Still living …

Yep, I’m still alive. I apologise for any worry or concern I’ve caused. I’m fine, really. Mostly. Just the physical giving me grief. I’ve spent the last six days not touching the laptop, or much of anything really. Apart from going to work I have only left the house to go to the blood bank, and a trip to the market for more sugar (the cupcake ladies took pity on me and gave me a free cupcake). The rest of the time I have been on the couch, cradling my defective arm, consuming large amounts of sugar and painkillers, watching lots and lots of Dr Who.

I know I was leaving my box set until after I had finished with uni, but when you can’t use your dominant hand without shooting pains (even with enough drugs in you to down an elephant) then there really isn’t much else you can do with your time. Miss R is completely over Dr Who. She was even happy to let me watch some of the rugby. You know I’m not myself when I am willingly watching sport.

I am feeling better today. Pain is at a manageable point, so I am trying to get as much done as I can before my arm/hand packs it in again. Frustrating, but such is life. The last assignment isn’t due until the 21^st, but I’m trying to get as much done as possible. Don’t want to end up in a position where it’s due and I can’t physically do anything. Which is why I spent the weekend doing nothing. Plus, cranky Hawm is nobody’s friend. So I channelled my inner couch gnome, and tried to relax.

While I’m not 100%, I managed to get through work and most of the day on minimal painkillers. I even managed to catch up on everything I’d left going on the laptop. Well, after I had to completely reboot it (twice), upgrade the anti-virus software (which had apparently disappeared after being corrupted), and ran a total system scan (which meant I couldn’t actually use it for two hours while it sorted its shit out).

I’ve got another appointment with the torture merchant on Wednesday. I always feel better (once the screaming stops). If I still feel like crap by Friday then I’ll go off and see the doc. Won’t be a great deal he can do, but I’ll go anyway. Ah, the joys of getting old.

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.

Convention for those wounded in love

I should be doing my assignment, but I thought I would take a moment to post this up. More than a few people have been having less than stellar personal relationships of late. Some of us are coming out the other side of our funks, and some of us are still wading through. I found this a while ago, and reading it helped. It seems appropriate to put it up now.

Convention for those wounded in love by Paulo Coelho

General provisions:

A – Whereas the saying “all is fair in love and war” is absolutely correct;

B – Whereas for war we have the Geneva Convention, approved on 22 August 1864, which provides for those wounded in the battle field, but until now no convention has been signed concerning those wounded in love, who are far greater in number;

It is hereby decreed that:

Article 1 – All lovers, of any sex, are alerted that love, besides being a blessing, is also something extremely dangerous, unpredictable and capable of causing serious damage. Consequently, anyone planning to love should be aware that they are exposing their body and soul to various types of wounds, and that they shall not be able to blame their partner at any moment, since the risk is the same for both.

Article 2 – Once struck by a stray arrow fired from Cupid’s bow, they should immediately ask the archer to shoot the same arrow in the opposite direction, so as not to be afflicted by the wound known as “unrequited love”. Should Cupid refuse to perform such a gesture, the Convention now being promulgated demands that the wounded partner remove the arrow from his/her heart and throw it in the garbage. In order to guarantee this, those concerned should avoid telephone calls, messages over the Internet, sending flowers that are always returned, or each and every means of seduction, since these may yield results in the short run but always end up wrong after a while. The Convention decrees that the wounded person should immediately seek the company of other people and try to control the obsessive thought: “this person is worth fighting for”.

Article 3 – If the wound is caused by third parties, in other words if the loved one has become interested in someone not in the script previously drafted, vengeance is expressly forbidden. In this case, it is allowed to use tears until the eyes dry up, to punch walls or pillows, to insult the ex-partner in conversations with friends, to allege his/her complete lack of taste, but without offending their honour. The Convention determines that the rule contained in Article 2 be applied: seek the company of other persons, preferably in places different from those frequented by the other party.

Article 4 – In the case of light wounds, herein classified as small treacheries, fulminating passions that are short-lived, passing sexual disinterest, the medicine called Pardon should be applied generously and quickly. Once this medicine has been applied, one should never reconsider one’s decision, not even once, and the theme must be completely forgotten and never used as an argument in a fight or in a moment of hatred.

Article 5 – In all definitive wounds, also known as “breaking up”, the only medicine capable of having an effect is called Time. It is no use seeking consolation from fortune-tellers (who always say that the lost lover will return), romantic books (which always have a happy ending), soap-operas on the television or other such things. One should suffer intensely, completely avoiding drugs, tranquilizers and praying to saints. Alcohol is only tolerated if kept to a maximum of two glasses of wine a day.

Final determination:

Those wounded in love, unlike those wounded in armed conflict, are neither victims nor torturers. They chose something that is part of life, and so they have to accept both the agony and the ecstasy of their choice.

And those who have never been wounded in love will never be able to say: “I have lived”. Because they haven’t.

electric dreams

There are times that I’m glad I don’t talk in my sleep, and that most days I wake up alone. This morning was one of those times. My memory is not brilliant, but I can’t remember a single night in the last 95 days that I haven’t that dreamt of Ms L. Sometimes she yells at me. Sometimes we talk. The most upsetting are the ones where we have managed to move past everything, where we are just hanging out like the friends we used to be. Those are the dreams that leave me crushed, and make it hard to get out of bed.

Stupid brain.

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. 

Perils of the reference desk

Ok, so anyone who wasn't at Miss A's BBQ may not have heard of my marathon phone question late last week. Basically I spent 25 minutes on the phone with a little old lady (that I'm not certain is actually a member of my library) trying to find information on Robyn Fong (fashion, 1950s). NLA's digitisation of Australians Womens Weekly (May, 1972 edition) eventually gave me something useful. She decided to call NLA to see if she could get a copy. This was after I told her several times that I could print the information for her if she came into the library. But she got what she wanted, so that wasn't my issue.

That was the end of that ... until today. My branch team leader was on desk with me this morning. She answers the phone and then hands it to me. It's the little old lady again. Apparently she had tried calling for me the other day, but I'd gone home. She had another question for me: Bobo Faulkner (fashion/tv, 1950s). After 30mins on the phone, and much trawling through Trove I was again saved by NLA's digitisation of Australians Womens Weekly (June 1973). She did ask me when I'd be in again. I should have lied, I know, but by that point I just wanted to get off the phone.

So some time in the future she will call again. She'll ask for me, and the cycle will repeat. This is the danger of giving good customer service: they remember your name and then won't talk to anyone else. If you see a librarian walking around with an ice pack on his/her ear then the chances are they have a similiar patron of their own. If you work in information management you may even end up with one (or even more) of your own. Who knows? 

One thing I do know: this was not in the brochure.