Load of Shot (Please Buy a Different Vowel)

How goddamned hard is it to flush a toilet? Conventional wisdom has it that the girls are generally cleaner than the boys, but I’m calling bullshit. It isn’t even as if our work toilets have a choice: there’s one button to press, not some half-and-half wavy looking thing that is confusing. I hate those. Every second one in a public place seems to have the half- and full-flush reversed. Mostly, big whoop, but if there’s a bit more in the bowl standing there flushing repeatedly like a moron is a tad off-putting. Because of the assumptions of those waiting in line, okay?

And while I’m about it, how hard is it to throw hand towels in the bin? IT ISN’T. IN THE BIN PEOPLE. Is it some kind of leaving-the-scene-of-the-crime kind of thing? Flush it and flee? Or rather, not flush it and flee?

Our loo isn’t helped by the mood lighting over the sinks (because clearly us girls will spend too much time in there touching up our makeup otherwise), which is nice after the glaring fluorescents elsewhere but not much use if you want to check out the pound of gunge in the corner of one eye. The toilet part is well lit, making the mess look even worse. About a year ago we changed over from the hideous scratchy toilet paper to individual tissue things from a dispenser. While they’re much nicer on the bum end, they fall out of the dispenser and litter the floor. At least I hope they fall out. The other is a bit ick to contemplate. Ick. I’m saying nothing about wrappers for certain other things you find in girl’s bathrooms.

If I were doing a review of toilets, ours would get one star. I’m less bothered by those toilet blocks you find in parks, and that’s a scary thought. At least there you know you’re (probably) in for a treat of epic nasal proportions if nothing else. I suppose it’s better than the “worst toilet in Scotland” from Trainspotting, and now I’ve thought about that (both the book and the film versions), I may stop.

It’s better than those holes in the ground on the way to Canberra. The hilarious part about those is they’re part of the Remembrance drive, so each one has a little plaque about the truly spectacular derring-do of a fallen soldier, is (the last time I was near one) beautifully landscaped, and a latrine. Mmmm. NOW I’ll stop.

Since this entry has been fairly disgusting, I may as well go on about the nits. We are slowly clubbing them into submission, with tea-tree oil, eucalyptus oil and conditioner in a convenient spray bottle, brought to you by my unfailing search for something that will bloody work. That silicone crap doesn’t kill nits, or we have a radioactively hardy breed. Ooh, perhaps we do. The reactor isn’t that far away as the crow flies. Probably not mutants though. They'd have more legs and more freakish heads. Bummer.

I doubt it’s operator error with the silicone stuff. If I’ve had it on my head for hours and when I comb out the nits are still alive, it isn’t much use. They’re still alive with the oils and conditioner, but the point is attrition by removal rather than murder. Of course it amounts to the same thing, since they don’t live long off everyone’s heads, but what my eye doesn’t see, my heart isn’t grieving over. Indeed, I’d dance on their little nitty graves with red tap shoes if they had them. Graves, that is, not red tap shoes.

The tea tree oil smell everywhere is a bit of an experience. Imagine a particularly noisome apothecary, with frogs in delightfully heavy-looking glassware and small roots that may possibly be mummified animals (or even people!) and you get the idea. Everything tastes and smells weird. We took a couple of days off the war of attrition, and I think I’m going to be on the hunt for a new perfume, because mine smells too nice. Yes, too nice. Which annoys me. I was first given my perfume by an ex-boyfriend, who hated it. I’ve been wearing it ever since. Mwahahahaha.

Back to the nits, yes, too bad, small lad will be going off to camp shortly for three glorious days of wandering around the snowfields and Canberra. As you do. So no doubt we’re in for another two weeks or so of combing small insects out of each other’s hair.

And the thought has just occurred that we’re stuck with this until high school at least. I may shave my head after all.

Love and peace. Except for nits. They can just DIE.

Outnumbered Plenty to None

I’ve been reading, and also recovering.

I finished off Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which left me much less emotionally wrung out and miserable than I expected. Rather, I felt relieved. All of these thoughts I’ve had, the narrative I’ve believed about my foster mother, her illness and her dying with an outside perspective.

