So my phone was refusing to make phone calls and it even started refusing to find signal. I’d tried begging and imploring it and in the end gave up and stole Ian’s spare phone because, goddamnit, why does he need two phones anyway? It’s going off to repair on Wednesday and I don’t need anyone’s numbers because they should all have backed up to google anyway.
Meanwhile, my group therapy ended and I’m now in the delightful limbo of having slipped through the cracks and possessing no idea on how to return to my psychologist for more treatment. Yay!
Joseph is doing super well at school, though! He’s learning to read quickly and has been given various word boxes and reading books to tackle. His writing is also coming along well, he loves spending time with Ian and I writing things out and will usually try and copy what we’ve written. Unfortunately, he also enjoys spending his time playing computer games so his sleep is suffering a little – that being said, he doesn’t always play games and more often than not is perfectly happy to play board games or the like instead.
Recently I’ve been finding it harder than ever to remember to do things. I’ve now finished my mindfulness therapy and they’ve tweaked my medication to make it easier for me to regulate my mood.
As for charity work, it’s going… just about. I never thought I’d say this but it’s pretty hard for me to keep it up half the time and I can only assume that I’m not the only one beginning to get annoyed with this…
Anyway, today I took a step in the right direction. I’ve tried to get my life back on track and now I have to sit back and see how that goes.
Right now, the living room is lit up with the ethereal glow of fairy lights – something that puts Ian in mind of christmas and makes me happy. When I was younger, I used to envy some of my friends because they were allowed to have fairy lights in their rooms and I wasn’t. It’s not that I was deprived, I wasn’t, it’s that my mum didn’t really see the point in me having a string of them just strung up around my room. A feeling that persists to this day – seriously, it’s like people have never wanted to have fairy lights strung up around their living rooms or something (no, I won’t take them down – they’re not a christmas decoration.).
My insomnia has returned, assuaged only by the lights strung up around me that tell me there is a softer side to things. I lie here, looking at my hand as I hold it up above my face and remember a more innocent time when I managed to convince myself that there were weird creatures in the dark that ate people’s feet if they dared to dangle them off the side of the bed. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever dared test this theory, so tonight – in an uncharacteristic feat of daring – I let my leg dangle ever so slightly off the edge of the bed. Nothing came to eat me. Thus I conclude, younger me was wrong. (It’s a pity it took twenty years to figure that one out.)
Some small part ofme wonders what I’m attempting to achieve by posting this up – allowing the world to see one of the hidden things – whether I try to achieve some species of enlightenment when all I’ll possibly get is a weird look.
I once made it snow with an offhand comment.
There, now the rest of this post will seem completely rational.
I’m secretly worried about one of my friends, I haven’t seen or heard from her for a while now and I’m scared she’ll have done something dumb. However, I have no idea what to say to her so I’m waiting it out, hoping that the words will become clear to me. My impulse is to hope she makes first contact, a behaviour that I’ve found myself defaulting to a lot these past few weeks. I deeply miss some of my friends and hope that they might be in a position where I might be allowed to – here I find myself grasping a straws, hoping the words will continue to flood out of me even though I know they won’t – I hope they’ll allow me a few selfish moments of their company where I may sit there and ask how they are, share with them the wonders of wild flamingoes and the disappointments of my enmity with cheese and ham.
But being me, I’m too scared to ask them. I know I’m being ridiculous, that my desire is not unhealthy and should be encouraged. However, I also know that these are very busy people and that expecting them to have as much time as I seem to is unreasonable.
So I sit here, after Ian has gone to bed, typing on a computer that was never built for this purpose and wishing that my own were returned to me because I started a story on it and would rather like to resume my sadistic narrative. It’s an unhealthy desire, you see, I love writing and utterly adore creating stories – even if my character creation is incredibly dodgy – but not as much as I enjoy flinging these characters into weird situations and watching it unfold. Rationally, I know that it’s not terribly bad to do this and that a lot of “normal” people use this technique to vent their frustrations but it always felt like a guilty pleasure to me.
Of course, a small subset of you will wonder how the holiday in France went. Well, the answer to that is simple; I both enjoyed and resented it.
I enjoyed it because I love spending time with friends and family and it was so very very beautiful out there. Also, we got to see wild flamingoes and there was no end of pretty sights to be seen. Avignon was an experience all to itself, complete with the (weird) experience of paying 50 euro-cents to pee in a hole.
