a challenge

Several days' worth of posts have been passed by. Not on purpose. My temp agency found me a placement and why blog when my days could be full of sleep?

Please note the strange sentence structure and word usage. My laptop has been on the outs for months (my new laptop at least. My old laptop has been on the outs for years) and now we have reached a stage where several rather necessary letters on the type-words part are no longer usable. Haven't a clue what's happened but my laptop has chosen to deny me access to the personal pronoun and the letter below (more useful than one may suppose). And commas. No more commas for me.

A new laptop proves necessary. One that ten or eleven days at my current temp placement won't pay for. But the new laptop hasn't come home yet and there are just these two useless ones that don't do what they're supposed to do. One won't type necessary letters. One has a screen that's alternately dead or totally blue and shuts down the second someone else attempts to connect to the same router. TWO laptops. You'd assume that would be enough and you ought to be correct. But here we are.

So here's a post that uses none of those letters (or commas. That's almost the hardest one) because why not? When a challenge shows up you should leap upon that challenge no matter how useless. No matter how daft. No matter how flat-out dumb-ass.

Hmmm.

Perhaps we've all wasted valuable seconds here. Sorry.

inside out

Inside Out came out last year so it's not exactly topical right now, but I'm still seeing people talk about it on a fairly regular basis. People whose opinions I respect and value very highly write and speak about what an incredible film this is, how it's one of the best portrayals of depression they've ever seen, everyone must see it, it will make you cry buckets, it will make you re-evaluate every single thing that's ever happened to you, what a fantastic piece of storytelling and characterisation this was.

I didn't like Inside Out, and I'm so confused.

Inside Out is exactly the kind of film I should have liked. It's an interesting premise, the characterisation of emotions is something I've thought about a lot, and Pixar writers are gifted storytellers. I was fully prepared to like it. Actually, I was fully prepared to overidentify with it massively and struggle to communicate for the next two days. Bearing in mind my experience watching Up (where I cried so hard that I really frightened the guy I was on a second date with, and not all of that can be attributed to its being the last film in an all-night marathon), I bought a box of tissues from the newsagent on the way to the cinema. When we left, I hadn't even opened it, and I cry at everything. 

The fact that I didn't like it makes me a bit sad. So many people seem to have found things in this film - lightbulb moments, new ways of looking at and explaining things, minor religious experiences - and I want them too, but I couldn't find them. I've read and watched detailed reviews of this film and I still couldn't find them. Where's my moment of enlightenment, Pixar?

I will say that the animation is excellent and the film is beautifully designed, there are a lot of clever ideas within the script and especially within the smaller jokes and details, and the end sequence with all the different sets of emotions in different heads is genius. But that's not quite enough.

Some of it is definitely my own personal stuff. I'd heard that one of the emotions was Fear, and I went in assuming that that would be what got me. So many times I've felt like fear was driving me from the inside, making me say and do things I didn't like, and I thought it would be a powerful thing for me to see that represented. But then Fear was just a jittery dweeb who was basically superfluous to the entire story and didn't do or say one memorable thing. I feel like Fear has been my core emotion for large parts of my life, and this snivelling powerless nothing character is the complete opposite of my personal experience. But that's just me, and it's a nitpick. More important is that I didn't think the story was very good.

The story for the characters inside Riley's head is that Sadness and Joy are trying to get back to headquarters. And they almost do, and then suddenly whatever they're standing on falls over somehow. You can pull this trick once, but it keeps happening, and somewhere around the time of the Bullshit Rocket I just stopped caring. The journey wasn't compelling enough, and I believe I may have let out a quiet "oh, for fuck's sake" somewhere around the penultimate random obstacle. It didn't help that I didn't like Joy or Sadness (or Fear, as I said, and I still have no idea why they chose "Disgust" as the fifth emotion. I liked Anger) as characters and wanted them both to just shut up. 

I could tell where I was meant to cry. I always cry at the places I'm meant to cry, and usually at several places I'm not, but not this time. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't care about their journey. Pixar usually knows how to make me care, but this time I could feel the writers constructing a thing around stuff that usually makes people care. Let's have a heroic sacrifice! Heroic sacrifices are moving, right? (No, I didn't like Bing Bong either, and it's been made clear that this makes me a monster.) And it's weird for me to feel like this, because I always care. I can find a way to care even when the filmmakers haven't put a shred of effort into making me care, because I over-empathise horribly with everything, and I'm so confused by how this film managed to override all of my normal impulses and turn me into that person I've always hated. The "oh, everyone said I would cry, but I just didn't cry" person. Why am I that person now? Stupid film.

