guilty delights

One of my guilty delights is to listen to people I disagree with explain their points.

I don't mean people who think that Harry Potter wasn't a milestone in modern English literature, or who think that Nutella isn't the food of the gods. People on both sides of those sorts of arguments, and the people in between, tend to have picked their sides with a high awareness of subjectivity. Plus, these are the points that aren't exactly life and death.

I like listening to people whose points of view are utterly unfathomable, and which they believe is something of cosmological importance. In Paris today, there is a huge anti-gay marriage protest, a social issue that some people interpret as an attack on traditional values. These people are so angry about this issue, that they have caused huge disruption to the city's public transport, prioritising the exciting,sexy social issues above the mundane but vital to-ing and fro-ing of everyday life. I think it's a wonderful micro-example of the problem with the anti-gay marriage argument on the whole; the protesters are so angry, so caught up with a subject that is ultimately so inconsequential to their individual lives, that they forget the basic, vital stuff of life. No matter what your political views, I think we can all agree we need to think about the simple business of food and travel, before we think about the complicated matter of segregating and dehumanising other people over some arbitrary fear you have. In fact, I think we can all say that preserving a communal sense of respect and compassion, is more important than your personal opinion.

There is something so fascinating about people who are so dead set for or against something, who have a level of certainty about something when I have Cartesian crises every other week. 

To some extent I understand, I have some of the map that led them to decide, rather than discover, their conclusions. Take, for example, the pyramid UFO believers. I understand the desire to believe in magic. At the grand old age of 25, I occasionally wish my heart out that there were mysteries like I thought there were when I was a child. As great as this time period is, with the high life expectancy, no smallpox etc, I can't deny  I sometimes feel the wind goes out of my sails when I remember none of the worlds I constructed in my head will ever be real.  

So I get it, when people say there is life on other planets, benign and wise, or brutal and imperialistic. I understand why some people whisper softly about crystals and energy and chakras. Because when the hard reality is hit, we don't want to admit it. We want to tunnel a way out of the cruelty and monotony. We don't want chemotherapy to be the only possible cure for cancer. We want to hope, to believe there is something someone else knows that will fix it. If you are all alone on earth, a loser, a joke, you hope that there will be something from another place, another world that will distract you, that will convince there's more to this awful place.

An extract by one of my favourite contemporary writers.

So this is where all that anger started — the anger that confused so many, on the announcement of Baroness Thatcher’s death. All those people childishly downloading Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead or throwing parties, “celebrating” her passing. Among many commentators, there was bewilderment over the fireworks that were set off and the champagne — put away in cupboards for so many years for this day — being drunk. Why would you celebrate a death? The death of someone hard-working, old and confused? It is, surely, unnecessarily crude. It is just not classy. 

But for all those who were left behind, to mourn their own towns, the sadness and the fear had turned to anger, as it always does — all anger is just fear, brought to the boil. And that is when so many impotent but determined entries were made in diaries. Entries made when a factory closed, or Section 28 brought in, or a relative came back from a protest, bleeding. Entries made when politics seemed to get very, very personal. Entries when politics became dangerous and destructive.

And they will all have been written differently, on different days, in different pens in a thousand different ways, but what they all boiled down to was this: “I can’t do anything else, now, but outlive this. Outlive you. All I can do is outrun you.

By Caitlin Moran, beautifully put.

"Why you don't return to Britain?"

In response to my joyless, reticent and downright cuntish student, because Britain does this:

to honour someone who actively made the world a much, MUCH worse place than she found it. 

Brilliant Mark Steel article about the matter:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/mark-steel-you-cant-just-shut-us-up-now-that-margaret-thatchers-dead-8568785.html

In other news, it's not hotter than Vulcan's cock, but it's getting there. 

May be on the verge of death, may need new glasses.

I'm a fan and purveyor of sad, introspective drama, and I take further pleasure in the fact my hand-jazzing pathos is rarely actually seen, allowing the pretentious side of my brain to pose sadly in ink-stained white shirt, quill in hand while the cynical side of my brain snorts in hysterical contempt.