Sometimes I think I should go or should have gone into therapy over all of this palaver, but I probably wouldn’t believe anyone else anyway. I’m the only one who knows my story.

In between the wonderful lurgy and the lurking smell of tea tree oil on everything (damn all nits - which we seem to be slowly winning the war of attrition on), I haven’t been able to speak properly for days. While I’m a fan of silence (when I’m concentrating), my own silences are not much chop.

I talk to myself all the time when I’m alone. Usually, anyway. It passes the time. But being unable to hold down conversations with the lads (husbandly and small) seems to have silenced me completely. I still think, but it isn’t the same, and I’m not much of an artist: drawing the shorthand for words in my head is beyond my sad sad sad skills. I should practise them, because I used to be reasonable back in the days where it was standard operating procedure to be drawing diagrams of plants and animals. Ahh, biology, I remember ye well.

And today I visited a bookshop. Actually, I wasn’t holding out much hope of anything. We used to have a Borders and few smaller ones around, but now not so much. And I think I’ve whinged about not being able to touch the books I’d like to buy and read the first page at least. It just isn’t the same. I have a Goodreads account, but reading what other people think of a book is a bit crap when what I really want to know is what I think of it.

I took The Hunger Games home with that first page unread. If I’d read that first page in the bookshop, I’d have grabbed Catching Fire and Mockingjay straight away. I’d have regretted it - since the first one is the strongest in the trilogy - but the agony of suspense was, well, annoying.

As a method of picking a book, it doesn’t always work: Perdido Street Station was a purchase due to repeated exposure. Every time I went into a bookshop, there it was and eventually I caved. Which is a little weird, given that now I own a lot of China Mieville’s books. The Scar is my favourite, and set in that complicated universe that includes New Crobuzon, Remaking, avancs and Uther Doul.

Today’s purchases weren’t picked that way, either. I picked up one by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312, which I have absolutely no idea about yet (ask me tomorrow, or Sunday) because I wanted to take a punt on something. The other was Without Warning by John Birmingham. Follow the link, he’s a ripping read. It’s roughly twelve hours later, and give or take an hour or four being a responsible adult cooking tea and washing dishes (and the interminable nit comb-though) and less responsibly watching James Bond, I’ve read my way through the whole thing, wide-eyed in parts. Many parts.

It surprised me a little, since I’m not a big fan of alternate history stories (clearly, I am high maintenance and difficult), nor military fiction, but wowsers this is good stuff. I’ll bypass the story, because I hate giving spoilers, but the fun of the technical arts of the story and character interactions, and (yay!) pop culture references I will mention. See, I just did. I don’t mean the technical side of the McGuffin (damn, I do have to say it now, the Wave that takes out North America and a few more bits besides), but the way in which it all hangs together, and the depth of characters.

In one way, it’s a comfortable read, especially for one that isn’t simplistic or dumb (I had my hand on a Patricia Cornwall book today as well - I couldn’t do it to myself in the finish), which sounds like a huge back-handed compliment, but isn’t. While thrillers aren’t my scene, the ones I have read often head for the break-the-action-in-the-middle as a way of ratcheting up the tension, when I would prefer that-the-author-simply-finished-the-effing-sentence. The tension In Without Warning uses the cliffhanger a couple of times, but it isn’t gratuitous and is therefore satisfying. In terms of comfort, it may be that I’m familiar with Birmingham’s style, but I don’t think it is that; it feels very Australian to me in its tone, while encompassing all us chickens under the sun. And then, there are the (yay!) pop culture references, which are so natural as to be invisible. Oh the relief. So often it feels like there are neon signs plastered all over the damn things, and we’re supposed to get all excited. Blerk. If you have to shout about it, it wasn’t worth including.

And oh boy, this post will come back and bite me on the arse one day. Ne’er mind. Where I was headed was about the weight of other people’s words when I have none of my own, but clearly I have at least a few, so I’ll keep burbling on.