The short at the beginning with the sad volcano? That got me. 

My partner didn't like Inside Out either, but other than him I've heard maybe one other person mention in passing (before I saw it) that they didn't really like it. I even searched for "I didn't like Inside Out" and only found four things written by people who didn't like Inside Out. Two of them mentioned similar problems to the ones I had, but I still feel very alone on this. Everyone thinks it was brilliant and moving and possibly life-changing, and I wish I'd got to see the film they all saw. 

Tell me I'm rubbish. Go on.

sleep

To celebrate turning 31, I decided to try and adopt a vaguely human schedule. Six months of being sick followed by three months of unemployment leads to a lot of waking up only just on the right side of midday and not a lot of consequences for doing so, and that's not so compatible with my new desire to actually work and make myself useful.

I've been suffering from mostly mouse-related insomnia for about a year at this point. During our first winter in this house, a mouse started paying intermittent visits to my room, scurrying and rustling and attempting to get at any food that might happen to be in my room except the stuff with the poison in it (it was an upsettingly smart mouse). If I could hear it in my room, I couldn't sleep. At first putting all the lights on would send it back to wherever it was coming in, but soon it learned not to be bothered by that and it would be in and out all the time. It finally left me alone when I got a sonic repeller and the traps downstairs have turned up a couple of mice since, so I'm pretty sure it's gone now. However, from this months-long experience, my insomnia learned a great new game called Was That A Mouse?

Insomnia: Was that a mouse?
Me: No, that was the plastic bag I put stuff in just before I got into bed.
Insomnia: Was that a mouse?
Me: No, that was something outside.
Insomnia: Was that a mouse?
Me: No, that is just what it sounds like inside my ears.
Insomnia: Was that a mouse?
Me: No, that was literally nothing at all.
Insomnia: We should listen extra hard with our whole body on full alert in case that nothing develops into a mouse.

It got to the point that I could only get to sleep by waiting until I was so tired I could cry, and then plugging in headphones and playing something on Netflix. Then Netflix started doing this thing where if I was actually watching a show it would continue to judge me by asking if I wanted to carry on after two episodes, but not bothering to do that if I'd fallen asleep, so it would just play an entire series straight and wake me up a few hours later when my brain tuned back into it. I have no idea what the Netflix logic behind this is, so I've no idea if I can change it. What I did know is that I was getting very little sleep but spent all day feeling like I was about to drop down where I was. If I tried to go to bed early, Insomnia Voice would pop right back up. I tried to get some sleeping pills that had worked for me before, but the doctor would only concede (and then very reluctantly) to give me a quarter of the dose I used to take, which is too weak to actually do anything.

My recently-implemented plan is called Schedule Shit at 9.30am and Hope Things Adjust. Right now I have a massive sleep deprivation headache, but I have plans to be out of the house at 9.30am tomorrow regardless. I will be able to exist in the normal world with the normal people, dammit.

cheese

I am not going to write anything interesting today. I am on a flying visit back home and have been provided with a selection of fine cheeses and single malt whiskies, so I am writing this solely because I said I would.

Daily blogging, everybody! It's a wild, wild ride.

assorted thoughts I had while watching Spice World alone at midnight

(I saw Spice World in the cinema when I was twelve, and never again in nineteen years until last night, when I was looking for a suitably stupid way to see out my 31st birthday. It is a terrible, terrible film, but up until it started trying to have a plot at the end, I quite enjoyed myself.)

The Spice Girls appear to be having trouble lip syncing. Surely that's one thing they should have learned to do by now?

Is Jools Holland meant to be Jools Holland here or is he actually trying to act? I genuinely can't tell. Jools Holland always seems like someone who's playing Jools Holland unconvincingly.

Oh, they're playing chess now, are they. Explain chess to me, Geri, go on.

So. Many. Spiral. Wipes. Whose idea was this?

A fake sock penis! I did not remember there being a fake sock penis in this film!

Richard O'Brien played the baddie in this (well, a baddie in this)? Jesus.