I feel these two contrasting parts of myself need names. Pretentious brain shall from henceforth be called Gretchen, and the cynical side, Martha. Gretchen, because that's what I changed my name to for 4 weeks when I was a 15 year old living under the unprecedented tyranny of period pain, and Martha because I can't think of that name without thinking of a rolling pin. And to me, rolling pins are a symbol of "get your fucking arse out your head."

You can just imagine a burly "worked me whole life" woman giving you a "the hell?" look with that in hand, right? That's who is sneering at Gretchen in my head.

Aaaaanyway, back to the original point of this post.

About 2 months ago, I was shaving my legs in the bath tub, when I noticed a small freckle I hadn't noticed before. A little bit "oh", and considered the implications a little, before deciding to mention it to a doctor friend.

I then promptly got out of the bath, and forgot all about it. Until about 2 weeks ago, when I almost fainted in class, and generally felt like I was going to vomit at any given moment. I am still having the headachey, world-turning, nearly fainty feeling, but not nearly so badly, and at the time, I was really very worried about the prospect of something being seriously wrong with me.

I should mention, at this point, that although I am related to doctor people in England, I don't have health insurance in France, which is where I am confined. Also, it was around this time that I found another freckle on my stomach.

I'm still debating with myself if the stomach-freckle was there all along or not, but either way, this is the first time in my life that I've been scared for my physical health (my mental health has always been nothing much but a geographical concept.)

In my paper diary, I wrote a rather forlorn plea to fate to spare me. In retrospect, it's a little embarrassing to read, especially as I am now almost convinced that the problem is my eyesight. All the same, I am grateful when I gain deeper perspective of things, and most of all for the accompanying empathy to others really in the situation, even when what gave me that deeper perspective is utterly false.

This post ain’t gonna make much sense. I’m particularly scatty-minded, and my writing makes a wonderful, Turin-Shroud like copy of my brain, so enjoy.

I am female, and as a female, once a month I have a period.

This, if you are living in the same society I am, is for some reason a topic which is treated with a great deal of “bleugh”, or “hohoho, you talked about your period, you’re so wacky.”

This has come up in conversation the past few days because I tend to get very, very miserable when i’m on my period. The women in my family nickname this feeling the “Can’t-Help-Its”, because you want to be cheerful, but every small thing is upsetting you, and you are feeling snappy and generally miserable.

I don’t like to admit I occasionally go through this, because people like to abuse it as short-hand for “her opinion doesn’t matter”.

And so before I say anything else, I will just like to point out three important points.

1) This does not happen every month, and even when it does, I, like everyone else who gets it, am not controlled by it.

2) Acknowledging the existence PMT and menstruation-related moods does not give anyone, anywhere an excuse to undermine or dismiss what a woman says.

3)While I will happily admit that my periods make me a little more battle ready than usual, I have never been angry about something while on my period that I haven’t been passively tolerating for the rest of the month.

For me, the occasional spike in irritability is just what I need to summon up the balls to tell someone that they’re mysterious and misdirected rudeness has to stop, or to ask my obviously stressed boss for a holiday.

 By no means am I a wilting flower without the extra progesterone, but I tend to overthink things. As such, I have two pieces of criteria for resolving possibly difficult situations directly. These are:

1) Is it actually worth the trouble? For example, if I don’t like the way my supervisor throws his weight around, is telling him to stop worth the possible fallout when I might not work with him that often?

2) Would it be unkind/inconsiderate of me to do this? For example, is asking my boss for a holiday going to cause her yet another headache as she has to figure out how to cover me?

My monthly battle-dress makes me more impulsive than usual, and in both the cases above, I took action that led to a less cuntish supervisor (around me, anyway), and getting my time off when I wanted it.

Unrealistic Ambitions

Introduction.

