New Link

In MAP you may notice that I have added The Golden Lasso which is written by the brilliant Anna. This is all I have to say. Hers is a blog I’ve read for a while and I really like everything I read and the fascinating insights we receive into her life which is so unlike mine. Anyway, there you have it. Enjoy!

You Are The Bearer Of Unconditional Things

You treat me like I’m a princess,

I’m not used to liking that;

You ask how my day was -

You’ve already won me over in spite of me.

[...]

This song probably takes it far too far, but yes. Jenny is happy today. And expecting this not to change too soon.  I am also headachey and in worrying need of a lot more coffee and should be in B&Q picking out paint colours. And it’s raining, and I should be revising, and I seem to have lost my revision notebooks, let alone the textbooks, and I have no money, and I’ve burnt my shoulders, and the optician dyed my eyes fluorescent green yesterday, and I was so tired that I did many hundreds of really stupid things, looked really silly, and annoyed myself intensely in the process because I’m hopeless at just allowing myself to make mistakes, but honestly, I really don’t mind, right now. Things are quietly looking good.

A Litany Of Recent Injuries

Having nothing interesting to say, and wanting to say it anyway, I’m going to talk about the utter clobbering my poor body has recently taken.

After Saturday’s party I came home with hundreds of grazes and bruises and lacerations of unknown origin. I don’t like drunken injuries, they’re annoying. I want to know why my legs are in the most part a freaky shade of green-grey, thank you very much. Preferably I’d rather they were a nice normal skin-like colour, and preferably vaguely tanned, but never mind.

On Monday I somehow found myself up the allotment, so I have bramble scratches all over my arms and legs and also burnt the backs of my legs. Joys. I also ache a bit from hours of allotmenting and the beating I took at the gym the other day – I got very into it, and it was good, but ow.

On Tuesday I ended up in a lake, as I may have mentioned, culminating in various dubious-looking lake-based injuries, but thankfully not AIDS, typhoid or Legionairre’s, all of which were threats hurled at us from the banks by the non-swimmers!

Wednesday was by far the worst of the lot – in orchestra, where normally I show up for two or three rehearsals before the summer concert, play the cello, and go home again, I am this year masquerading as a double-bassist. Now. Double basses have thicker strings than cellos. They are also played in an entirely different way. Furthermore, if you are a bassist you are surely used to spending about half your time playing pizzicato, i.e. plucking the strings rather than playing arco, with the bow. I am not a bassist. I play the cello. I don’t do pizzicato and I certainly don’t do snapped pizz., where you pluck hard enough to make the string snap against the fingerboard. Which is why I ended up with a gigantic blood blister on my right-hand middle finger. I am considering putting varnish on my middle finger to give it an artificial protective carapace for the duration of my short-lived career as a bassist.

And just now, to add insult – and more injury – to injury, I peeled about three or four layers of skin off the top of my foot with my razor in an attempt to shave very very fast with a razor I thought was a lot blunter than it turned out to be.

Here’s to the next week being a little more successful. But then, as I am so frequently reminded, I define malco-ordination, I am that clumsy. This is little more than I deserve, I guess.

My Grandfather’s Granddaughter

Insofar as I am not really a massive fan of the monarchy. The monarchy has got to at least be more tightly financially managed, on principal – look at these figures. I know that in the scheme of things it’s not much, but it is still something, and there is no reason for them to be given all of this for what little we get in return as a country, do you not think? I don’t think I necessarily want the entire abolition of the monarchy, I just think that the system needs paring down given the times in which we live.

Found these figures, incidentally, through the very interesting blog Washminster, which Fi put me on to. Meanwhile, you can check out George Monbiot’s latest, on the prohibition/legalisation of Class A drugs. I really don’t know what I think, but it is definitely worth reading. It’s a hard argument to precis, so you’ll have to go and read it, but then please come back with your reactions, yes? I’m always interested to know.

Little Bits Of News And Stuff

Yesterday was a brilliant day. I went to meet up with some friends in a nearby town, where we had lunch and then went to see the new Star Trek movie. It was excellent – I never thought it would be my thing but so many people had recommended it to me that when group preference was angling for either that or the Transformers film, I plumped for Star Trek, and I am so glad I did. It was beautiful, and interesting, and well-paced, and I may have a bit of a crush on Kirk, and it was interesting to see all those weird catch-phrases and so on that I hadn’t, in my pre-geek innocence, recognised as being Trekky things, that now suddenly fell into place. Star Trek, it would appear, is one of those cultural reference-frames which is so ubiquitous you never really realise the influence it’s had. And it was highly enjoyable.