From the sublime to the less so, we saw Guardians of the Galaxy last night. Now here’s a film with lots of fun and waaaay cool stuff in it. But I have to wonder what is going to happen when the Marvel catalogue runs dry (and again, here I am clearly high maintenance and difficult). Will it all get rebooted? If so, why should I invest in it now? If ephemera are to be made more ephemeral by repetition (and therefore reduction?), will they be valueless?

I dunno. But I’m thinking about it.

Nice and Warm and Toasty

Things I did on Saturday:

• took small lad to the golden arches for crap breakfast
• slept
• rolled over and slept some more
• rolled over again, felt nice and warm and toasty and slept some more
• stretched and got up
• washed dishes
• ordered pizza
• combed nits out of small lad’s hair
• combed nits out of my own hair
• watched Gardening Australia (which we never do)
• ate pizza
• had a shower
• thought about how nice I felt being all nice and warm and toasty and rolling over to go back to sleep (LUXURY!)
• moved bags of blood from one place to another
• a QAP set (take that anti-K)

Things I did on Sunday:

• hugged husbandly
• sat next to small lad in his bed and told him to go back to sleep
• looked at this entry, faffed about with it and closed it with no changes
• took chicken out of the freezer
• slept
• got up to wee
• slept again (not in the toilet)
• ate some leftover pizza
• cooked dinner
• ate dinner
• sat still while husbandly and small lad combed nits out of my hair
• combed nits out of small lad’s hair
• washed dishes
• had a shower
• braided small lad’s hair
• bemoaned my fumble fingers since I can braid my own hair quite well, but his always turns out a mess
• emptied bottles of water into empty containers to make cleaning solution
• thumped an uncalibrated touchscreen (because that really works - the last four weeks of the same uncalibrated touch screen show that, right?)
• put rubber bands on cardboard luggage tags for use with platelets
• moved more bags of blood from one fridge to another
• threw out some platelets that weren’t used
• sat with Coraline playing in the background as I added to this list (I’m saving Corpse Bride and Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers for start of day jobs at midnight)

Things I will do on Monday:

• take meat out of the freezer
• remember that we have no carrots
• faceplant into my bed
• sleep
• probably get up to wee
• sleep again
• mumble at small lad when he gets home from school -or- panic that he isn’t home yet and stumble out to the car just as he ambles down the drive
• start to cook dinner, remember we have no carrots and paw through the fridge
• find the pumpkin and wonder if I can make it look like carrots
• cook it all anyway and resist putting on that annoying bright face which small lad just KNOWS means he’ll have to eat something he doesn’t want to
• eat dinner
• wash dishes
• comb nits out of small lad’s hair
• sit still for the combing out of my hair
• have a shower
• sit down to braid small lad’s hair, say bugger it, and do a simple plait instead
• feel guilty as I drive to work for not braiding small lad’s hair
• move bags of blood around
• get irritated that no one bothered to make cleaning solution or refill water bottles for making cleaning solution
• get irritated that no one bothered to check the machine needed anything else either
• get over it
• slather hemp hand cream all over my hands and arms and possibly my legs (the air con, she is verrry drying, yes?)
• try not to touch anything until the hand cream absorbs
• fail miserably and try wiping it off onto my lab gown
• clean the phone, pen, bench top and PC I had to use while hand cream was still at smearing stage
• print out confirmation slips and cut them into smaller pieces to send with blood (I went to uni so I could do this job, it’s a wonder)

Things I will do on Tuesday:

• pretty much the same as Monday, plus carrots, which I’ll remember to buy on the way home
• run very fast as someone tries to lose their blood volume
• curse blood banking and all of its works as I try to fit in an antibody, multiple antibodies and a transfusion reaction with the bleeding patient(s)
• curse this list because I pre-jinxed myself
• be hugely relieved that after this load of shit I go home and don’t do it all again until the following Monday.

