It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

So, odd day. Started off, as every other Tuesday does, with therapy.

Suddenly realised something about me, and how I manage - or don't manage - my moods.

My Mum's most common refrain, if I, or my brothers, is playing a certain kind of music - such as Radiohead, the Manics (GATS, THB, JFPL only) etc etc is "why are you listening to that suicide music?" She even said it once when I was listening to Josh Ritter's Hello Starling (my response? "it's not suicide music, it's about the return of hope" her response "pff!")

It's an infuriating little quirk and no amount of explanation of what a song is about, or what a certain genre of music is doing will change her. However, it reveals a little about how my Mum deals with extreme feelings: WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT THEM.

I've always been rather British about this and concluded that not speaking about dramatic emotions is good and right. But over the years, and through the diagnoses that attitude has begun to change. I am thinking about how this attitude affects me because if I do move back in September, I'm going to be living under the same roof as it again

My main fear is that if things do go a bit pear shaped emotionally/mentally for me again I am going to be under enormous strain trying to keep it hidden - as I did as a teenager - which, of course, compounds the problem. I've spent the last 7/8 years expressing most of what I feel as it happens to my friends and partners, and being allowed the space to simply express it, with no repercussions, no being told not to think/feel those things, no being told to push it away, ignore it, no being told it's "not as bad as you think" or "you always take on so, don't" or simply "you'll feel better tomorrow".

The thing is, all of these bits of 'advice' from my Mum come with the best possible intentions. Deep, deep down she truly believes that if she doesn't acknowledge any of the things I say are happening to me/I'm feeling then they won't be feeling. My two eldest brothers had complete mental breakdowns - full on break with reality - and she very nearly managed to pretend that things weren't as bad as they were/happening for the reasons they were. In short, my Mum makes denial a world class sport.

The effect of all of this is that somewhere in my head is the hard-wired idea that both expressing and experiencing extreme emotions of any kind is wrong. It's reductive and not a little absurd to suggest that all my problems come from this deny/suppress environment, but I think it's fair to say it doesn't help.

Interestingly, my Dad has a very practical approach to all this, he's brilliant at coaching and counselling my brothers and has the gift of being able to provide practical perspectives and solutions to emotional hardship. However, I'm his only daughter, and I'm the youngest.  I feel like being number 4 of 4 kids with some sort of mental health failings means that I am the failure, I am the disappointment and if I told him I'd either disappoint or worry him - most likely both.  I don't want to do that.  

Of course, social factors aside, most of the things that mentally shit me over are probably genetic.  Genetic like the ligaments and joints that comprise my knees.

After I finished with therapy and had lunch I headed along to the Doctor's Surgery to talk about my knee pain.  My burning, flaming knee pain that happens whether I stand up for 8 hours at work or not and I was told that.....I have arthritis!

Joy.  Bought glucosamine, despite my massive scepticism of alternative remedies and went away with instructions to keep my knees straight when sitting - i.e. not sitting with my legs splayed apart with the knee joint turned outwards and to never cross my legs.  Or do the breast stroke when swimming - although I used to swim competitively and was taught to swim racing breast stroke which has a much straighter extend rather than kicking to the side so I might ignore that one.  Finally I was told to work on building up my quads - continue cycling to work and do some weird toe curling exercise when sitting.  Le sigh.

My seagulls remain in ruddy health and are growing like weeds.  Managed to capture two not-very-good occasions of them feeding, in each case I got my camera to the window after the main feeding was over.  Turns out nature is difficult to film, who knew!

If you could go back in time and meet your 16-year-old self, what three things would you tell yourself?

1) Save some of the money you're spending on weed, it'll come in handy in a couple of years
2) Yes, you are queer. No biggie.
3) Go on, eat a pie.


Tomorrow I'm going to paint and read, I am optimistic I will then produce a blog entry of value. Stay tuned folks...