Then we went back to the depths of the countryside; C gave me a lift across the county to get there and we went via his house and an empty property his family is selling where we’re hoping to sort a party at some point before it goes. Everything in that warm late-afternoon light looked utterly beautiful. So, off we went, meeting up with the others again to set up a fire and sit around comfortably in the middle of A and T’s family’s forest, which we’ve always called The Moat, for reasons I don’t really know. I swam in the lake, warmed up by the fire, and then went home. I even got a hell of a lot of revision done on my various lengthy journeys. I never thought it would be possible to get to The Moat and back home in one day, for me, but everything just worked. A lovely, easy day, in the company of people who know me well enough that we could all just relax.

There were some people missing, who were missed. Things change – things always do. And now that I’ve started to make friends with a wholly other group I am just hoping and praying that I don’t become one of the missing. This new group, and the people in it, represent for me a whole new chapter and things I’ve never done before and never successfully managed. I have a number of choices to make now – I can have nothing, and be content with what I have, or I can give up waiting and throw myself into this terrifying but potentially brilliant new thing. And it is terrifying, to me. And I don’t know how to predict that if I do one of those things, how entirely cut off my other choices are, further down the line. I hate that I can’t see the future and make my choices based on that.

There are days when I just want to go and shut myself into the library with my revision and give up on this socialising thing altogether. It’s far, far easier, and me being me, I would be just as happy like that.

But instead, no – tonight I am going to a rehearsal, and then on to my grandmother’s house. Back from my gran’s tomorrow afternoon and straight off out to go to the pub with New Group, and then home from that and to the opticians and then straight to a party with some very, very old friends indeed on Friday, and then on Saturday my sister has a concert, and on Sunday I may be going back to Home Town to see some old friends. There are plenty of Good Work Hours in that time, on trains, in my room, in peoples’ houses, on buses, in the car, and so on, so it’s not really a problem. I just want to stop, for a second. It’s a good thing a lot of that time is spent in comfortable, familiar company. Far less stressful.

Oh, stop complaining, dear. Stop being so averagely twenty years old. Stop it, now. I’m just tired. Ignore me.

Cold-Reading The Lyrics

I’ve got into this funny habit, over the years, of making playlists containing all the music that such and such a friend of mine has given me or recommended to me. Some of them aren’t entirely accurate – I’m lazy about making them, so sometimes everything I have by a particular artist will end up in a playlist when the person who puts their name to that particular playlist only actually gave me one song by that person, or whatever. Which is a bit of problem because a lot of people seem to have given me Pink Floyd at some point, so not only does their entire oeuvre appear multiple times in my library, the whole lot has made it into a number of playlists, and they’re a good band, I see why they’re so famous, I’m just not a massive fan. They’re growing on me, still. Anyway, that’s a tangent, back to my point… *drifts*….

Oh, yes. The reason why I still do this so obsessively (when the original intent was to have all of one person’s music in one place so that I could make the effort to listen to it all pretty soon after recieving it, so I could report back and enthuse about this or that artist with them) is because  I find it fascinating how you can tell apart peoples’ tastes – some peoples bequests to me all fall under one genre – commercial hiphop, say, or indie, indie, and more indie. That’s easy enough. And then other people have tastes ranging across a whole host of genres, from classical and jazz to metal and rock, to eighties pop, nineties ballads, dance, trance, you name it, but quite often you realise that all the songs they like have some kind of a feeling, a mood, in common, which I can’t put my finger on it. K’s tastes are by and large for happy, comfort-listening songs. C’s are, well, there isn’t a word for it, but I’d go with songs which feel somehow grey. A misty kind of a grey. Which is roughly the mood I’m in now, so guess whose playlist I’m playing? A goes for manically upbeat, B’s songs all sound a bit stoned, D just listens to indie, V is an unusual mixture of very, very happy songs, and very very sad songs. And so on.

This is not to say I am some kind of friend’s-music-leeching pirate. I am trying, slowly, to buy all the music I listen to, unless it genuinely was a gift to me, and get rid of the rest. With a library like mine it’s rather difficult. But I’ll get there. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. I wonder if I was given a blind listening-test of some stuff these people listen to that I don’t have, whether I would be able to guess who owns what… . Oddly enough I think I might. Do I win the music if I guess right? Pretty please?