Despite wanting to do all sorts of things, I'm not particularly active, and I have crippling social anxiety. 

Strangely, I have a job that involves a lot of presenting, smiling, and general chatter. A good percentage of the time, I am the one talking, and when other people are talking, it is me who is the general conductor of the conversation (I'm an English teacher to Frenchies.)

Talking and engaging during a lesson isn't at all like to chatting to a colleague, or to a stranger at the bus stop.  

Most lessons are free of the social awkwardness that hangs around during every other human interaction I have. The reasons for this are obvious; I've prepared beforehand what we're going to talk about, and everyone has to do as I say. I'm not always terrified of the conversation breaking, because I always have something else to move on to.

While it's not devoid of a social side (it makes things a lot easier if the students like you), it's primarily a professional situation, not pleasurable one. Unless you have a group of underfed zombies to teach (it happens), it's generally easy to keep proceedings going by until the finish line.

And then the lesson finishes. And the change in atmosphere as soon as every closes their books and stands up is clear. I wasn't a popular girl at school, and I'm not exactly Miss Popularity now. But I can lead a fun lesson, I can explain grammar, and I can get people can use it. 

The puzzle is why I can't talk to people outside of that. 

Unrealistic ambitions are just a fact of life for me, and some are ridiculous, others aren't that unlikely. Some days I wish I could sing, so I can act like I'm in a music video. Some days I really want to write something half-decent. But the most infuriating thing for me is my inability to do something my students do with each other as soon as they stand up, and that is to turn to each other, and talk normally, easily, without the steady tracks of a prepared lesson to guide them.

Some thoughts

I'm eating pizza right now. Isn't it weird that you now know that? I'm surrounded by a mess, which is surrounded by a wall, which is in a house in a town, city or even country separate from yours, and just from that first sentence you know that a) I exist or have existed at some point, b) I have access to a computer, c) I'm literate,  d) I have a pizza that I am eating, and e) I have enough time to eat pizza, and misuse my education and time on meaningless little posts like this. Just by encoding a few words into writing in a little electronic box, a collection of electronic magnetic waves magically changes them into a section of ones and zeroes, takes them over to your computer, and changes them back into words before your very eyes. So much information. 
From the language that I am using, it is enough to identify me from what must be more than 99% of human life. Even at a), I'm in the minority of all the humans that have ever lived. To be known from afar to have lived. 

It was important you know. For the dead to be remembered. Still is I suppose, but not so centrally. I'm talking core religious belief. The Egyptian monarchs dedicated mindblowing resources to ensure people would remember their dead kings, diverting rock and sweat and lives to construct towering monuments, commemorating the life and death of the pharoah and his lot. So much is difficult to grasp for us, but think about being an Egyptian man or woman, confronted with this building, far bigger than your limited imagination would have ever allowed. An immense building built for your dead leader, 20 times bigger than your own current dwelling, which not only holds you, but your spouse, 4 children, your parents and sometimes your livestock. We see big constructions all the time, walking down the street, crawling inside them like crabs feeding on a whale carcass. Very rarely do we ever stand back and look at them. See how truly magnificent they are. Appreciate the planning, the sawing, the chiselling, the broken bones, the burnt skin, the strained muscles and neurons it cost to erect them. I stand on the pavement and gawk upwards. Try it sometime. It feels like the bottom of your heart just opened, and the world peers in. 

So think about the poor Egyptian felt as he stared at the dead kings pyramid, or mortuary temple, or barque shrine. Nothing that size ever really existed that was man made til then, for him anyway. If he was lucky he may have glimpsed the treasures of the sort that may have been inside, at some point in his life. Sacred things from places you don't know exist. Colours on a gemstone on a necklace are even more brilliant when all you're used to is sky and sand and rock. And the shine! Nothing ever looks that clear here. My word, reflections like on the water but not, brighter and cleaner and clearer and more entrancing and frightening, like God flashing a grin at you!! And a slow understanding, entering your mind drip by drip, that you are tiny; a speck on a speck of sand that you think is the whole jostling, moving, unwieldly world. The brief insight that it is a speck and the whole world is elsewhere, pressing down and surrounding you like earth upon a buried person, the excrutiating horror and excitement about the size and number and sheer enormity of life outside. The realisation only lasts the briefest of seconds, before the mind instinctively pushes it away to the back of the brain. Dwelling on that sort of thing can drive a person doolally. Best just get on with things as best you can. 