My seagulls are still doing well. Tonight I invited my flatmate up to my room to see them have dinner. Tried to film them through the blinds and I got about 2 mins of footage of chicks and parents but they were totally on to me filming them and weren't terribly relaxed. It's seriously windy tonight, when I last checked on them they were bedding down the other side of a ridge they normally sleep against on the flat roof so I'm hoping that's because it'll give them some shelter. I wish I could speak seagull and invite them to come inside at night.

In other news tonight I watched Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest for the first time in about 17 years as Asda were selling it for £4 and I couldn't resist. Turns out it's as good as I remember and I have concluded my generation are as concerned about the environment because of the formative influence Fern Gully exerted. I jokingly wrote this on twitter and a friend replied that she neither watched Fern Gully as a kid nor cared about the environment. CASE CLOSED.

Via forthwritten I've come across this article; This is your brain on drugs. which makes the 'argument' that all of us with an 'artistic temperament' should stop medicating with pharmaceuticals and start self-medicating and, god damn it, our lives would then be peachy. There are a lot of problems with this stance, not least of all the angle that "You have to be who you genetically are", yeah, great, you sell that to people with genetically coded ailments, like diabetes, haemophilia, cystic fibrosis etc etc and I might start listening when you tell me to suck it up and get on with my genetic hangover.

There's also an issue, on a personal level for me, that half of what she's saying is echoing the little voice of doubt (which gets particularly loud when I'm manic) which tells me to jack in all the meds and just embrace the roller coaster of unpredictably, self violence, frantic highs, anti social behaviour and emotional collapse....because, says the article's writer and my little doubting voice, your life will be better for it.

 My seagull babies are still on the roof.

The day after I thought the first one had made it back to the nest a second baby appeared and I realised the first one had been there all along.  After a brief sighting of the parent I didn't see them again for the rest of the day and was worried the babies were going to starve.  I called the RSPCA in the early evening and they took all my details and told me they'd call me back.  They didn't call me back that evening.

Luckily, though, I noticed the parent bird returned that night and slept with the chicks, on the roof, all night.  The next morning they were there until around 1pm.  Shortly after 1pm I got a call from an RSPCA inspector and I was able to tell her that the parents appeared to be looking after them.  The inspector asked me to keep an eye on them and call them back if they took a turn for the worse.

That evening, once again, one of the parents slept on the roof with them - all through the torrential rain.

Today the whole family was there, both Mum and Dad.  I want to get some photos of them but the parents are on to me and know that I stand behind the half opened blinds to watch them.  Previously they only squawked when I actually opened the blinds and stood at the window but now they listen for movement in my room and watch the window.  I've managed to sneak upstairs a couple of times now and catch the whole family sleeping - which is just gorgeous - but it's tough.

I feel so protective of them all - I keep referring to them as my seagulls.  The chicks are growing so fast, they are already noticeably taller than they were two days ago and much, much steadier on their feet.  I can't wait for them so start fledging.  I want to try and film the whole family together so I can send it Springwatch but it's going to take some patience.

I sent my Dad the photos I put up the other day and he looked them up, apparently I have Herring Gulls and they only have 2 or 3 eggs, so these chicks are undoubtedly their only ones, moreover, contrary to the popular opinion of most Brightonians, there aren't as many of them as there once were and apparently the UK breeding population is concentrated to less than 10 sites. My gulls are precious

The NaBloPoMo prompt isn't up for today yet and I want to blog now, so I've decided to just go for a simple one and post my most recent painting. I based it on a Matisse sketch and started off with a Hopper colour palette but of course things developed and it ended up looking more like a piece by Alexej von Jawlensky that I have on my wardrobe (click if you want to see what my wardrobe looks like, art-erific! I buy one postcard per gallery visit.). As a result - because it took such a journey from conception to completion - I don't really like it. However, this isn't a popular opinion, Bex, my flatmate and my Dad all like it - and my flatmate rarely likes my paintings. So I'm posting it in a speculative way. Unless my output explodes between now and the ArtFor Pride exhibition it will probably be for sale then, so one way or another, I'm going to have to get behind it.