Devils and Deep Blue Seas and Such

A recent blog post of Callan’s got me thinking a while back about this whole issue. I would like to come back to what he said with this: I have been in the same situation now for pretty much all of my life. And I used to ride the rollercoaster, get hopeful, get battered and bruised and dejected, and climb straight back on, fall for the next sucker, keep moving. And more recently I have lost the ability to care enough about people I meet to even consider going to the effort of liking them and having my hopes crushed again, and so I don’t do it, and in fact, for months, I haven’t really liked anyone new, haven’t struck out on my own and although I’ve been on dates and for drinks with people and so on, it’s all been going through the motions, really; and it got to the terrifying point, quite recently, where I realised I was completely emotionally uninvolved in the actions I was going through, and I wondered, when does this stop – when does this numb resignation and acceptance go away, or will it just swallow me whole and that’s it, I never break through this shell again, and I never fall for anyone ever again or really care in the least bit?

I won’t give you more recent installments in this story – that would be gossiping. They prove the point I’ve already made, no more than that. But I do merely want to say this – I don’t think continually getting your hopes up and getting them dashed is as bad as losing the ability to get those hopes up in the first place and turning into a confirmed spinster at the grand old age of 20, and I can easily, horrifyingly see how I could turn into any one of my mother’s friends, with hobbies and jobs and great lives but never anyone significant for long, because the connections that hold you and whatever man there happens to be are just too loose because you don’t know how to feel any different.

I’m not saying I want to be horribly rejected, I just don’t want to end up building barriers around my solitude and keeping things that way. I like being single – and that’s what makes being single such a risk, that I could just stay that way forever. It’s bad enough that I am just muddling along now without making any real effort to change things – and I hope I serve as a warning to, well, any and all of you. Quite seriously. Don’t resign from the game, because it’s bloody difficult to make yourself jump back into it.

Meanwhile, I’m writing this now because, well, there may be a change in the wind. That is all you may know for now, dear Reader. We’ll see how it goes.

Another Good Day, Or, How I’m Doing It

I don’t really know, is the answer. The question being, of course, how am I still alright? It is hard work, or rather, it isn’t hard work as such – being content should never be hard work otherwise is it really contentment? But I have to be aware of certain things and I have to avoid some things and take care to do others. So here it all is, how I’m doing it, the things I know and the things I don’t know about recovery. Partly to prove to you all that I’m not just drifting and hoping, partly to set it all down for myself, because I know there are rules, and I know what the rules are, but it makes me feel nicely organised if they’re down here in real list form.

I know I can’t get away with not getting enough rest or sleep. This is partly why I was teetering on the edge over exams – the stress and the fact that I really wasn’t sleeping well all combined to threaten to send me round the twist. Now I am sleeping better, which is good. I don’t know if it’s really the amount of sleep that counts, it’s the being conscious in the depths of the night, when no-one else is around, and it’s dark, and time becomes this surreal, slow, viscous thing, which doesn’t move at a constant speed, and everything suddenly looms so much larger and more luridly, and because it’s not a time at which one is meant to be awake, you’re not quite sure what you should be really doing with yourself at 3am, or whatever time it happens to be.

Things are just that much stranger and scarier, and you’re that much more alone, so it’s just you and your mind and of course it gets to you and conspires to unlock and unblock those aspects of you which you’re working so hard to put to rest for good. So if you’re not going to get enough sleep, you have to do it in a structured way: it’s OK to be sleepless if you’re lying in bed retelling yourself the collected works of Jane Austen in your own words, or counting sheep, or trying to work out exactly how you would go about making the perfect dress in your mind, mentally cutting out pattern pieces, or designing your perfect wedding, or rescoring orchestral works for string quartet, or counting breaths in and out (in…2…3…out…2…3…4….) – these are all things I’ve done. It’s a case of making your mind stick on ’safe’ subjects. Better still, of course, get some decent sleep.

