There is truth in fiction that cannot otherwise be seen.

I've always loved novels. And history. And philosophy. And my favourite means of accessing history, and philosophy, and religion, and politics, and life in general has always been through fiction. The nuances of feminism, the raping of the world by colonialism. Perspectives on life, seeing events with a broader view than you could ever achieve through personal experience. I haven't read so much recently, the breadth of books I have to read has made a pleasure into a duty, a chore. 

Let's change that. Unless it's a tome the length and breadth of Middlemarch, the majority of books only take an evening to read. Occasionally two. An evening a week for a book that is nothing to do with speech therapy is a small goal. Goal is the wrong word. Pleasure, reward.

This week: Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat.

Fuck off crumpets

I don't want you. I really don't.

I fucking love crumpets. With blue cheese, and mushrooms, and possibly a poached egg on top. Basically nearly all the things that make me ill, on one plate. Most delicious thing ever. Regarding this, I feel that I need instruction. So



Dear self,

Don't.

Yours sincerely,

Woodcat

I hereby promise myself

That I am going to do the thing I've been telling myself I will do for about the last six weeks. And I will do it by the time I am 34. Which gives me about three weeks.

Sounds fair.

OW

If you ever needed an illustration of how bad sitting for long periods makes you feel, leave writing an essay to the last minute, then write it sitting in an armchair. Your back will ache. Your legs will ache. Your arse will either ache or go numb. After a couple of days, you will be dying for exercise. I absolutely guarantee it.

Candour

Cattenberg and I today had a conversation reflecting on how a dysfunctional relationship can make you value your own company above all others, and conversely how once you are removed from such situations you value the company of others immensely. When everything is wrong with your closest relationship, the last thing you need is more people, you need space, isolation, to escape. When there's nothing to escape from, that's when people become a pleasure again.

A life lived in fear

Is fucking stressful, I'll bet.

I thought I had a free day on Wednesday. I forgot I signed up for an exciting talk about dementia. Go me, rocking the extracurricular shit.

Right. Placement starts tomorrow. I have reading to do, and placement clothes to prep. I should probably look up where I'm going. It's in Congleton, I know that much at least...

There is much to do before I sleep. You want to come and make me cups of tea? You can slob on my sofa and read or watch films inbetween times. Just a brew every hour, no conversation. No awkward silences, just silence.

I will be 34

In less than a month. I haven't celebrated my birthday in 6 years (just in case you're wondering, it didn't work, I still aged), and a few months ago I felt like I should, but now it feels daunting and I am severely tempted to stay in my shell and pretend it isn't happening.

Maybe we shall skip that day on the calendar, I shall age, but it shall go unmarked.

Or

Maybe we shall go to The Magnet/Sandbar/somewhere vaguely pub shaped on Friday or Saturday night, and see where the night goes.

Either way, I will be going to Watter + Holy Sons + Lilac & Champagne on 08/02. Which is not my birthday. I will already be 34 by then. But since I've been calling myself 34 for about four months already, there's little point in splitting hairs. Buy a ticket, come with x

There's still a long road to travel

But the words are coming, content is landing on the page in vaguely ordered splatters. The deadline is in sight, thankfully so too is the end of the essay.

As regards the last post

Fuck it. A pity party isn't going to get my work done. Lets roll.

Even though my brain's finally working better than it's worked for years

Even though my brain's finally working better than it's worked for years - thanks to all the vitamins and controversial nutrition, yay, butter! - I still have the mindset of failure to overcome. When you've been told you aren't good enough all your life, even though you fought like hell just not to sink, it's hard to remember that it isn't true. I have an IQ around 140, a highly analytical brain, and I can do this. But yet. I'm floundering in the remnants of the learned behaviours, the learned expectations of when my attention issues were at their worst. Which is arguably most of my life. Although I've largely fixed my capacity for abstractions and logic so that I can see answers clearly, rather than struggling to fathom them as though looking through a barely translucent screen, I still sit here with the haunting uselessness of the sinking weight of the inevitability of failure. Because for so long, that's all that was expected of me, because it was all anyone believed I could do. Me included. And for all that I've made massive inroads this year, I still have to spend a certain amount of energy consciously undoing the attitudes instilled in me over the years, the expectation that I am a failure. I am not, and I never was. But because you walked in my house for all of ten minutes and reinforced all of that old shit, now I am sat here, impotent, fearful of work I know how to do, staring down failure like a rabbit in the headlights.

Cheers. Fucking cheers.

Urgh.

