With a hey-nonimity

In my last entry I gave away a lot more about myself than I ever intended in this blog. Originally I endeavoured to be completely anonymous – trying not to reveal my location, my job, even my sex. This was partly because this blog was not supposed to be about me, but to deal with more abstract concepts – although of course, as thematically it revolves solely around my personal wonder and worrying, it is in fact entirely, unavoidably, egotistically and uninterestingly about me, probably laying aspects of my inner psyche horribly bare to anyone who can read. The attempt at anonymity was also partly because I was paranoid about making some kind of false move or faux-pas in the blogosphere that would cost me my job, or cause some such miserable scandal of the type only social media can dish out, as we hear about so often (“teenager’s misspelt text message goes viral”…)

Of course, I’m sure to any vaguely astute reader, I have naively revealed all about myself numerous times. However, in returning to the blog I have purposely relinquished some of that anonymity for various reasons. Although I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood (I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there dealing more efficiently and helpfully with such a subject), my everyday life is still so greatly taken up by the unavoidably female aspects of parenthood – namely, recovering from childbirth and breastfeeding – that I imagine it will inevitably show through in my writing. Furthermore, there is simply so much more interesting stuff on the internet that I’m sure nobody is really likely to find or care what I write.

So what else have I given away in previous entries? I have referred to my “other half” or my “partner”, so not so much to learn there. The reader knows that I live in or near a city with a tram service, and I may have mentioned mountains somewhere. I’m a teacher – and I imagine my subject area can easily be guessed (answers on the back of a postcard please. I wonder why they say that anyway. Whoever writes on the front of a postcard?) I have a sister, and I have lost at least two grandparents and a mother (for that matter, so has she). I like music (ooh, and so much more there).

And who cares anyway?

Anyway, as a breastfeeding, sleep-deprived mum of two with a house to look after (somewhere) and a job to do (teaching something), I guess I should be in bed rather than rambling further.

It's been even longer

I know I’m breaking all the rules of blogging here. I’m sure I read somewhere – and anyway, it makes common sense – that to be successful (i.e. followed and read by enough people to make it worthwhile) a blog must be regular, and consistent in theme. Well, it’s been over a year since my last entry; for all the usual reasons and a few less usual ones: our seemingly-insanely busy (but probably fairly standard) everyday routine, compounded by a few life-changing events. One of these was the death of my mother after a long illness, which I have alluded to, although not directly, in various previous blog entries. Then, more happily, since my last entry I have managed to conceive, carry and give birth to our second child, the arrival of whom approximately coincided with the death of my partner’s father, and us buying and moving to a new house. So, we’ve been occupied, to say the least.

I’m returning to blogging thanks to a good friend of mine: one day we randomly started talking about writing, and I let slip that I had this obscure, entirely-unread blog. She actually did me the honour of reading it, discussing it, and sharing some of her own ideas and words. What’s more, she persuaded me to keep writing. More of that in future I am sure.

I have been so unbelievably busy, not-to-say sleep-deprived, since my last entry that I hadn’t really felt that need to write that drove me in the first entries (as explained in First Entry). However, once I accepted the idea that I was going to return to it, the anticipation of doing so made a tiny part of my brain feel nice somehow, somewhere in the background beneath all the other stuff it had to deal with. I started writing entries in my head during night feeds and inane household tasks, enjoying the intellectual challenge of trying to order ideas and construct paragraphs mentally, and to hold on to them until such a point as I could write them down.

The feeling faded as I kept putting off the moment – I of course couldn’t allow myself such a luxury before finishing such-and-such a piece of work, and then there was the tax return to submit, and then…and… But tonight is the night.

Why oh why am I trying to return to blogging, when there are so many other things to be done? My baby is only three months old and still waking me at night, so any time not spent doing something absolutely essential is time that should be spent sleeping. In the day-to-day, any moment when I am not directly dealing with either or both of the children, I am usually obliged to dive quickly into one of the absolutely unavoidable household chores – namely washing up, laundry or cooking. The slightly less incessant tasks like hoovering or cleaning windows go – well, out of the window (hah, hah). (This problem is compounded by having just moved to a house in which some of these tasks have not been done in the three years since the previous residents departed, or I think in some cases, in the hundred-or-so years since the house was built).

Then, my job – I might as well tell you; I’m a teacher – is far from being one that fits into a closed schedule and can be left at the office at the end of the day. There is always correcting, grading or admin to be done, or preparation for the next day, week or year. If ever these tasks seem finished, or at least sufficiently un-urgent to allow me to contemplate doing something else, I could/should be improving my practice by reflecting, reading and researching.

