodbye to the house and the street and the whole of South London and left forever. To my utter astonishment, my full deposit landed in my account several days later.
Me: She's given it all back!
Flatmate: I know. Don't ask any questions.
Me: But we broke a glass! And we replaced the mattress protectors with Primark ones.
Flatmate: Shut up! She might be listening in somehow.
Me: How?
Flatmate: Maybe she bugged us.
Me: She certainly bugged us.
Flatmate: Shut up.
We settled in to our new home (after cleaning the smell out), and eight months later we're still here. We've not heard anything from our landlord since last year, and are working under the theory that he's dead but because he moves so slowly nobody's noticed yet. It's OK here. I miss convenient bus routes and wooden floors and the ridiculous fuck-off living room in the mansion and kitchens with space in them, but it's OK. My room is my room. I've been able to settle in and spread out and accumulate crap. It might be a long journey home, but I know where I'm going. The landlord might be slow, but the novelty of having a landlord stay the hell out of the house still hasn't worn off. I'm comfortable, and comfort is something that's been missing for a long time.
So concludes my adventures in housing. It's been interesting, going back over it all and writing it down and remembering everything. I almost enjoyed it. But that's enough. It's done now, right? This is all the housing upheaval I've been budgeted for this lifetime, and I'm looking ahead to decades of really, really boring house moves and living situations. I'm sure that's it.
The End. (Please.)
We started searching for our next home. I had dreams of moving back to the area where this story started, the area I'd lived in comfortably for two years, that had everything I needed and felt like home to me. At first my flatmates were willing to indulge me, and we looked at a few things around there. We got unreasonably attached to a flat we called Robert which they wouldn't let to us. We tried to make an offer on a place in a beautiful building with a lovely kitchen, but the lettings agent repeatedly refused to call us back after we expressed interest and let it to someone else instead. We saw a maisonette with an enormous roof terrace and beautiful living room, which came with a slightly terrifying landlord, a third bedroom barely big enough for a dog bed, and a single-person kitchen with no oven. We debated for days over taking a ratty little flat on an estate which stretched the upper limits of our budgets because I was so excited about proximity to a Zone 1 tube in the area I loved. After that, the other two gave up on my dream and started looking elsewhere.
The house we were leaving might have been owned by a crazy person, but it did have a clean and spacious kitchen and bathroom, and it was hard to go from that to the kinds of things that were on offer in any places that were even vaguely accessible. Sinks missing vital components, ovens that rattled ominously when anyone came within seven feet of them, toilets that appeared to contain the aftermath of someone setting fire to a crocodile. My flatmates, who didn't have quite the same dance-focused transport-dependent schedule, started looking further and further out to find nice places within our budget.
Them: What about this place?
Me: It's in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's so cheap!
Me: There's a reason.
The first Leytonstone place was easy enough to reject. It was a long way from the tube station (which was a long way from anything I considered to be civilisation), it was dark and cramped and unpleasant.
Estate agent: [pushes door open] This is the master bedroom.
Me: Huh.
Mostly-naked man on bed: Uh, hi.
Estate agent: Of course there's more light in here when the curtains are open.
Me: I - hmmm.
Mostly-naked man on bed: [nods to me and covers his lower half with duvet] Yep.
Me: OK, I think we're done here.
The second one was harder to turn down. It looked large and well-maintained and pretty in the photos, it was under budget, and it was three minutes' walk from the tube. We sat outside in the heat (hey, remember that? When it was all hot last summer?) waiting for the estate agent.
Me: Guys, I really don't want to live in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's really pretty and cheap!
Me: I go to a lot of late-night social stuff and getting back here would be an absolute nightmare. It would take hours.
Them: Well, we stay in a lot, so we want somewhere nice.
Me: I get that, but literally the one thing I said I wanted was somewhere accessible.
Them: But it's pretty and cheap.
Sitting outside that house, I felt dread build up in my stomach. I can't live here, no way. But if it's as pretty as it looks in the ad, they're going to want to take it, and I'm going to have to say no and then there'll be fights and they'll hate me. We waited, and I panicked, and we waited, and I panicked, and we waited, right up until the estate agent called my flatmate to say that one of their other properties had exploded and they wouldn't be coming after all (yes, there are two exploding properties within one year of housing drama. At least this one worked a tiny bit in my favour).
We stopped looking in Leytonstone, but time was running out yet again. We started looking for rooms on our own in case we needed a back-up.
We got another viewing. The house was on the side of London none of us had lived in. It was old fashioned and the landlord was slow-moving to the point that I thought he might have been doing it on purpose as a psychological experiment. But it was a house, and there were two full bathrooms between three of us, and fruit trees in the garden, and it was inconvenient but manageably inconvenient, and we would get a proper tenancy agreement, and we were the first people to see it and the slow-moving landlord liked us.
My flatmate was conflicted. She hated it. She couldn't even pinpoint why, except that it smelled funny. She really didn't want to live there, but we only had a week left until moving day. There was almost no chance we'd find somewhere else where we could all live together. She decided she couldn't take the risk, and we made the snail-landlord an offer. He accepted us.
We packed up for the move across London. Convinced that our ridiculous landlady or her proxy would comb the place looking for reasons to deduct from our deposit, we hired a cleaner then cleaned the whole place again twice after she'd gone. I broke a glass and panicked that she was going to charge £300 for it. We worried about the state of the pans, the bathroom grouting that wasn't done properly in the first place, any scuff or scratch mark we hadn't documented when we first got there. We were convinced we would be living in abject poverty for months while we tried to recover from the loss of our deposits.
The landlady's husband came to see us out. He seemed normal. He had completely normal conversations with both of my flatmates, but treated me like a slightly dangerous dog, trying not to speak to me or make eye contact or attract my attention with sudden movements. I wonder what she'd told him about me. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I was some kind of ghost that had acquired the ability to communicate with the living and get a bank account. We loaded up our van, said goodbye to the house and the street and the whole of South London and left forever. To my utter astonishment, my full deposit landed in my account several days later.
Me: She's given it all back!
Flatmate: I know. Don't ask any questions.
Me: But we broke a glass! And we replaced the mattress protectors with Primark ones.
Flatmate: Shut up! She might be listening in somehow.
Me: How?
Flatmate: Maybe she bugged us.
Me: She certainly bugged us.
Flatmate: Shut up.
We settled in to our new home (after cleaning the smell out), and eight months later we're still here. We've not heard anything from our landlord since last year, and are working under the theory that he's dead but because he moves so slowly nobody's noticed yet. It's OK here. I miss convenient bus routes and wooden floors and the ridiculous fuck-off living room in the mansion and kitchens with space in them, but it's OK. My room is my room. I've been able to settle in and spread out and accumulate crap. It might be a long journey home, but I know where I'm going. The landlord might be slow, but the novelty of having a landlord stay the hell out of the house still hasn't worn off. I'm comfortable, and comfort is something that's been missing for a long time.
So concludes my adventures in housing. It's been interesting, going back over it all and writing it down and remembering everything. I almost enjoyed it. But that's enough. It's done now, right? This is all the housing upheaval I've been budgeted for this lifetime, and I'm looking ahead to decades of really, really boring house moves and living situations. I'm sure that's it.
The End. (Please.)
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
progress
Three weeks down, four to go. I'm not sure if this is working, but I plan to keep going just in case it is.
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