...is this a Gary Glitter cover?? Oh, apparently it's a huge set-piece Gary Glitter cover. I thought we didn't do that? With Gary Glitter being such a fucking awful human being and all? Had we not realised that in 1997?

Aaaand now there's a spaceship. And aliens. Who want autographs. And all the Spice Girls speak alien now.

Oh dear, Michael Barrymore is in this. This is uncomfortable.

Richard O'Brien has emerged from inside a toilet and then turned to photograph said toilet for some reason. I bet Richard O'Brien thought this was great fun.

The Baby Spice thing actually is a bit creepy, in retrospect.

Seriously, what am I meant to think about Alan Cumming here? What is his purpose? Is he a bad guy or comic relief? I am so confused.

Meat Loaf is a bus driver, Elvis Costello is a deeply unconvincing bartender, Peter Sissons is Peter Sissons, and Geri is Bob Hoskins. Got it.

The entire film is soundtracked by the Spice Girls, except at this one point where it's My Boy Lollipop by Millie Small. But they're lipsyncing to it anyway, and not doing any better than they have with their own songs.

These are seriously the shittest news stories they could possibly have come up with. "Boat drama", really? When you could have gone with "Spice Girls attempt to drown fans"?

God, Geri is TERRIBLE at this.

God, Emma is TERRIBLE at this.

Is there meant to be some kind of Emma/Mel C subtext here, or am I just spending too much time on The Toast?

Ah, a flashback to the Spice Girls and their friend I keep forgetting about in their local working-class caff in their pre-fame days. This is possibly the least believable thing yet. Oh God, and they're going to do an entire song here, lip syncing to the purposely shitty boom box.

Oh God, that was meant to be an emotional moment and I completely didn't realise.

MORE FUCKING SPIRAL WIPES.

OK, Stephen Fry has turned up and made me laugh on purpose. Well done, Stephen Fry.

They're taking their way-past-her-due-date friend to a rave? And now they've left her on her own to go and dance? To their own song?? What shitty friends.

Now all the Spice Girls are in the delivery room? WHY are they all in the delivery room?? Why is Geri directly between her friend's legs? Why did she get to hold the baby before its mother?

What, so now the whole photographer thing was a story being told by the movie people? And they've wrapped up the whole evil-newspaper-guy plot with a nonspecific headline? I thought he was pitching a film, but apparently he was narrating actual events? The fuck?

Oh, I remember the model bus thing! And them trying to scream convincingly at a bomb!

EWWWWW I am upgrading the Baby Spice thing from "a bit creepy" to "really fucking creepy". I didn't notice this at all when I was twelve.

Seriously, what am I supposed to think about Alan Cumming?? Why is he even here?

The Spice Girls are performing at the Royal Albert Hall and it is the worst lip syncing yet. Either that or worst editing yet. Plus I really don't like Spice Up Your Life.

That was the end of the film? Really? Huh.

Oh yay, fake outtakes. And then they pretended to be able to see the audience! And then the bus exploded. Good times.

thirty one

It's birthday time again.

Last year I wrote what was in retrospect an unnecessarily harsh post to mark my birthday, about how the year to come was going to be hard and I was going to have to do unpleasant and difficult things for my own good. I'm not going to write that kind of post again.

This is going to be an odd year where everything changes, but what that means is that I have choice. I get to choose where to work, I can choose where I want to live. I can choose what to do with my weeknights without feeling like I've let anyone down. I have obligations to my partner and my family and a few of my friends, but none to jobs I dislike, houses that are slowly disintegrating, or entire groups of loose acquaintances. This year I can do what I like.

For the first time in a very long time, I actually want to be working. I want to have a job and an office and vaguely annoying co-workers, and I want to be showing people that I'm smart and good at lots of things. For the last few years of my working life I spent every morning battling the dread in my stomach and wondering if there was any way I could get out of it, and this feeling of actively wanting to be employed and useful is so foreign to me that it's taken a couple of weeks to work out that that's what it is.

I'm remembering what it's like to want to learn. I've been taking pride in my dressmaking skills recently, beginner though I might be, and I've been excited about getting better. I've been thinking about new dance classes, singing lessons, ways to improve my Italian. I've wanted to start cooking again. I've thought about learning something completely outside my normal wheelhouse; getting an A level in a science, learning indoor plumbing or some other extraordinarily practical domestic skill. I've thought about learning illustration, to see if I can teach myself to draw something that doesn't look like an inebriated ghost. I've thought about performing, doing something fun that will silence at least one of the voices in my head telling me you can't. More than anything else depression took from me, I've missed curiosity.