Things I will do on Wednesday:

• go to a movie instead of going home and sleeping
• get inspired that I’m out and about, plan a hugely complicated dinner
• mentally slap myself sensible and go for sausages instead
• manage the drive home by grinding my teeth in the car (it feels like nails on chalkboard - not pleasant, but I won’t fall asleep)
• be really annoyed I can’t sing in the car because of illness
• get halfway through putting on a load of washing, run out of steam and sit reading facebook and/or twitter (I’ll regret that tomorrow)
• get a fifteenth wind and clean something
• hate everyone else who uses the something (WHY CAN’T THEY BE TIDIER?)

That’s my week. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Broken Under Molten

When I first started discovering all of the horrible nasties that are out there in disease land - the biggest of which in my younger days was full-blown AIDS - and working in a lab, I always used to worry about catching a nasty and not finding out until it was “too late”.

It dovetailed nicely with my fear of having a brain tumour: I’ve been getting migraines since I was sixteen or so, and what if I blew off migraines thinking they were migraines, but they were a sign of - dum-dum-DAH! - a tumour? (“It’s not a TOOMA!”)

If I were to get sick when I was at school, it would always be on the first day of the school holidays. Once I started working for a living, my previous patterning of getting sick rang true. With a job, if I had a fever, it would spike overnight rather than during the day. Leaving me rung out but vaguely functional to go to work the next day, I’d come home and the fun would start again. To wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat when the fever broke was nice from the now-the-fever-has-broken and not-being-an-ambulatory-wet-rag-in-public perspectives, but a bit concerning when a diagnostic feature of certain diseases is - dum-dum-DAH! - Night Sweats.

The only thing is, this year at least, if I’m going to get so sick there is no getting out of bed (or off the lounge), it will happen the day before I’m due to go back to work. Or the day I’m due to go back. After my five-days-off stretch. Always a good look to an employer. I am kinda waiting to get spoken to, because I don’t always go to a doctor. Well, actually, I hardly ever go to a doctor, but let us pass that one by in silence. Because otherwise I’ll rant about how the blue firetruck I’m supposed to drive myself to a doctor when the room is spinning and operating machinery is ill-advised. Ahem.

The pattern for fever still holds true: if I’m going to get it, it’s night time when it’s the worst. As it was this time. I haven’t been quiet from sheer lack of something to say (although a thousand words every few days is taking some getting used to), I’ve been sick as. We all have.

Small lad copped it last Friday, I had it by Saturday night and husbandly caught up on Monday. Lucky us. Small lad of course bounced back pretty quick (although the allergies are still playing hob), but husbandly is still coughing and blowing, as am I.

The last significant fever I had I spent an entire night dropping off and waking up thinking I’d have to remake the world because parts of it were broken, which was pretty funny in the cold light of day. I could barely count my legs.

The first night this time, I had to move very slowly turning from one side to the other, because otherwise the waves and waves of bedclothes might wash us all away. Susurrations of the manchester threatened to carry me off or bind me to a wall (the linens weren’t exactly clear in their intent). The second night was worse. If I can’t sleep, I read, or watch something, or…something. But I couldn’t read comfortably, because my eyes were jammed into sockets four sizes too small and weepy (well, der), so I sat playing mindless games on my ipad. And the paranoia lurked at the edge of every game I played. I had to fix…something…or do…something. I couldn’t choose the right game to play. I couldn’t read facebook anymore (plus I’d read it…not much happens around three in the morning). So I got up, a monumentally stupid move. I shuffled a two-foot path into the floor for about ten minutes. I was seeing the universe through panes of broken glass that slowly rotated through molten glass dripping off sharp edges. If I touched them, the molten covering would be soft and cool - until of course my fingers were cut off by those blades. I didn’t try. The part of my brain still working told me to lie back down, drink more water, have some drugs, but the fever-ridden lunatic was still holding sway. Yuck.

Of course it passed, but I think I’d rather be trying to fix parts of the world again. A lot more has happened in the world than anything I have to contribute, but all I have is a ringing silence in a multitude of voices.

Real Nitpicking

We have nits in our house or rather, on our heads. My husband has missed out, lucky bugger, and I’m close to shaving my hair off. I’ve tried scratching my scalp off my skull, but the nits don’t seem to care. Small lad is worried that I’m going to cut his hair off, which he’s been growing for over a year now, and I’m tempted only to stop my own population of the ugly suckers.