Then, I could be reading a good book, or picking up a long-neglected musical instrument, or finishing my sister’s Christmas present (a knitted scarf). I could be attempting the novel that I have had rattling around in my head for literally years. I could study a foreign language, do my physiotherapy stretches, get some badly-needed exercise. So why, instead, return to my (almost) entirely-unread blog?

Well… we’ll see how it goes. I still rather like the title. And the colour scheme. And, if I ever permit myself to liberate any brain cells from the tyranny of the everyday, I still have some ideas – and worries – concerning the state of society, the future of humanity and the wonder of the world.

So it seems I’ve broken another presumed rule for successful blogging – that is, to keep the entries short and to-the-point. And having made that observation, I guess I’d better stop here.

It's been a while

It’s been more than two months since my last entry. This was due to a chain reaction of circumstances – a heavy period at work, followed by a possibly-not-unconnected bout of illness, followed by another heavy period at work trying to catch up following sick-leave, and culminating with a life-changing event, the anticipation of which I have touched upon in previous entries. But I am NOT ready to tackle that in a blog yet.

I started this blog in a slightly less hectic season work-wise, and was quite surprised at myself for managing nearly two months’ worth of regular entries. Then I lost momentum, and was not even sure whether I would pick it up again – there novelty of blogging, especially when one remains entirely unread, wears thin after a while.

One thing a period of illness allows me, is the leisure time to read. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a keen reader, and have real difficulties putting a fiction book aside once started. Thus I can rarely allow myself the luxury, except on long journeys by public transport (alone, not with a toddler) or when sufficiently ill to lack the energy to do pretty much anything else. Thus recent acute bronchitis meant I could indulge in a fair few novels (it was not a long illness, but I can read pretty fast). I would like to share a few thoughts about the most thought-provoking of these books, and the reflections they induced concerning the subject of this blog. Of course my indulgent meanderings cannot do justice to the power and skill of these novels (I can only say that you would be much better spending your time reading these books than some inane online blog).

I read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, telling the story of four generations of a Chilean landowning family, encompassing issues of poverty, class conflict, political unrest and fascist oppression, with a poetic dose of spirituality and the supernatural. I read Inés of My Soul, also by Isabel Allende, about the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Chile and the horrendous suffering and bloodshed involved on both sides. I read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, which tells the interweaving stories of several characters set in London during, and immediately following, World War 2.

These books are cracking good yarns, with amazing plots and effective prose. All these books include vivid and moving depictions of shocking cruelty and suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. They also tell stories of survival, of the strength and resilience of which humans are capable in situations of immense difficulty and suffering. All these books are fiction, and yet draw on historical events so closely, that the experiences described clearly reflect real experiences lived by people of those places and times.

This reading experience once more brought home to me the abstract and indulgent nature of the concerns that supposedly drive this blog. If death is potentially around every immediate corner, and every day is a fight for survival – as it must have been for many during the Blitz, during times of military persecution and fascist rule, during the Spanish conquest and all other episodes of aggressive colonialism – then a person has no space to fret about the potential fate of the entire human race and planet Earth. Generalised ecological and economic worries are luxuries afforded only to those who are not battling significant, immediate personal hardship.

I also have the luxury of wondering if/when the collapse of the current economic and ecological systems will bring about human suffering of the immediate, intense nature of some of the scenarios depicted in these books. It may well already being doing so in ways of which I am shamefully ignorant.

Makes you realise how lucky you are.

New tram tune

I’ve got a new tram-to-office tune! 

As I explained in Too much music, I’m a terrible creature of habit on whom 16 GB of iPod space is completely wasted, as I usually switch to one of two tunes for the walking part of my commute. Well, all that changed this morning.

For once, I hadn’t even wired up for the tram journey, as I had a gripping novel to finish. I love reading – I could make that the subject of an entry, or even an entire blog, one day – but it’s rare that I allow myself fiction on the tram, as I’m such a plot junkie that it is too painful to put the book aside and return to the real world on arrival. As it happened, the end of today’s read was something of a disappointment, as I was able to discover (with serendipitous timing, due partly to a tramway technical glitch) just one stop before the end of my journey. I don’t know what made me get the iPod out for only the less-than-five-minute tram-to-office trot, and even less what made me need to listen to a different song.

This time I will reveal what the song is, in the hope of introducing the genius of Oysterband to people who have not yet had the opportunity. My family discovered this band several years ago, but for some reason I had only really got into one album, Here I Stand. Recently I pushed myself to expand my repertoire, and discovered the album The Shouting End of Life, and in particular latched on to the song ‘Everywhere I Go’.