I disliked the abundance of cheese and ham, though to be honest I’m not sure what I would have done differently – they seemed to be a majority hit. I also disliked the severe lack of public transport and of my own method of travelling around, though I am incredibly grateful that I had a friend to help me get to places. I also somewhat resent the fact that Avignon charges money to go and see the bridge – a bridge that you can see a whole view of from the road that passes by it. I would have liked to go, but no way was I paying 5 euros for something I saw the entirety of from the dual carriageway. Honestly, unless they give paying members of the public a reacharound or something I cannot see how it begins to warrant that high a price for what is (essentially) half a bridge of (I’ll be nice here) visually agreeable masonry.
Oh, and my mentalism? Yeah, it’s being sorted… apparently, I might not be bored after all…
Tags: angst, dazed rambling, decadence, ericfail, ericwin, frustration, health, look at me not complaining, news, random, random thoughts, rare events, squee, travel, weakness, woes
Posted in General Activity, mentalism
In case it’s passed any of you by, I’ve been in France the last few days. Anyway, today we went to Avignon and had dinner in a restaurant where my homicidal tendencies surfaced after we were forced to ask for the bill no less than four times… that’s not my point.
The point I was trying to make was more along the lines of this:
Ever since I was a little girl I’ve always found driving in the dark in Europe kind of sad. I don’t even know why… I mean, driving around England in the dark is okay I never feel sad or even the slightest bit wistful but whenever I’m in Spain (or, in this case, France) I just find it so saddening.
There’s no real logic behind this, it just makes me feel that way.
As some of you may have worked out (or not, I haven’t been the most vocal of blog-creatures) I’m getting married on Friday to some bloke. Anyway… the point is I bought the dress in January or thereabouts and it fit me perfectly back then… so I got smug and was all “I don’t need to lose weight so I can eat all the cake” so I ate all the cake. Now the dress doesn’t fit properly. This *would* be a problem except for the fact that some useful being developed some species of torture device. So now I can use a pretty corset to trim that extra inch, for it is indeed only an inch that I am having issues with removing, and in the manufacturer’s inexhaustible usefulness it even comes with a fabric swatch so that I may ensure I can match it with other outfits!
So I have a new corset and it was less than £20 which would be astounding if it weren’t for the fact that it’s bendy as all getout…
Seeeeeriously bendy.
Oh, and here’s a picture of the fabric swatch… that is what it is, right?
with handy elastic to attach it to clothing...
So… uh… I’ll blog again sooner or later… enjoy your weird mental images…
Well, another January-March is upon me and I have fallen deeply into this latest melancholy as if I never left it last year.
It’s bizarre to think that I can almost completely predict these things. Though, truthfully, I don’t think I really recovered from last year properly.
I thought, perhaps, with last year’s official medical diagnosis of “you’re just bored, dear, now go get a hobby or three…” that I might finally be cured. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I might not need a chemical crutch again. But weeks turned into months and still the happiness that getting gainful stuff to do promised didn’t turn up. But I persisted.
I tried Wing Chun, thinking that it might help me if I did a martial art. And for a while it did, then the self-hate spiral kicked in and I dropped out just after passing my first belt. I decided that I just wasn’t capable of improvement and that there really was no point paying the fee if I was going to dread going every week. I was so convinced that I could never, ever, be as good as the others in the room that I refused to accept Ian and the instructor’s encouragements. To be honest, it’s hard to regret that decision. Now I don’t dread my weekend, there’s no hope that I will fail to learn something so simple that even the teenagers can do it naturally, instinctively, while I fail utterly at remembering left from right and, in my embarrassment, get more flustered and useless.
On the other hand, my volunteering is going well. I always promised myself I would give back to society and doing so helps fix my self-view. Where I normally see myself as some useless thing, put on this earth to impose, it lifts me out of that somewhat and reminds me that I’m useful for something. It kinda helps that I have a very supportive co-ordinator handling my deployment and it’s a charity very close to my heart. That being said, I’m half tempted to do more charity work… perhaps I might give up another day and help out in a shop or something. It truly makes me happy and while I’m out there I feel like somehow, in some tiny little way, that’s my calling.
In other areas, the excitement for my wedding is almost permanently tampered with the dread of my mother in law’s nagging. See, the thing about her is that she’s really very good at it and the thing about me is that I am incredibly stubborn and when nagged it just makes me want to be more stubborn. She’ll probably never win and Ian will probably go prematurely grey at the way I handle it. Otherwise, I totally can’t wait to make Ian mine permanently. It’s one of the many things that keep me going on a regular basis. It’s altogether much more effective than the chemical crutch the doctor would give me.