Oh, and this afternoon I got squawked at by a seagull when I looked out of my bedroom window - nothing unusual in that, they nest on the flat roof over my attic conversion every spring/summer. However, later when I looked out the window I realised why I was squawked at so emphatically - one of their babies had fallen out of the nest;


I checked several times over the next few hours and he was still there all on his own but I just checked again and he's gone so the parents must have put him back in the nest, thank fuck. I teared up the other day when I saw a dead starling chick on the pavement. ETA; seriously though, he was SO CUTE. All fluffy and spotty and kept stretching out his disproportionately long legs and feet and fluffing himself up with a little flutter of his tiny wings, and then stalking about on the flat roof, he so completely had the attitude of a fully grown seagull.  I was a little bit in love with him and half imagining having to hand rear him if his parents didn't return.

Thursday, June 3, 2010
Define "freedom."

The interesting thing about the word 'freedom' is how many contradictory things it can be used to champion at any one time.

In any exercise of individual freedom comes the possibility - and often the realisation - to infringe upon another person's freedom. The notion of 'free speech' and 'freedom of expression' are surely those freedoms which most frequently fall into that guilty category. Look to the newspaper articles in the likes of the Daily Mail, look to the manifesto and public statements of groups like the BNP; these people exercise their right to free speech and demand a curb on the freedom of others. But at what point do the scales tip too far in one direction and privilege the expression of one group over another? At what point, if any, does 'freedom' become a right that is abused and not carefully exercised with all due consideration to those touched by the words, actions and expression of another?

We look to countries with poor human rights records and we can say definitively that those citizens lack freedoms, that they deserve more; that is where freedom is easy to define. Similarly countries which dismiss and oppress women, who erase their personal freedoms whilst men pass through their lives in liberty; we know what freedom means to these people.

Somewhat ironically it strikes me that the place where freedom is hardest to define, the place where freedom takes on the burden of too many concepts and demands is in this country, in America, and all the other first world countries - those who have the greatest freedom and the most absolute sense of their entitlement to it. What makes our notion of freedom so difficult to understand? What I know of America and the most public political polemics, is that the term 'freedom' is brandished daily, it encompasses the drive that led the country to be founded by the white settlers, and so it is of daily relevance, Americans are living in a country which promised freedom as birth right. And although we perhaps don't have that historical absolute, along the line all other first world countries have made that guarantee, so for generations we've been born to expect nothing less. Could it be then that we are too comfortable, too complacent to understand the privilege of freedom and the minority we live amongst who can wake up on the first day of their lives and know that, within their country, they will never face death for expressing themselves in an immediate and honest manner? But that seems too simple. I know as a woman I am concious of the freedoms bequeathed to me by more foremothers, and I know as a queer woman I am grateful for those activists who came before to ensure me and my friends can love who we please and tell who we please. Perhaps then, freedom is a steep gradient which begins to even out towards the top but is, in a hard to define way, never fully realised.

So what does freedom mean? I don't know. I don't think anyone does, really. We can understand it by degrees, we can understand what it means to have and lose and need freedoms; but freedom? It's too big. It both signifies and betrays too many concepts simultaneously.   And perhaps, as it seems never to be fully realised, it will remain a word always slipping out of grip as we try to pin it down 

 Writing Prompt for Tuesday, June 1, 2010
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I couldn't decide between two careers.  For years - until I was about 12 and discovered I wasn't great at maths - I wanted to be either a vet or an astronaut.

A vet for the very simple. and largely uninteresting reason that I liked animals.  The astronaut ambition has more interesting motivations...

Some of my earliest memories are laying in bed waiting to go to sleep and I would sing to myself.  All the songs I sang would be about the stars, or the moon, or the sun.  Somehow I just arrived in the world with an innate wonder at the celestial display.