And again, you can miss out on sleep if you’re with friends and having a good time and genuinely have a bloody good reason to be awake in the middle of the night (be that gin and tonic, or sex, or a film marathon, or a great night out, or a great night in, or a night outside with a decent fire and good company, or Eurovision, or drink-along-with Film X(we have so many plans for drinkalongs this summer - Withnail & I, Torchwood, Assorted Films I Should Really Have Heard Of, Casino Royale… though whether we’ll actually get around to doing any of them I really don’t know), whatever floats your boat). It’s a case of keeping your mind occupied.

Stress is another big one, of course. And I have to be aware of the things that get me stressed. I hadn’t realised it but I do suffer from exam stress. Not to the same degree that other people do, but still, it’s a problem. And I got around it by being very careful to get up at the same time each day, stick to a routine (admittedly a routine which meant starting each day with obscene amounts of coffee and cigarettes) but it was structured, it was the same each day, and I had a revision method which I stuck to and which worked, by and large, and I made damn sure to do my best not to let work overwhelm me by taking good breaks and never working late and reminding myself that although they might be a big deal these exams – all exams – are not the be-all and end-all.

As another recent entry of mine will have pointed out, I get stressed about organising things. Last year I became in many ways one of the chief organisers of our group holiday to the New Forest, partly because I owned one of the two big tents we took with us and because I was one of only about two or three people in the whole group that had gone camping on a regular basis and knew how to camp on a campsite in the long term (if you’re only going to be in a place for two or three nights and there aren’t showers and such becuase you’re in the middle of nowhere on DofE then it’s all a totally different experience from living in the tent and being able to relax and enjoy it because that’s the whole point of being there, after all). So therefore I allowed the whole experience and peoples’ enjoyment of it to become my responsibility and that wore me down and wore me out and sent me round the bend in ways I don’t like to think about. However it was a fairly public temporary loss of sanity and so I think although people will be worried about taking me away this year, they’re doing it anyway, and I think they’ll probably be looking over my shoulder for the whole time, especially M and J, and though that might annoy me, I know it’s for the best. And I know now that if I can’t cope with taking that role, and find myself doing so anyway, I can and should ask for help, cast off that mantle, and let the whole thing go hang. Better for everyone in the end by far.

Likewise I’ve realised I literally can’t currently cope with organising big social things. Last night I hosted a fire evening for a number of mine and my sister’s friends. As it happens it went off fine despite my slightly middle-aged outburst at some interlopers, but I think it was about as much stress as I could reasonably cope with without losing the plot entirely – as it was I was pretty distracted from one moment to the next, always trying to keep an eye on everybody, and we’re talking a group of about ten. I got a bit snippy with some people but I think we all got off lightly there. I don’t think I could cope with organising something involving any greater numbers than that right now, which seems ridiculous, but I just have to accept that I’m honestly just not capable of it.

That’s the thing – I have to realise my own limitations. I can’t go out in the evenings two nights in a row, not if they’re late nights. I can’t drink too much because if I don’t get horribly low whilst drunk, it’s sure to hit me along with the hangover the next day. I have to get enough sleep. I have to eat sensibly. I can’t take recreational drugs and get away with it.

I have to keep my mind occupied, I can’t just drift for a few days and chill out totally – I have to have little projects. Tidy my room, read this book or practice that piece on the piano, learn some more poi or wield the staff I found in the garage (by which I think I probably mean an old broom handle, but it seems to work), go and run errands in town or go for a walk or a run, knit. Hobbies were invented for a reason, and now they’re coming in handy. That and I should be working.

I can’t let myself get too stressed, so I have to be invited to things rather than organising things to which I can invite others. If I’m going to do anything like that it requires a lot of planning because being the hostess and the organiser is one of my Big Fears. I have to keep my own life organised – keep a diary to tell me where and when I have to be, keep a journal to understand where, when and how I was.

The hardest bit is this, and it’s an odd one: I can’t get too happy. I can’t have a great evening, where everything makes me laugh and smile and lots of good things happen without paying for it later that night or the following day. Sometimes I can get away with it; and having a really good time and forming all those brilliant memories of a really stand-out-perfect day or few hours is worth the price of one or two bad days, but it’s a shame it has to be like that.

