October recap

October was a big month. I’ve finished my masters, set up a new library, enjoyed Men of Letters, and I’ve passed the 300 mark. I’ve also finally had my leave approved, so I can start organising all our flights between christmas and new year (3 flights in 7 days, oh the joy). We’ve come up with a tentative date for Zombicide (Nov 30^th) but haven’t heard back from everyone involved. On the up side I only have 52 books left to read.

Books read in October:

277. Tattoo by Jeffrey R Butler

278. Silently and very fast by Catherynne M. Valente

279. Cycle of the werewolf by Stephen King

280. The mist by Stephen King

281. The Colorado kid by Stephen King

282. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess

283. A face in the crowd by Stephen King

284. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

285. The prisoner of Snowflake Falls by John Lekich

286. Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

287. Berserk v24 by Kentaro Miura

288. Berserk v25 by Kentaro Miura

289. The keep by F Paul Wilson

290. The Tomb by F Paul Wilson

291. The touch by F Paul Wilson

292. Reborn by F Paul Wilson

293. Reprisal by F Paul Wilson

294. Night world by F Paul Wilson

295. Shaedes of Gray by Amanda Bonilla

296.  Blood before sunrise by Amanda Bonilla

297. The Umbrella conspiracy by S D Perry

298. Caliban Cove by S D Perry

299. City of the dead by S D Perry

300. Underworld by S D Perry

301. There's a bear in there (and he wants Swedish) by Merridy Eastman

302. The Icecreamists by Matt O'Connor

303. Royal mistresses of the house of Hanover-Windsor by Susanna de Vries

304. The mark of Athena by Rick Riordan

305. Nemesis by S D Perry

306. Code Veronica by S D Perry

307. Zero hour by S D Perry

308. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

309. Live and let die by Ian Fleming

310. The queen of frost and darkness by Christine Pope

311. Castle in the air by Diana Wynne Jones

312. House of many ways by Diana Wynne Jones

Familiar pain

Miss R is very annoyed with her best friend. This friend is stuck in a loop of her own making. She wants a relationship, with a good man, but instead hooks up with losers (who do the “I just want to be friends” dance, usually just after she’s finished blowing them). Now I’m not making any judgments. What a person does with their body is their own business. And we’ve all put ourselves in dangerous situations at some point. However, most of us learn from our mistakes, rather than repeating the behaviour and crying “Why me?” when everything goes to shit. 

 

Miss R started out being very supportive, but she has reached her limit. Now she is channelling her inner Hawm. And it feels good. She is normally the nice one, as anyone who knows her will attest to, so this new attitude is a bit of a shock. But it gets the job done. It won’t last long, the guilt will eventually be too much. For the moment she’s getting on with things and taking no prisoners, so I’m enjoying the show.

What’s this got to do with pain? Good question. Part of her friends problem, and something many people also suffer from, is the inability to leave a wound alone. As human beings we take perverse pleasure in wallowing in our own pain and misery. Rather than let the scab heal we keep picking at it. We read text messages/emails/letters from people who’ve hurt us. We listen to music, watch movies/tv shows, read books they recommended when they were still part of our lives.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? Lots of different reasons. Mostly, I think, it’s because we don’t really want to let then go. Even though they treated us like shit, even though we are better off without them, even though we know it’s wrong. Computers and the internet have made this harder to avoid. Now you can check that persons facebook/twitter/myspace/blog/webpage etc. anytime, from anywhere. Every email/tweet/message you ever sent each other is there. Every click keeping the wound open.

How much simpler thing were, when you could just burn the letters and move away. That is always my policy: destroy everything and move on. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the pain still lingers, even months after the wound closes over. Every day, it’s still there. Granted it is not as sharp as it once was, and it no longer fills the entire space, but it is still there. Most of the time I can ignore it, but I’m not having a good few days. Unfortunately another familiar pain has come back to visit, which is making me more cranky than usual.

My body is on the warpath, which means my pain levels are up. I’m due at the blood bank, so I can’t take any painkillers, and I’m stuck doing everything with my left hand. I’ve got an appointment with the torture merchant tomorrow morning, so hopefully things will improve. If not it’ll have to cancel the blood, and hit the hard stuff.