I can see a future for this year the way I couldn't for previous years. 2013 was completely about the present, 2014 was confusing, and in 2015 I couldn't see anything at all. This year I can feel opportunities for something better. I want to feel more like myself while growing with another person, to let out some of the things I've always hidden because of a nonspecific fear. I've got high hopes for this weird-ass uncertain year.

30-year-old Jen had a miserable time of it. 31-year-old Jen is going to have fun.

the worst

Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader is following me.

It's no exaggeration to say that I hate this song. I hate this song more than any other song I've ever heard. It infuriates me to the point that I will leave a shop if their in-store radio starts playing the song, and if it comes on when I can't just leave (because I'm in a restaurant or whatever) then I will stop the conversation and put headphones in, or sit there with my fingers in my ears like a small child. I have developed such an antagonistic relationship with this song that I cannot listen to it all the way through without having a minor but genuine breakdown.

Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader is the worst song ever written. The plinky intro hits at just the right frequency to make me twitch, the guy sings as though someone is trying to shove a Pot Noodle up his nose, and every single line rhymes with every single other fucking line. Light rhymes with bright rhymes with might rhymes with fight rhymes with delight until I start gouging bits of flesh out of my palm to stuff up my ears with. I don't often hate things, but when I do, I hate them.

Once my friends and I were at a free local music festival, hanging around by the artists' entrance, and Toploader rocked up. They were rude to the autograph hunters. I shouted at them that I hope their record company dropped them, and after that it was years before I heard anything of Toploader again. The story of "Jen is an actual witch who put a curse on Toploader and it actually worked" made the rounds a fair few times at my school.

Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader seems to be having a resurgence, and for the life of me I can't understand why. In the last two weeks I've heard it in shops, cafes, and even in my therapist's office.

"Oh God, I hate this song, I hate this song, I hate this song," I said through clenched teeth as the opening plink started up. My therapist chuckled and went to fetch water. The closest I can get to describing how I felt when I realised that he wasn't going to switch it off despite being right next to it is that I possibly astral-projected out of my body in order to smack him across the top of the head. When he came back in and I begged him, almost at the point of tears, to please just turn the radio off, he looked confused. It's apparently not really normal to hate this song this much.

Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader genuinely interferes with my well-being and mental health. If I'm ever kidnapped and brainwashed, this will be the song they use to trigger me into doing whatever nefarious deeds they kidnapped me for. Hearing even part of this song can honestly ruin my day. And now it's following me. That song must be at least fifteen years old by now, there is no reason for anywhere to be playing it. It's not a classic that needs to be kept in rotation, it's a festering pile of plinky, nasal, twee, irritating shit, and it must be stopped. Maybe I should curse them again.

with no face

Story time!

When I was four or five, we had an infestation of slugs in our back garden. My parents were trying to grow some vegetables, and to keep the slugs away from the plants they decided to put out shallow dishes full of beer. Of course, that's not what they told me.

"Why are you putting beer in the garden?" I asked.
"It's for the Tomato Man," said my father instantly, in the same genial tone he uses for ninety-eight per cent of everything he ever says. "The Tomato Man and his Four Hippopotami."
"Why are you leaving him beer?"
"Because otherwise he won't make the tomatoes grow. We have to leave beer for the hippopotami."
"But if there are four hippopotami, why are there only three dishes?"
"One hippo has to keep watch."

This all sounds ridiculous and adorable, except that the more I thought about this story the more terrified I was. I would lie in bed at night, listening for them. My immediate reference for hippos was a set of brightly-coloured ones that had been strung across my pram when I was smaller and had now been passed down to my baby brother. I pictured three hippos, each in a different jaunty primary colour, drinking beer from the dishes in the garden under the cover of night, while the fourth one stared unblinkingly up at my window, waiting for any sign of movement. And if he saw anything, I imagined, he would alert the Tomato Man.

(This sounds SO RIDICULOUS. But this is what it was like being Baby Jen.)