My Dad taught me to adore and respect Nature.  I think, deep down, he's a Romantic in the most absolute sense, he understands the Sublime in a way few Romantic writers could ever manage to express.  In the appreciation and awe of Nature comes a sense of the absolute wonder at the fact of our planet.

My Dad also assured me that there were and are aliens out there.  It sounds laughable but my Dad is not prone to flights of fancy, he rarely if ever reads fiction and is a salt-of-the-earth type.  But one night, in the early 80's, when he was still a policeman he was on a night patrol with a fellow officer and they were in a stretch of open ground.  Suddenly a bright light shot to earth and hovered a few feet above the ground.  It was so bright my Dad struggled to look directly at it.  He tried to approach but as he got close enough to really *see* what he was looking at the light shot back up in the air, hovered overhead for a few seconds and then jetted into the atmosphere.

He still has a copy of the official report he filed after this inexplicable event.  It was duly investigated - which is to say the RAF and Air Traffic Control were contacted and requested to supply any pertinent information which might explain the spectacle.  There was no explanation available.  My Dad is, to this day, convinced of what he saw.  

As a kid this made a dramatic impact upon me.  My imaginative world exploded.  I had no doubt that aliens existed; that every space expedition brought us a little closer to a bigger universe.  I used to ask my parents exactly how many years it would be before we could live on the moon.  I played endlessly with my lego space-base set and sang David Bowie's Space Oddity as I played; just the first verse and chorus, over and over again.

Of course, my absolute faith in my Dad's judgement waned, as it is want to do as we mature.  Indeed it was around the same time I came to the conclusion that there was no God and that Christianity was well intentioned twaddle that I also concluded my Dad was not lying in as much as he believed what he saw, but that he was mistaken - it was not irrefutably alien life, there were as many terrestrial explanations as extra.  And then, then I stopped wanting to be an astronaut.
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...more or less.

What came with maturity, with disentangling my personality from my parents as children do as they grow up, was fear.  Awareness of the hugeness of earth, the fragility of life, my own mortality.  And space ceased to be a gap waiting to be filled and took on a new role as a hostile....it is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.  Oh shit, hang on, I just turned into Bones....but you get the idea.

The power of stars, the beauty of our Earth, my continuing astonishment at the many and various ways the natural landscape can alter in a second through the combined forced of our atmosphere and the barely known powers beyond....all these things have not yet lost their power over me.

One of the things I miss the most about living in a city is losing the stars.  In the country the sky is full, every night.  One of the most remarkable sights I ever saw were the stars in the Southern Hemisphere one night, in Australia, from the deck of a tall ship in the Whitsundays.  I will never forget falling asleep to that spectacular display.

And somewhere in there is the reason I'm not an astronaut.  I think.

Yesterday I got a text message from my best friend B which simply asked if I could go round to hers today, all day. I said of course and asked why. She said she'd seen a train accident on Saturday night and didn't want to be alone.

So I took chocolate cake and went round this morning. It turns out this is the accident she was talking about:

A 16-year-old girl died after falling under a train while she was running alongside it on the platform

B was on a train going in the opposite direction which arrived into the station just seconds after the accident.  All the power was turned off and B sat in her carriage, which was level with the front of the other train, and watched as police and paramedics went to work.

The girl's best friend started screaming as soon as her friend fell.  B said she didn't stop screaming for over half an hour.  She says the scream is one of the worst things, she just cant get it out of her head.

The whole station was closed down for three hours.  B got talking to a girl in her carriage who was also from Brighton and this girl called her friends who immediately began driving the 45mins to the station to collect her and drive her to Brighton, B was invited to go along with her which she agreed to.  About 15 minutes before the friends arrived their train was cleared to leave so B, not wanting to leave the girl alone, got off the train with her and together they waited on the platform.