Can you appreciate why they worshipped their leaders? Can you understand why they believed the king when he told them he was god and was to be obeyed? I didn't get it at first, but I think I do now.

Another Poem (rhyming is hard and too boring.)

I left you at the airport at 5 to 8. Your gate closed at 15 past 8, and your flight departed at 15 to 9. It was on time, even though I prayed it would be late so we’d get more minutes together.

I left not crying, because I never do, but with a heaviness in my chest and a wateriness around my eyeballs. I regret everything, then nothing, then everything again. I flash angry-happy-desperate.

 I travelled back to Saint Denis. It’s quite close to Charles de Gaulle, and I often hear the planes flying over the Seine. At 10 to 9, while walking on the bridge near my apartment, I see the flashing lights in the sky that signal a plane flying overhead. My profile is elevated to the heavens as I watch it, listen to it, suffering my lungs. I breathe your name. “I don’t know if that’s you. I love you.” I stare up a little too long and become disorientated as I try to walk across the bridge while gazing upwards. It must look comical.

Your plane or not, I am struck by the paradox of having nothing but a well of sky between us. Gravity’s apple stops me swimming up. I stand at the bottom of this well and I watch the sky-boat take you away. I whisper my love in bubbles that I hope the wind takes to you. All of this is impossible. Just wishing it with gasps.

And I think of what I told you. If the billions of anonymous people in this world were featureless sand, I would set them in an ashtray. Films, the television, and teachers tried to tell me every human in the world was special and different and mattered, but I get on and off the Metro everyday, and I see different, undistinguished faces of the crowd, bored, staring, dull eyes, inane gabber.

To me, they are grains of sand. The world is an ashtray, and we are all grains of sand swept up there, not sure and not feeling. I set the ashtray aside. I don’t hate them but I don’t care about them. Upturn it if you like, I do not care.

Except you. You I hold, I keep. You I find in the sand, and are more than a grain. My fellow vulture.

Fleh

Banging through my head when I sit in the bath are the things I wish to say. I have speeches and dialogues rehearsed til I know them by heart, I have been brought to tears through the things I want to say, to write, to make other people understand. But rarely does it become matter. I say the words, but words don’t rest, they are there and then they are gone, and unless someone else hears them, they mightn’t have existed at all. I hold the pen, but it feels unpleasantly clunky and tangled in my hands, and I can’t quite get the flow from my head to my hand. Imagine blood flowing from the brain, down the arm and through the pen in words, scratched in narrow lines on the page. That’s what I like to picture.

The truth is, as my lecturer put it, is that poets and writers are not struck with impassioned and spontaneous brilliance, viscerally entrenching their work with the very physical and emotional core of their being. There is a process involved, a systematic and quite mathematical one. Examination, analysis and reduction of the material, a written page analysed and thought about, and then a re-examination, analysis and reduction of the material on the page. Followed by yet another picking over and deducting and adding up and taking away of lines, thoughts and so on. The poems, stories, songs, whatever are still most likely inspired by the writer’s own experiences, or at least something they’ve seen that has bred thought, otherwise they wouldn’t have such complicated views and feelings on the matter, or an interest to represent them. But the persistant criticising of the material, the selecting of emotions to portray, or the decision to leave out this thought because it doesn’t fit the metre in this form, but to include it in a different way which actually casts a very different light on the true tone, all this adds up to a sensation of an accountant getting the numbers to add up.

Quite cold hearted really, yes?