We’ve tried pesticide, eucalyptus oil, tea tree oil and silicone. We’ve wrapped our heads in plastic wrap. Of all the things I never expected to think when composing a shopping list, it was “we’re running out of Glad because we keep wrapping our heads in it” that won the prize. It was closely followed by, “must buy more dental floss to clean out the nit combs”. Third place went to, “I wonder if I could find a mini-vise to hold the combs in while I floss them”.

Of course if I did cut my hair off it would have to be a hatchet job. Most hairdressers won’t touch nit-stuffed clientele with a 10-foot stick covered in cholera (just on the nudging end). After weeks of intermittent somebody-just-cracked-an-egg-over-my-skull feeling of the tiny turds* with legs crawling around, I'm ready to brave the cholera. It should beat out the raving insanity.

The shopping list for tomorrow includes (aside from plastic wrap and dental floss) more nit-busting (yeah, right) goodies and bacon. If I’m going to have an itchy uncomfortable head, I deserve bacon. Small lad deserves bacon, husbandly deserves bacon; I decree bacon for everybody.

*I don’t think that would be a good name for a biscuit. And now I wonder if it was the working title of those Nerd lolly things, since they do look like tiny turds.

I’m a little bit concerned Victoria (the state, not a random person called Victoria whom I clearly know well and assume you do too) knows something it’s not telling the rest of us. On their number plates they have “Stay Alert Stay Alive” - which means they’re ready for the zombie apocalypse if nothing else. Will you clue us in if you know it’s coming, or will it be “et tu, Victoria”?

I currently have an anxiety about drinking a glass of water by the side of my bed in the middle of the night. (And I think I just won the prize for completely random.) I’ve been reading Agatha Christie, and have decided to eschew any sort of beverage by the bedside: someone might replace my water with acid or put atropine in it. I’m also never eating hundreds and thousands again (they might have arsenic in them), unless someone wants to make me some fairy bread. Fairy bread! It’s four-sucky-something in the morning and suddenly I want fairy bread!

At least if you drop fairy bread on the floor it doesn’t take four tries to get rid of the sticky bits. Imagine fancy cordial, a kitchen floor, and dinner about to go on the table. Quick wipe up, then with sponge, and she’ll be apples. Let’s eat dinner. Bollocks. Next time, I’m taking off and nuking the site from orbit.

It’s now five-sucky-something in the morning and my work is cheerfully spinning. I assume cheerfully since ascribing happy faces to red cells is much nicer than imagining them with teeth. There’s probably a story in that idea somewhere.

I’m reduced to staring blankly out of the window. That blank where your brain is dead, your eyes are heavy, and people can talk to you, but your replies are coming from a damn long way away. Long enough away that by the time you start talking back, the other person has left or is prodding you with a stick. Because they were raised by wolves.

The sun is up now. I conked out for a little while earlier, and for some reason this particular entry has been soothing, because the dream population were singing and/or bopping along to a soundtrack. We are all floating in a choral sea. I’d better shut this down for now and tidy things up. Though most of my work is done…it really wouldn’t do to leave an unclean deck.

Not So Celebrated, Bummer

When I started high school, I had to catch a train and went past a newsagent every day. Never much of a girly-girl, beyond liking shoes and my boobs, I used to buy Smash Hits, before it turned into a girl/boy band extravaganza. Or maybe I outgrew girl/boy bands. I disremember.

I bought it so I could wide-eyed stare in at artists, artistes and not-so-either-one (as it sometimes turns out), but also for the letters page. It was usually silly. I was in the year of Whispering Jack, and the beginning of my loving John Farnham. By then, I even had a tape (a tape! I knooow!) with “Sadie the Cleaning Lady” on it, which I thought was musically and lyrically lame, but John Farnham it was, so therefore awesome. Lovely. I outgrew it, which in some ways is a bummer, because outgrowing the belief in a song, or a collection of them, is a sad day. But finding other songs and other artists with whom your own story intersects is still lovely. I suddenly find that rather than embarrassment at thinking John was da bomb, I’m grateful he was a door. (And I still like Whispering Jack, which I no longer own.)