I like Oysterband for their variety – their lyrical love songs, rollicking dance tunes, and political, anti-establishment rants. ‘Everywhere I Go’ falls into the latter category; it is about, as I understand it, the confusion and contradictions of the world we live in, and how we are manipulated by the powers-that-be. The chorus is as follows:*

‘Everywhere I go I see what’s going on

And the more I see, the less I know.’

Here is my favourite line:

‘And the food we eat won’t go bad

But the cows are mad and the chickens glow

They want to tell you this, they want to sell you that

Just hold your hat when the black wind blows’

This song has an invigorating, driving rhythm and pulsating cello line, which along with its angry lyrics are fantastically energising, perfect for my morning commute. The only problem, if it can be called a problem, is that it is followed by a beautiful ballad called ‘Put Out the Lights’. This song can make me cry, for two reasons: 1) its combination of poignant lyrics and harmonic progressions mysteriously provoke certain biochemical reactions within my organism; 2) Someone very close to me (previously mentioned in my Waiting for the end and Christmas entries) suggested this song as a possible funeral choice. This has resulted in me having to hide tears on the tram on more than one occasion, but then this is not the only song (or stimulus) to have this effect. Luckily, repeated exposure is making me less sensitive to its effects (a little like the treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder perhaps).

This is also helped by the fact that it is followed, two tracks later, by one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard: ‘Don’t Slit Your Wrists for Me’. Set to a rollicking, Celtic-like dance tune, it is about a girl with ‘…rings on her fingers and a bone stuck through her nose … wearing studs in places where the gardener never goes…’ rejecting the advances of a hormonal young man:

‘And I wouldn’t say I couldn’t be a lover

Not if there was nothing else to be

But if love is what you’re dying to discover, darling

Don’t slit your wrists for me’

This song has had me grinning to myself, or even giggling out loud on the tram. By the time my iPod has fed me these few tracks, my fellow commuters must be wondering if I’m really safe to be let out on my own in public. The joys of personal, portable music . . .

* All lyrics copyright the Oysterband, quoted without permission but with evident admiration and appreciation. I am fully aware of the dodgy ground of quoting song lyrics by authors still-living or not sufficiently dead, and am taking the risk as I think it is blindingly obvious that my doing so cannot possibly have a negative effect on the respective musicians' income or reputation, and is clearly not for personal gain. To paraphrase the approach of the great political musicologist Philip Tagg: so sue me.

Happy New Year

Like Christmas, the end of the year and all the pomp and circumstance that goes with it is too much for me to tackle in a blog entry. I suppose I could trot out some really obvious things, concerning clichéd, and doomed New Year resolutions, or my history of disappointing New Year celebrations. Even by my own standards it is not really worth the waste of blogosphere space or electricity.

I will just share one thing that I was lucky enough to receive for Christmas, and that I am hoping will greatly help in my approach to 2013, if I let it. One of my most precious Christmas gifts, beautifully handmade and from someone who knows me very well, came inscribed with the following quotation.

“Life is not about sheltering from the storm. It's about learning to dance in the rain.”

The best I have done with Google's help is find various versions of this phrase, attributed to various authors. I won’t spoil it by trying to add anything further.

Love you sis.

Christmas

Christmas is such a monster topic that I am not really sure I want to tackle it in a blog entry. Which in part explains why I am several days late in doing so.

Christmas is colours and lights and anticipation and disappointment and memories and nostalgia and childhood and cliché and more colours and pressure and family and travelling and spending and eating and chocolate.

Christmas is a carefully-manufactured bread-and-circuses event to get us through the hard winter months (obviously speaking as someone who has never experienced a festive season in the southern hemisphere). Christmas is the ultimate celebration of the excesses of consumerism, encouraged by the minute rich elite that run this show and stand to profit. It is all the more successful because guilt is removed, as all this consumption takes place in the guise of giving, of sharing, and of tradition. I wonder if anyone has done the maths and calculated the effect on the economy, GDP, ecology etc. if Christmas, or at least all aspects of it pertaining to consumption, was simply eliminated? To take the art of bah-humbugism to an extreme, I wonder if this consumer-fest has reached such a level of excess, that its removal would alone be enough to bring human consumption of the planet’s resources down to some form of sustainable equilibrium?