Meeting up with my cousin and her mum in the city tomorrow. Should be interesting. Hopefully I’ll be able to move my arm by then.

Head shrinkery

As you are all aware I have been talking to a shrink to manage some of the crap that has been going on in my head. The contents of my brain is dark and twisted at the best of times, but when it gets stuck in a loop there is no other option than to get that external assessment. Your friends can sympathise, but aren’t always qualified to help you plan your next move (though they may be more than willing to assist you in the disposal of a body).

In this respect having these appointments has been very helpful. Sometimes it’s not what's in front of you that is really the issue, or at least not completely. Sometimes it’s just the trigger. The trigger in this case was Ms L, and the implosion of our friendship. While the feelings of hurt (and my ongoing trust issues) are in no way insignificant, it is not the central issue. It boils down to two things: loss and grief. In part for Ms L, but mostly for my Pop.

My Pop died two years ago last January. He had been an alcoholic for much of his life, but had been sober for nearly 5 years. It was when he had stopped drinking that they found the cancer in his liver. I won’t go into his final stages in great detail, just the two important points: he died in my arms, and my family were at each other’s throats by the end of the funeral.

With everything going pear-shaped I didn’t really get an opportunity to grieve. It is one of my many (many) in-built flaws: when things go to shit I put my feelings aside and get on with what needs doing. Part of my problem is that I have been doing that for a very long time. As a short term solution it has its benefits. As a long term solution it’s about as helpful as serving bacon sandwiches at Middle East peace talks. Mmmmmmmmm bacon.

So while I was left feeling hurt and grieving the loss of my friendship with Ms L (who was the first person I really connected with since my Pop died), I was hit with the original grief that I hadn’t processed. The severity of my funk now makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Ms L is the only person who will ever know why she reacted the way she did (and as much as not knowing bugs me, it is something I will have to live with). I still miss my friend, but now I can at least understand my own reaction. Not bad for three sessions.

I may be sane by easter ;)

 

life get in the way

I’ve been neglecting my blog the last few days (bad Hawm) so I’m making a proper effort tonight/this morning. There is all sorts of stuff going on, of varying levels of importance. So this is, in no particular order, what’s been going on:

• Caught up with my library girls last Wednesday. Always fun, even if the crowd wasn’t quite what we expected. Will go again next month and see if more people front. We made the most of it, and had our own little catch up.

• Work, which is the one constant in most of our lives. The introduction of VOIP by council has been one long fuck up, though my boss was on fire Monday morning. The council IT guys were all hiding under their desks. Some branches still don't have any phones, which means the extra traffic is being forwards through to the branches with working phones. 30 phone calls in an hour. It's like being back in a call centre. Oh to win Powerball and shake of the financial chains. I could really do without the job hunting. It really is depressing.

• Uni. I should spend this Friday on homework and stuffs, especially as I skipped the lecture to catch a movie at the film festival.

• MQFF. All the film you can watch in a 10 day period, provided you have the time and the cash. Miss R and I have been to three sessions so far, and have two more to go. I really enjoy the diversity of films they show, both fiction and non-fiction.

• Old book play-date. Miss A joined Miss R and myself on Saturday for some book loving. It was a close thing, with Miss R coming away not with the pirate book (which had been the original goal) but instead a signed first edition of Texts & Pretexts by Aldous Huxley. I was talked out of the very old leather bound dictionary by Miss R (mostly because it was $250). I may yet go back for it, though apparently I need to invest in a special display case for my growing collection of old books (mostly dictionaries and some poetry).

• I had an interesting chat with a patron about the new series of Dr Who. He was telling me about a guy he follows on twitter, and how some “feminist nazi” was ranting about the series being sexist (it was supposed to be for Red Nose day or something). * So I watched the clip on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51JtuEa_OPc and followed the link the patron gave me to http://twitter.com/#!/TheUrbaneMan to see what all the fuss was about. You can imagine my surprise when I scrolled down and found that Ms L was involved. Truly my world is too small sometimes.

• I had a call from Wendy (little old lady who likes to call and ask about obscure 1960s Australian models). It was a short phone call, under 20mins, but I still couldn’t get her to come into the library. She said she was going off to the state library as they had better resources. I’d be amazed if she’s actually gone into the city. Some of the other librarians and I have a theory that she doesn’t even belong to our library, she just calls each branch asking the same question until she get an answer she likes. She’s harmless, unless you are flat out and she refuses to take no for an answer.