Some nights I couldn't sleep for thoughts of what might be on the other side of my window if I ever dared to pull the curtain back before the sun came up. I'd decided what he looked like; a large tomato head with vines for body, arms, and legs, large flat leaves for hands and feet. I would picture it over and over again (with the same horrified fascination as Supposedly Adult Jen reading the Wikipedia pages of films too frightening to actually watch and then feeling sick for weeks). I could see myself tripping over to the window and pulling back the curtain. The slightest twitch would have alerted the hippo on watch, and by the time the curtain was fully drawn he'd be there, huge tomato head millimetres from the glass, staring at me with his featureless face.

I have been known to judge potential friendships in large part over whether they understand the terror of being stared at by a man with no face. I've now moved past this as an appropriate test, but it's still interesting to ask people. Is the stare in the eyes, or in the intent? If it's in the eyes, then you have nothing to fear from the goddamn Tomato Man, but if it's in the intent? You are never getting away from that stare. He can't blink, he can't turn his attention elsewhere. You can't distract him. You can't break his gaze, because it isn't there. I've been afraid of being watched since then, but fear of being watched by a person, a monster, whatever, has never been more intense for me than the fear of being stared at by something with no face at all. Yes, I'm still aware it was a tomato.

I kept this completely to myself for years, because to say something aloud gives it power. I got so used to keeping it quiet that it stayed a secret long after he lost his grip on me. It must have been at least a decade if not more before I told my dad about my childhood fear of the Tomato Man.

"What?!" he said, in the exact same tone as he'd told the story in the first place. "It was just some nonsense about tomatoes and hippos!"
"You know about my imagination, Dad."
"Well, yes, but hippos and tomatoes?"
"Anything can be scary."
"I didn't mean to scare you! I was talking nonsense."
"Man with no face, Dad. You conjured up a staring man with no face."
"...good grief."

visible

I've done that thing where I haven't written for so long that any attempt at a new post takes on a disproportionate level of importance, and I continue not to write because I can't think of anything inspired enough to restart with. This is silly, and so I'm going to do daily blogging again for the next month.

This year's been okay, so far. I've danced, I've seen shows, I've made clothes. I spent New Year in Sicily, though that's really not as much of a brag as it sounds. My friend had a baby and I managed to persuade her not to name him Oakley. I'm taking a burlesque course and seem to have agreed to do a performance at the end. I'm signed up with a temping agency, I'm going to Paris next month, and in August I'm moving in with my boyfriend. Life's alright.

It's going to be an odd year. So far I've spent quite a lot of it being angry. I know, I just said that life was alright, and it is. But I've been angry, and being angry on my own behalf is something I'm completely unused to. When I've been mistreated in the past I've always responded with sadness, or fear, or a compulsion to rationalise the other person's actions until it looks like everything is fine, and this hot feeling of how fucking dare you is new and weird, and it has to be said, not entirely unpleasant.

I'm angry at the extended family members who are treating me like a pariah. I'm angry at the friend who abandoned me and is now sulking and pouting as though he's the one that's been hard done by. Having spent my whole life reacting to bad behaviour by assuming I'd caused it and trying to disappear, it's a very sharp kind of relief to know without any hint of a question that this is not my fault, this is your fault. I've been lacking that kind of certainty for a long time, and while I've got no interest in staying angry forever, right now it's giving me back some of the energy I lost last year and I'm grateful for it. Not that I know what to do with it, mind you. I'm still working on getting my activity levels back up to normal, so all my restlessness is getting channelled into sewing; I've made ten garments in two weeks. Which is bonkers. I need to slow down, but I think I'm worried about directing that energy to the places it really belongs.

If step one is realising that this is not okay, then step two is telling people that this is not okay. I've made it my business to be as unobtrusive as possible, to not fight and not complain and not start drama, and the idea of stepping out of that is terrifying. I have an astonishing imagination, and yet I can't hear myself saying "that thing you did was incredibly rude" or "you've been acting like a massive knob and you owe me an apology" or "you are a fucking adult who won't speak to me because I don't want to run around in a circle trying to steal hats off people's heads and that is pathetic" (I have some very specific complaints) without adding something into the scenario to make it clear that it's not real. Like everyone is wearing snakes or it's all taking place inside an orange. I can't imagine any version of me inviting conflict and demanding to be noticed like that. But at the same time, if all the anger stays on the inside, it's going to do me no good whatsoever. I've always wanted to be seen, but I've never wanted to be looked at. One way or the other, that needs to change this year.