There was an actress I loved, and I honestly cannot remember her name. For someone who is indirectly responsible for the way I think about famous people, it’s my personal (small) shame that I don’t remember. Then again, maybe landing her with blame would be hideous, so it’s just as well.

Smash Hits reported her as “spending time” with a co-star - probably a male, it was the late 80’s after all. It was the first time that I really understood that the writer meant she was having an affair (one of them was married, possibly both). Whether she was having an affair or not, I have no idea, but eew. Smash Hits was something of a bible, so I believed them enough for it to matter.

And I didn’t like her so much after that. Having an affair is wrong, officially, but in my head, mostly eeeeeewwww. (I was twelve or thirteen at the time.) If she was in something I watched it until this article. After it, I didn’t want to. I couldn’t reconcile her work with this aspect of her personal life. Though I’m pretty sure I didn’t think of it in clear terms: I was in waters I was too young to negotiate. I wasn’t having sex myself; I didn’t even KNOW anyone I’d connect to in that way.

Fast forward about nine or ten years, and I have a friend who is having an affair with a married man. I was just (barely) married myself, which somehow ended up being code for I would disapprove with mutual friends.

I can’t help but find that funny, because the only person(s) I have problems with having an affair is my husband or myself. But I was the first of a group to get married, so maybe it’s understandable.

Anyhoo. Friend’s lurv I think is kind of a douche, but I don’t actually care on the “he’s still married” front: maybe this is true love, maybe they are right for each other. (Not so, as it turns out, but, well, bummer.) But I do think he’s kind of a douche. She can do better.

So, when it’s my friend, I’m willing to weigh up whether an affair is eeeewww, or really a discovery of the love of your life. Okay, store that away, thinking.

Alright. Someone I admire has an affair, I don’t like them: check. Someone I know has an affair, and I already loved them: slightly less check.

I wanted to believe my friend had found a good thing. I didn’t really think so, and after meeting him, wow what a complete effing moron. The one time I remember him clearly, he was appallingly rude. Dork.

Anyhoo. Or possibly, anyho (ba-doom-tish). Those couple of years go by, possibly more, and I work in pathology at night. Like most hospital waiting rooms, our tea room is armed with old women’s magazines, and they’re full of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan. The articles themselves (or rather the magazines they came in) might have only spanned three months, but I read those things over and over…well, the covers at least. A waiting room (our tea room)=old mags. They sat there for close to twelve months, and a year of reading about two celebs something something snore really does validate the old saw: familiarity breeds contempt. Couldn’t care less.

But those mags did something. It made the link between the actress I’d admired, my friend who had an affair and these two actors I liked separately (I hadn’t seen the movie of them together - and, AND, that first actress was holding sway on what I thought about these two).

So here’s the thing. If I were friends with that actress, all those years ago, and she had told me she was having an affair, or if we were friends enough that I worked it out: I’d have still been friends with her. I wouldn’t have stopped watching her stuff. I’m not friends with anyone famous now, so maybe that last point is moot.

But my point really isn’t about that actress, may I hope she’s gone on to far better things: I don’t know these famous people taking up miles of paper, so until I actually do (because, clearly, that will happen, snort) stories about them don’t matter a damn. I don’t even read that kind of thing, much. I follow various famous people, and I pick up silly trivia. If it’s harmless, who cares? If it’s wrong, I might look a bit of a tit, but essentially, who cares? But the serious things? Dude, unless they’re my friend, I avoid.

Not So Much a Big Whoop

I should have continued on with my last post, because it seems I wasn’t finished. Which I knew, but over 1,000 words and I start thinking “I’d better wrap this up”. Plus it was getting late.

I let my sister know I was posting the last post, because I didn’t want her to come across it by accident. Just in case. We weren’t raised together - she was adopted, and both she and her mother expressed support and love when they read that infamous blort on my escutcheon*. Which I wasn’t really expecting. Colour me bemused (which I think is a kind of teal blue with possible hints of purple-to-red).