They were going to wait outside the station but a station employee told them they could wait on the platform and stay a bit warmer.  They sat and looked across to the opposite platform where the police were looking down at the tracks with torches.  B says that although she could hear their conversation and see clearly what they were doing, it took her a minute for it to actually register.  When she saw what they were doing down the tracks she grabbed the girl who she was with and dragged her out of the station.  A couple of minutes later the same station employee came out to apologise to them, he hadn't realised what the police were doing and the police had not realised there were any passengers left in the station, so they had not kept their voices down.

B is doing ok.  She burst into tears almost as soon as I arrived.  And again when she tried to read the article about it on the front page of The Argus.  But she managed to tell me all of the story above, along with a few details I have omitted, without crying.  And we carried on talking about it all day. She was doing much better by the time I left this evening.  In many ways she did better than me as I started crying when she was telling me her story!  I just hope she sleeps reasonably well tonight and is able to face tomorrow back at work. 

It is just beyond tragic.  What a horrific end to what was obviously a good night out for this girl and her friends.  Just a split second and suddenly everyone's lives changed around that one random event.


_____________________________________


Spoke to HP today, they tried to tell me the warranty didn't cover accidental damage so they wouldn't repair it.  I told them that was fine and dandy, but there was no accident.  It just stopped working: BAM! After arguing for a while they agreed to collect it tomorrow and will ring me when they've established whether it was user error - if they think it is, they will charge me for the repair.  Basically if they decide it was my fault, I dont have a leg to stand on, there is no way I can prove that all I did was turn around to plug it in only to turn back and discover it was broken.

I turned it on this afternoon and the bottom half of the screen has also gone screwy, I think the refresh rate has dropped through the floor for that half of the display, for god knows what reason.

All of which is stressful, when it needn't be, HP could just give providing good customer service a whirl instead of being arseholes on the phone and I'd be feeling a lot happier about sending it off to them tomorrow. Ugh.

Anyway, this is possibly the last NaBloPoMo entry I'll do, depends how inspired I am to painstakingly type html code out on my phone in order to have some sort of formatting.  We'll see.

Good wishes for B, the girl's friends and family, and hopes of a swift resolution of my HP problems dominate my thoughts this evening.

Christmas blues seem to be setting in a little early this year.  I can only blame the fact Christmas adverts and preparations begin earlier each year and seem to be in full swing already.

Weirdly, I'm really on top of all the things I need to do (Christmas cards are currently laid out on the floor drying, Christmas card list is written, letters for those across the Atlantic are written) and have plenty of social events lined up in the next 6 weeks and yet....

And yet.

Man I'm tired.

Second day back at work after my epic week's holiday and I'm done in.

NaBloPoMo is beginning to feel like hard work. I simply haven't found time to think about the what I want to put out into the world

I will, therefore, be brief. It's harder to make friends than find someone to fuck, or even to date. Indeed it's so much harder that for the majority of new people I have met in the last year, I have had to work backwards from that position; with an even spread of it being me or them who is left feeling vaguely little disappointed.

It seems to me that we are all so desperate to be loved, so desperate to be indispensable to someone else's life that we assess every new person we meet in those terms: are they my next conquest? Could I fall in love with them? Would they make me the centre of their world? As a result we end up viewing friendship as a poor second place.

One of the hardest things about coming out of a long term relationship and back into the world is that you have to rebuild your identity, social life and home around the notion of being single.  And the only way you can do that is with friends.  Yet we do not search for friends, we search for a replacement for what we have lost, we look to leap back in and absolve our pain by assuring ourselves we are not just worthy of love, but entitled to it.

Whilst this seems instinctive, I suspect it is more self protective, because the road through heartbreak is a damn site harder to navigate when you do it alone, waylaid by lovely but completely ill-matched prospective partners whom you must sort through to find the one night stands, the life long friends and hopefully, finally, the new beau.

Then again, I've had quite a lot of schnapps and I might be talking out of my arse.  Who knows.