I have stress nausea. One day I will be calm, collected and cool under pressure. And truthfully, if you were you were bleeding, or in a mess, or there was some kind of crisis, I'm good with that. Give me a deadline, and a piece of work that I can easily do, and my head explodes.

Essay season.

It's that time of the year, yet again. The time when attention issues become overwhelming, and anything and everything steals my mind away from me. Not this time mother fucker. I've vitamined myself up with the As and the Bs and the Cs and the Ds and the Ks, eaten a slab of excessively raw cow and a small amount of excessively dark chocolate, I have coffee and water laced with Himalayan salt by my side, and I am ready to hit this motherfucker right in the face!

And then start my essay.

I'm rebelling

The cult of the individual pervades every corner of modern life. We are all expected to be talented unique glimmers of astounding individualism. We are knowledge seekers, trend setters, interior designers, carefully crafting our own unique story, our own unique image. We create novelty, we are interesting, notable in our difference. When alone, we read obscure texts, or the current zeitgeist. We are up to date with current events, current tv, current film, current music. We play music, or sew, or paint, or knit, or crochet, or all of these things. We do these things to a professional standard. We post (professional standard) photographs online of ourselves drinking the newest microbrewery creations before anybody else, and the following morning post photographic evidence that we are better than hangovers, instead we are half way up a mountain. Every meal we eat is a gourmet extravaganza worthy of a Michelin star. When in company, we are casually well dressed, erudite, sparkling witty company, neither tee total, nor embarrassingly drunk. We travel to Asia, Iceland, anywhere considered off the standard tourist trail.

Fuck off. We aren't. Sometimes we are just people. Most of the time we are just people. We aren't good at everything. Sometimes we're creative, sometimes we're not. And it's okay not to be. I have no desire to impress anyone who is only interested in me because of my knitting habit, or my penchant for wearing corsets furtively under hoodies. If I read a book, it's because I want to read it, not because it's on someone's list of texts belonging to a canon of cool.

Mostly, I do not have the time in the day to keep up to date with all this stuff.

Actually, something changed today

My child, beautiful willful Kittencat, has a tendency to hypoglycemia. I've been aware of this for a few months; when nursery had an unexpected kitchen staffing problem and the management stepped in, for all their best efforts, the menu was basically a diabetics worst nightmare, processed carbs and sugar galore. My first clue to the excessive sugar being the problem was when Kittencat started to complain about excessively itchy eyes, as I had this all my life, and it magically vanishes on a diet with virtually no sugar. But Kittencat had several individual days where she was basically catatonic, no energy, high temperature, tendency to vomit first thing in the morning, and yet fine the day after, and it didn't immediately strike me that there was a link between these days and the sugar and the white carby goodness. I'm still falling back on the misinformation of my youth, so occasionally it takes me a while to draw these oh so obvious connections. But I am reading. And some of my reading touched on hypoglycemia. And this is exactly what is happening with KC. I'm reluctant to get her formally diagnosed, as that involves forcibly pumping her full of a shitload of sugar, but basically, if my kid has too much sugar, she runs around like she's batshit crazy, then turns into a lifeless little ill person, dizzy, nauseous, temperature, exhausted. The reaction isn't always within minutes and can occur the day after, or indeed be a sort of cumulative effect over a number of days. But my observations are generally seen to be the over application of a little knowledge, and I found out today that my mother thought I'd been explaining a series of bugs as if caused by food. She told me this because she realised she was wrong. Kittencat had jelly after her lunch, went batshit crazy, then limp and lifeless and temperaturey and nearly asleep for several hours on their sofa. And we talked, and my theory was food, and hers was viral. And I agreed it might be, but we'd only know if it persisted beyond the day. And I'll tell you straight, the mother, a former very well qualified nurse, was seriously worried about the state the child was in. As was I, but it's happened before, and we deal. And then, at 17:30, she sprang back into life. Colour returned to her cheeks, a fervent desire to eat replaced the nausea and she ate tea, and it was as if nothing had ever occurred. The mother was flabbergasted, and explained that because she'd never seen it, she hadn't realised that I was being anything more than an overbearing mother, applying limited knowledge with gay abandon. Fact is, I research exceptionally thoroughly when it comes to my child and her health.

While I'm unhappy that this occurred, because it's no fun for anyone, particularly poor little Kittencat, both I and my mother are glad she's witnessed it. If only so that we're all on the same page, and that I no longer get told to stop being so overbearing for insisting that Kittencat can't have sugary things more than one day in a row.

A New Day

January 1st. A new day. A new year. So much has changed since yesterday. The date for one. Happy New Year.