• My little sister wants the whole family home for her 16^th birthday. She seems to have completely missed the fact that my Dad and stepmother don’t want anything to do with my brother and I. Not going to happen. Not a chance in hell. Ah, to be 15 and still think the world revolves around you. Hopefully reality will set in before July.

That’s pretty much it. Not really a terribly exciting update, but it is an update. And now bedtime. At least I can sleep in tomorrow. Love the afternoon shift.

*Now I have known some very nice feminists (and some rather freaky ones, but that’s another story). I have never understood what prevents a man as identifying as a feminist, though I suspect it comes from the (inaccurate) perception that all feminist hate men. If you ever want to chat about feminist theory I’m up for it. The three and a half years I spent studying gender/queer theory at uni have to be good for something  :)

A homily on forgiveness

As we round the 60 day mark since things went pear-shaped, I’ve been looking back and doing some cleaning out. My old laptop is almost officially purged. I just have to empty my inbox for two of my email accounts and all trace of my “relationship” with Ms L will be gone. While this cleaning house is necessary, I still miss my friend. I know this doesn’t make sense to anyone. I know many of you have wanted to slap me silly. Some of you even have. The most common question I get about Ms L is: how can you still want to be friends after everything?

The easiest answer would be that I’m stupid, or a masochist, or I have a thing for lost causes. Two out of three have been true at one point or another in my life, but I don’t think they apply here. I could be wrong. We all know I’ve been wrong before. Instead I like to think this is about forgiveness.

I have not always been Hawm of the infinite patience. I have been Hawm of the incredible (bottled) anger; Hawm of the impenetrable void; Hawm who falls off the face of the earth, and Hawm of the inexplicably complicated. I don’t think I’ll ever truly be able to shake the last one, I have managed to grow out of the other three. 

My relationship with my mother is probably the best example of this. I didn’t have the most brilliant childhood. There were more than the occasional beatings with the leather belt, there was the psychological warfare that existed between my Mum and my Nan (we were the both the prize and the pawns), the unresolved anger between my parents (divorced nearly 30 years now and it's still there), and the constant need to control our lives even after we ran away from home as teenagers. If you asked me how I felt about her then I would have been completely sincere when I said that I wanted her dead. 

When I came back from the army my perspective slowly started to shift. I was still angry, and the huge slices along my shins only added more fuel to the fire, but I started to fight back. Unfortunately fighting fire with fire, especially in my family, doesn’t improve things. It only makes for a bigger fire. So we didn’t speak. Not the best way to deal with a problem. Sometime the distance helps give us a clearer picture. Sometimes we need to have shitty relationships of our own to understand other peoples. I only knew how to have dysfunctional relationships, so I managed to rack up quite a few shitty ones. Until I figured out what I was doing. Well, that and I started having heart palpitations. Nothing quite like having what feels like a heart attack at 21 to put things in perspective. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I had several attacks before I figured out that what was putting the biggest strain on my life was me.

My anger. Me being angry at everyone; my life, my family, lovers, work, the world in general. Being angry was fucking me up. And when anger is what has kept you upright for so many years, got you through all kinds of abuse, it is an extremely hard habit to break. Even now anger is seductive. It’s so familiar, the buzz you get from the adrenaline, the energy, and you just want to push everyone away and give yourself over to it. Giving into it never ends well, as my body made a point of reminding me early last month. I hadn’t even realised I was slipping until I was sitting here with chest pains.

The reason I no longer hate my mother, and eventually managed to love her (and my father too, though I don’t claim to be able to like the man), is that I was finally able to forgive them for being human. They were young, and made bad choices (which fucked a lot of things up for all of us), but they were trying to do the right thing. Raising two children on her own wasn’t easy for my mother, and she didn’t always get it right, but she looked at my two year old self carrying a bong to my pothead father and decided she wanted more for us. I can’t blame her for that. I didn’t understand why I didn’t meet my Dad until I was 10 years old. I didn’t understand why we weren’t allowed to get in a car with either him or my Nona if they came to the school. None of these things made sense to me as a child, but as an adult I understand. I may not always agree with the how or the why, but that doesn’t matter.