Anyway, my point is…. I’m not bored. I have no time to be bored. So there must be some reason I’m so melancholy all the time. It’s getting progressively harder to work out why so I’ve put myself on another ridiculous diet/fitness regime in case it’s a body image thing. So far, it’s not working. I lost 5kg and kept it off and, though I still freak out when I gain weight, it’s not affected my happiness at all. I discussed perhaps taking up running, coming to an agreement that I ought to try power walking first before actually running distances. But the main issue with that is that if I have no time to be bored, when will I get time to do that. I’ll figure something out.
Anyway, enough of this. None of you wished to see all this meaningless drivel about how I’m always melancholy these days. Instead I will leave you with the knowledge that my son is the second most vicious denizen of our house. He even threatens (when given a doctor’s kit (made of plastic) and played with) to cut people up.
Tags: dazed rambling, diets are evil, ericfail, extra grumpiness, fail, flail, frustration, health, random, random thoughts, weakness, woes
Posted in mentalism
Well… today we went for a long walk (which turned out to be a not so very long walk because it was very very cold) with our cameras. Joseph was particularly pleased because he was allowed to use my camera and he took some really blurry pictures as we went along but it made him happy. On the way, we saw two policewomen and Joseph was delighted when they offered to pose for photos, thus making his day as we made our way ever so slowly down Middle Chine to the park in Alum Chine… cause that’s just how we roll!
So I got my pictures of the sea and the tropical gardens and the shrubbery and general stuff… (to be found on my deviant art as soon as I get around to posting them) and Joseph got a nice afternoon out in the freezing cold January weather and a picture of a (very friendly) policewoman.
I have to say, all in all it was a pretty damned good day!
Recently people who’ve been following my twitter might have noticed that my life just EXPLODED with busy… yeah, it really has…
I’ve started volunteering for a charity called Homestart, they provide support for needy families who just need someone to help them get the confidence to pick themselves back up and keep going. I used to be one of their “patients”, back when Joseph was a tiny little thing and they were a MAJOR life-line back then.
Now it’s my turn to give back, having successfully completed their induction and passed the CRB check – they’ve entrusted me to be one of their volunteers. So now I’ve lost a day of the week where previously I would have been faffing on the internet and I have to say, it’s awesome!
Meanwhile, my Mondays are still full of the win and awesome that Marie brings. Especially seeing as Joseph and Andrew still seem hell-bent on taking the world over together.
Also, this year I decided that I’d take on another crazy stupid doomed to fail project so I’ve revived my devArt account, deciding that I’ve had enough of just favouriting other people’s art. I’m doing a deviation (that’s a bit of art or a bit of writing or a photo or something) per day for the whole year. I’m doing pretty well, even if I did have to play catch-up this weekend. Also, I have been writing with renewed vigour which is a pleasant side-effect of this.
Oh, and did I mention? I have an awesome new friend! (Cue the Inbetweeners-style “new friend?” comments) I befriended the gorgeous Kate from Here We Are Together and we’ve allowed our children to mix… the upshot of this is that Joseph and I have now developed something to do with ourselves on a Tuesday… the downshot is that Joseph is completely 100% uncontrollable with excitement before and after going to see them. And he’s obsessed with Leonie…
So that’s my life this month so far… oh, did I forget to mention? I’m now 6724 years old as of the 20th, according to Ian’s Skype.
That is all…
So I saw this tea on our weekly shop aeons ago when I last did it and it was buy one get one free and my first thought was “ooh interesting tea, now for cheap”
Well, today I opened the box on a whim and was delighted to see it comes in individual sachets (especially as I hate leaving tea open… I still do it, though) anyway… so I tried it.
Initially I thought, “wow, this tastes like perfume… I wonder if that’ll be pervasive…” then it was more “hmm, I can actually still taste the tea in this…” and then I realised that I didn’t mind the taste at all.
The reason for this harks back to my childhood, you see my mum’s best friend used to bring me these little pillboxes full of old fashion flower candy drops and my favourite flavour of all of them was the rose flavour.
This tea tastes like rose candy drops… it’s awesome.
Still wouldn’t buy it ever again, mind. Once the two boxes are gone – that’s it for nostalgic tea. (It’s an earl grey thing, really, I love earl grey very occasionally and bought two boxes of it (two different varieties, mind) and now haven’t touched it in ages…)
Joseph’s still not sleeping, we’ve gotta do a sleep diary for a week. I need to learn how to best manage Joseph’s behaviour and this week we’ll be running around like headless chickens…
It’s not all bad though. I mean, my sister’s marrying a wonderful bloke on Friday and we’re fairly thrilled to be going up there…
Anyway, there’ll be pictures up at some stage.
Toodle pip!