* I don’t think it is a blort on anyone’s escutcheon, but given that I usually aim silly, it was an eye-opener. A blort is not quite a blot, in case you’re wondering.

I wrote it because of the articles on Peaches Geldof, true enough, but also a way of clearing my deck. I write best when I’m telling the truth (or as near to it as I can get, since my perceptions are a series of contingencies, with every apparent shade of grey). I feel like my past, the early part, is a neon sign over my head anyway, so what difference does it make if I tell people? Husbandly was a little less sanguine about it, because it’s private. He’s right on that, but he’s also wrong. If it’s out there, it’s out there. I don’t have to worry about it.

I tried for a while not telling anyone I knew. It’s my story and I can do what I like with it. Fair enough, but sometimes there are confusions when trying to explain my sister, foster “family” and how I had two mothers. Maybe I’m not as good at exposition as I think. And I’d worry about what “the truth” meant in someone else’s head.

I worked for someone I wouldn’t have trusted as far as I could throw her (which wouldn’t have been far, the big fat cow), who I was afraid would make this thing into a big deal. Would believe that my beginnings meant that I was untrustworthy, a sneak, a dead loss. Epithets aside, I might have been doing her a disservice, but too late now.

So, I didn’t tell people. But after all this time, it doesn’t feel as if it matters anymore. I have some bad days here and there, and I’m scared green that writing will bring some memories up to the surface. But meh, enough. It was something that loomed so large when I was younger, that it seemed to define me.

I look around the internet and there are lots of stories like mine, lots of people who we interact with as they tell a story like this, but often we never see or hear from them again. So sometimes, yes, that big problem or thing or set of issues can be definitional, and now I am regretting not putting all of this into my last post. Damn. Splinter.

I’m not anything special, or at least no more so than the next person. Sure I have something, but everyone has something. Every single person. So my thing might be big for me and something my opinion of, my feelings about, my handling of may change until the day I die, but it’s…like a birthmark. That itches.

I’m important to the people who are important to me, I’m loved and I love. That’ll do, space cadets, that’ll do.

I read an article about process and purpose. My foster mother made a big deal out of purpose, that you should live to find yours, but I don’t know whether she achieved hers either. But in my case, according to her, it was to not turn out like Mum. At least. Which is harsh, and reductionist. I’m a bit harsh when it comes to my foster mother - now a mother myself, I haven’t done and won’t do some of the things she did to me to make me a functional human being. That she managed that, credit where credit is due, is a tribute to her, but wowsers, negative reinforcement is a pretty crappy way to go.

The funny thing is, I think in terms of what I’m not, rather than what I am. I’m not mean, not horrible, not awful, not dumb. Writing all of this out has made me realise that I think of life as a moment-by-moment balance, where you try to do more of the right things than the wrong. Maybe I undervalue some of the nice things I pull off - at least to people looking on - but…it’s a team thing. I’m me, and there isn’t anyone else like me - but I’m part of a family, a group of friends, a society (if you like), and what I want is for my balance to come out right. Or write. Ba-doom tish. The one thing I do think of as something I have rather than something I’m not is the engine I have in my head. I think it’s for writing. So here I am.

If that’s my purpose, yeah righteo. I think it might be process. I don’t think you find out your purpose until you die, if then. If your work means you do something that fulfils you, then maybe that’s your purpose, but that seems very small to me. I’m not just at work, or at home, or making jokes with random strangers (which I do a lot); I’m all of those things put together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because I damn sure can’t see everything about myself, or the results of how I interact with the world. I’m content to wait, and maybe I’ll find out, maybe I won’t.

For anyone who read the last one, and this one, aside from having a few moments of thinking “crap! It IS out there now!”, I hit a fragile peace around two minutes before posting it, and it’s lasted. I’ve been at home for the last two days, so maybe I’ll get wound up (again) going into work, but meh. Enough.

Love and peace, peeps.