Forgiveness isn’t about right or wrong, it’s not about blame or recriminations. Forgiveness is about looking at a situation and recognising, with brutal honesty, that if we were in the same position there is no guarantee that we would have dealt with things any better. We’re human. We do the best that we can, and hope that the people we love don’t judge us too harshly. 

This is how I can think of Ms L and miss my friend. 

a tear in the fabric of reality

Reality is a weird arsed bitch. Anyone who has known me for a while will completely agree with me on this. Mum rang for Miss R's birthday which was sweet of her, considering that she got my birthday wrong one year. To be fair the MS is progressively making swiss cheese of her brain, so she's lucky to remember as much as she does. During our chat she informed me that we all have nicknames now. The first of my younger brothers is "the Big Shit," no surprises there. My youngest brother is "the Little Shit," again not much of a stretch. The middle of my younger brothers is "the Gentle Giant," and as anyone who has met him will tell you, he is a sweet boy. He's actually a bit of a throw-back, in that he has never really done anything to give the parentals grief (deferring uni, moving to Sydney and back, and going to work on a fishing trawler are minor things compared to some of our exploits). Having said that, he is only 22 so he has still got plenty of time.

Now, given my history I was curious as to what they had come up with for me, and I admit I was rather surprised. Apparently, I am "the Golden Child." WTF? Now even as the black (rainbow) sheep, I was still they one they would call to fix things, but to end up as "the Golden Child" I have to say I’m more than a little confused. Of course in my best reference librarian way, I asked how they had reached this conclusion. It seems that I achieved my most shiny status because I don’t cause any grief. Um, come again? 

For anyone who didn’t know me 15 years ago, which is actually all of you, this probably doesn’t seem like a big deal. Trust me, it is. I was wild. I mean I was really off the radar. Not violent, or dangerous, just completely and unapologetically me. This can be a lot to take on, even now, but then it was unthinkable. I’ve been disowned more times than I can count (my dad hasn’t spoken to me for five or six years). I’ve been written out of wills (which I never cared about, but everyone else in the family seemed to think was a big deal). I’ve been blamed for relatives having strokes and heart attacks. I’ve been blamed for family members becoming alcoholics. I was kept from seeing my siblings. My mother even tried to have me sectioned. 

How the fuck did I then become "the Golden Child?” Even 10 years ago this would have been unthinkable. Now the last seven years have mellowed my mother, and she did eventually realise that how I live my life is not all that bad (even if it in no way reflects what she thought I would do with it). And it is also true that I haven’t done anything outrageous recently, certainly not enough to rival the dramas the “big” and “little” shits are creating for themselves. So I guess what it boils down to is that time has finally put things into perspective for her (and glossed over the rest). Parents are strange but it keeps them amused, so there’s no harm in it.

Still, I don’t feel very shiny. Stupid brain.

family trials

So, the universe has decided that my life has managed to get too simple over the last week or so.  When I got home tonight I got the "Call your brother," talk from Miss R.  It seems Miss R and Miss H have been talking. As most siblings will tell you, when your partners start talking to each other there is usually trouble to follow. In this case it relates to our youngest sibling, my little sister.

Now, as everyone is aware we went north for a few days over christmas. Given the duration of our visit we did not manage to see my little sister. They have christmas at my Dads place (where my brother and I aren't welcome), and then usually have boxing day with my step-mothers family. Since we flew home the day after boxing day we didn't get to see my sister. In fact, (and I'm the first to admit that I'm in the wrong), I didn't even call to let her know we'd be there. In my defence, I was about 14 days into my funk, and really in no state to be making any judgement calls.

So, justifiably, her feeling were hurt.  But, having said that, she did not make any effort to contact any of us either. I will call my brother tomorrow and find out what been going on. If my sister has been in contact with Miss H (apparently full of tears and recriminations), then we will need to figure out what we will need to do to fix this. Everything is such a drama when you're 14.

I've also got my new laptop out of the box. Haven't really had much time to play with it yet. Hopefully tomorrow. Maybe after I've finished my long list of chores. Plus I've got the two most recent Buffy comics to catch up on as well. And a trip to JB to pick up the new Adele cd.

Could also do without the random thoughts of Ms L ... Stupid brain.