It’s not hard work, it doesn’t mean massive lifestyle changes, it’s just a case of remembering that right now (and maybe never) I can’t match the people around me hour-for-hour, drink-for-drink or achievement-for-achievement. I used to think I could have it all – a wild social life with lots of drinking, a certain amount of recreational substance abuse if I wanted it (which as it happened I never really have, but it was always an option), good grades, outside interests like orchestra and poi and climbing and reading and cinema and such, enough sleep to just about get by, and a real enjoyment of my university course, a stellar medical career, a solid group of friends. I can have a slice of each of those things if I’m organised and tough with myself. I can be the high achiever if I cut back on the social life and only go out once every couple of weeks and never on week nights; I can go out all the time if I’m prepared to sleep during the day a lot and do nothing else; it’s like my own personal version of the 21st-century-woman’s have-it-all dilemma – be the perfect mother, all apple cheeks and smiles and home-made cakes and massive, inventive projects building tree-houses and painting murals at the weekends; or have the high-flying career, and is it possible to have both? No. But you can find compromises if you’re organised and responsible. And that’s what I am doing at the moment – and that is why I am still OK.

I’ll Tell You Another Odd Thing

My father was procrastinating at work earlier (now he definitely can’t talk when I’m prevaricating myself) and googled my blog, and found me. A) I’ve googled myself in the past and not found this blog, no matter what I put into google, and B) I don’t know how I feel about him finding this blog. It’s not like I say anything on it that I don’t want him to see, but but I want to be able to write things up here which I don’t have to think about too much. I don’t want to be too self-censoring. At the  moment the only restrictions on what I write are basically that I don’t let slip where I live or the names of people I mention, and I don’t say anything about other people that they might not want to read up here, if I think there’s any chance they will read this blog, and if I genuinely care about their opinion and don’t want to hurt them. No strict rules as such, just basic tact and the vague hope of remaining reasonably anonymous. But if I were to try drugs or get hideously drunk or take up smoking again or otherwise go in for a bit of good old old-fashioned teenage rebellion (I’ve only got about seven weeks to do the teenage rebellion thing before I stop being a teenager, so watch this space…!) and I felt it was blogworthy, I’d put it up here. Meanwhile I wouldn’t want my father to read all the grisly details of the stupid things I do merely because there are certain things you don’t want to imagine your daughter doing, which is fair enough.

The thing is, though, thinking about it, this blog is pretty parent-safe, in fact it’s pretty safe for pretty much anyone to read apart from my tendency to swear unnecessarily, so why this has got me in a bit of a pickle I honestly don’t know. Perhaps this is just one of those days where everything’s a bit of a pickle. My body has taken me entirely by surprise (feel free to guess, I merely promise that I am neither ill nor pregnant); my room is out to confuse, upset and murder me, and possibly drive me to tears along the way; I am jobless and being messed about no end by the people who were going to employ me (a screw-up for which I blame my previous employers, and probably the subject of a later rant); I’ve spent the last goodness-knows-how-long trying to organise my friends into picking dates for our group holiday which mean that I can also go on holiday with my parents and that’s been driving me slowly mad but seems to finally have worked itself out, although there are a number of people to whom the less charitable half of me would like to do various incomprehensibly painful things; and I’ve been trying to organise various other social occasions and just wishing I could somehow invent some kind of social-organiser-type-intention-craft, such that I merely have to think, ‘it would be nice if on such a day, this set of people all spontaneously decided to show up in the same place for a few drinks and some food’, and lo and behold, abracadabra, there you go, none of this shilly-shallying and excuses and giving out directions for all and sundry and panicking about who can and cannot come and is this or that person going to feel awkward or get bored and so on; so yes, perhaps it’s just me, but life at the moment seems a bit chaotic, I can’t keep track of anyone and anything else, and yet somehow I’m the one that seems to have to do so.

Anyway, I know it’s only 4pm, but I would quite like a bit of a doze, so that is what I am going to do now.

That’s Very Odd

During the revision period I got about twice as many hits on this blog each day as I usually do, and now exams are over and I’m free for the summer, I’m getting a bit less. Not right back down to ‘normal’ viewing figures, but about half way in between the two. It’s very confusing. Is it because I’m posting less often, or is it because everyone’s finally free and is therefore outside drinking Pimm’s and cider and relaxing as well they should be?

I’m only stuck indoors because I’m unpacking, and I’m starting to get a little stuck on a few issues – where certain things should be stored in my room, and such. It’s silly because my room is huge, I should have no problems. It’s more of an issue with categorising stuff – random electric wires and useful bits of paper and bits of Useful Thing that don’t really have an obvious home.

I think I’ll think about this over the keyboard of the piano instead… .