Poem

Words – long and short, stilted and fluent. Building blocks, communication, vocalisat-

fuckers everyone of them

Mouth teeth lips, alveolial trills, stomach talki-

Eat me you traitors, mouth lips teeth, eat me, chew your words chew your filthy food, eat and ignore, smoke inhale and abandon, cut off from the raw, the

Tongue of an amputee my tongue is an amputee my tongue a stump my tongue the stump my tongue is an amputee

But then

words
 
the sapling stump, a poking yellow tendril is there and it grows and there is sunlight and rain and it grows again and

the words! 

the words grow too, bubbling, branching away, blooming, blossoming, from one to another, until a  canopy of hope and eloquence is there, floating and

in my mind

it is penetrative, sweet, cutting sheer like crystal.

And then it’s

empty

a dream I think, because again my stump bangs against

raw

my inside teeth, pathetic, short, chompy, thick, useless.

dead?

It won’t grow just by thinking, I think and I think and force it.
 I don’t know what happened, I only had it for the minute but I want the trees again.

But my tongue
brain
shrivels in my throat and it was a dream a dream it was all just a dream, and my tongue is an amputee.

Brain is mean

So this will be my new projection for my brain. Trying to sift through the brain isn’t that easy, because there are so many different subjects in my brain at any one time.

Sometimes they follow each other to the foreground like a dancing chorus line, all in the spotlight for a few seconds before dancing along and letting another subject flirt with me, making me interested, spurring on my imagination.

Above: The inside of my brain, with relative morality swiftly followed by cannibalism, agriculture and New Guinea hunter-gatherers!

For example, this morning, as I was turning on my computer, I was thinking about masturbation, particularly nocturnal masturbation (yes, it isn’t a coincidence that it was what I was thinking about when I woke up.) Then I saw an article on Facebook that made me think about feminism. Then I was thinking about education and the current British government, then about the role of religion in schools, then about the general belief in supernatural things, then the rise of militant atheism, and then about whether I could do my classes today and clean my room, and what I should have for breakfast (answer: crisps, and bread.)

As you can tell, it get’s pretty confusing. Within the space of 20 minutes, my brain has flitted between possibly hundreds of diffuse subjects.

Maybe I’m overstimulating myself. Just while writing this short blog post, I am also listening to a Ted talk, on Facebook, and doing a bill for work.  Hopefully, over time I’ll get better. Unfortunately, it also makes me a pretty confusing person to talk to, as within the space of a sentence, my focus may have shifted from the topic of discussion to something completely different, which means that by the time I’m saying something about, for example, public transport, my brain has already cycled on head, passed all tangent topics, and has settled temporarily on creepy Victorian era surgery. This is an actual conversation that I had not long ago, and the map my brain took is like this:

Problems on the Metro –> that article I read about dangerous stray dogs on the Moscow subway –> that article also mentioned the dogs were evolving to be really, really smart –> Smart Moscow dogs was the focus of the Michail Bulgakov novel “The Dog’s Heart” –> They did weird animal-human organ transplants in that book –> That real life guy who sewed chimp testicles into human testicles as a cure to infertility –> he might have been in Paris, let’s go find his house!

Pretty circuitous route, huh? But you can see how I got there. Unfortunately, this fascinating and colourful trip is represented in the conversation as:

“Yeah, it took me 3 hours to get home the other day, there’s been loads of weird delays recently. I hope it doesn’t stop me tomorrow, I want to see if that weird French surgeon who sewed chimp parts into his patient’s testicles lived around here and find his house.”

Cue explosive laughter, or disturbed silence.

I’m not trying to paint myself as a weird yet unique individual, as plenty of people are also interested in the stuff I’m interested in, and crazy 19th century scientists are very, very interesting. I just recognise that when it comes out, a propos of nothing, it is particularly surprising for my fellow conversationist.

Anyways, better get on and clean the flat (by which I mean eat bread in bed while reading The Guardian and considering what bad TV I can watch on a Sunday.)