Don’t get me wrong. I actually like Christmas. It appeals to the big kid in me. I like the colours and lights and the ease of access to chocolate. I like the challenge of dreaming up gifts for people – the puzzling, the reflection, the light-bulb moment when I hit up an idea that seems to suit the needs and desires of the recipient. If I had the time and abilities, I would happily home-make gifts rather than buy them. The only time I resent the gifting obligations is for certain awkward members of in-law-type families, with whom we have little in common and limited knowledge of their tastes and preferences. Then the pressure of finding something for the sake of it, appropriate or otherwise, just because we have to because they will give us something, overshadows the pleasures of present-hunting. Yet I participate in this charade, and not really for the sake of keeping up appearances, but because it seems like the right thing to do.

Then, as the cliché goes, Christmas is a time for family. The pleasures and the pressures of making time, for once, for people that mean so much to us, or else mean so much to someone who means so much to us (the whole in-law issue rearing its ugly head in a big way). I really do not want to dive into the murky waters of this topic, but further to my last entry (Waiting for the end), I want to acknowledge that I have just had the privilege of sharing a second “last Christmas” with a loved one. I have once again lovingly participated in the challenge of making a “last” Christmas together special. As with everything, we only really appreciate such privileged shared moments when it is almost too late – and I can only remain eternally grateful for the unexpected length of “almost” that we, this time, have been granted. 

The person in question keeps apologising for “ruining” another Christmas. We both had to acknowledge that if it wasn’t for the circumstances, chances are we would not have all been together for at least one of the two Christmases concerned. Uncountable numbers of people will have just spent their last Christmas together, or missed the opportunity to do so, without knowing it until it is too late. There is really something to be said for living every moment as if it was the last.

Waiting for the end

As the theme of this blog concerns my fears about the fate of humanity, I suppose it would make sense to address the fact that the world was supposed to have ended several hours ago. I am writing this at 0:33 on Saturday 22^nd December, 2012, and as far as I can see we are still here. Unless the main consequence of the apocalypse is one grand hallucination which looks distinctly pre-apocalyptic. But then, why not accept that the whole shebang is some form of brains-in-vats, Matrix-like virtual reality and be done with it?

I can’t help wondering what it must have been like for those that really did believe that the world was going to end. To be thinking that death was inevitable and imminent, that all that one cared about was about to be horrifically destroyed . . . I simply can’t imagine what genuine anticipation of such a catastrophic scenario could have felt like. Terror? Acceptance? Liberty? Or, like my own fears that are the premise for this blog (see First entry), was it just Too Much to Compute?

What is worse: a sudden, unexpected cataclysmic life-event, or drawn-out anticipation of something terrible yet inevitable? I guess the answer is obvious, and that the chance to come to terms and say goodbye beforehand is an evident blessing. The chance to really value time spent together, to really appreciate what other human beings bring to us, just before it is too late. For so many different butterfly-wing-triggered reasons, every meeting could be the last, every goodbye final, without us knowing until after the event. But when those of the medical profession pass verdict, and a loved one’s end becomes that much more inevitable and imminent, only then do we stop taking things for granted. Yet we also, somehow, resist grinding to a halt; we keep muddling on, and waiting.

My grandmother, having barely suffered a day of ill health in all her life, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 81 and given only weeks to live. And so all the family, herself included, got on with life, whilst waiting for her death that bit more consciously than before. I would find myself imagining where I would be when I finally received the news, how I would react; even how, at her funeral, I would finally meet all the people she had talked about but never introduced to me. In the end, she lived for two more years, and when the news finally came I was in a foreign country, pregnant, and unable to travel to her funeral.

In 2002 my grandfather (other side of the family) suffered a major stroke that left him severely disabled, unable to move, speak or eat. Coming shortly after a heart operation, he was not really expected to survive long. In fact he lived, bedridden, immobile and pretty much incomprehensible, for more than ten years. When he finally passed away I was in a foreign country, breastfeeding a newborn baby, and unable to travel to the funeral.

With age the waiting games inevitably move closer to home. My current "game" began over a year ago: as early as the diagnosis for some; only when chemotherapy was withdrawn for the more optimistic/naive (me). I suspect, for the person concerned, it began as soon as she acknowledged the symptoms, and chose to seek medical help later rather than sooner. Sometimes I imagine where I will be when I finally receive the news. Will I somehow know, when it happens, via cosmic resonances or some such paranormal phenomenon, before I get THE phone call? Or will I be in the room at the moment of passing, and really be "there" for her?

I know that I must appreciate the time left, value every moment, and be grateful for the fact that every goodbye so far has not turned out to be the last. But I also find myself somehow becoming numb to the anticipation. As always, I keep doing what the everyday dictates, and just keep muddling on. More to follow.