Wednesday, 27th December, 2006

Five Thirty AM

At what point do you just accept that the deep pleasure of sleep is going to remain elusive for you, and think "Sod it. I'm getting up"?

I think I remember it being 2.45am at one point, but that's a bit cloudy. Whatever time it was though when I slipped off, it was followed by intensely vivid and (frankly) odd dreams involving old friends from school who had mutated into hideous parodies of themselves, a two-year-old child with the body of a teenager, a dilapidated house on the verge of restoration, a drugs-bust in a New Age shop, a maths lesson on how to measure the displacement of water of things in a bath (and consequently, their cooking times)...

...and me, lying in a pool of sweat in my bed, staring at the clock with a hundred and one day-to-day worries flitting around my head, thinking "Sod it. I'm getting up".

...

I'm not in the World's Greatest Mood™ just right now. The other day, Joanna suggested I summed up 2006 with the words "I got grunk. It was fab", and whilst that's a pretty fair approximation of what this year was like for me, it'd probably be more accurate to say that I got drunk for half the year, and had a stonking great hangover the rest.

It's weird — I've been looking back over the past year for a while now, wondering just what happened, trying to piece it all together, and I'm forever coming back to the word "frustration".

You know, if I think back over the course of events, and look at just where I am right now in comparison to this exact time last year, everything seems to be on the up. I have (she said, patting herself on the back a smidgen) done some pretty fucking amazing things these past twelve months ... and I've met some pretty fucking amazing people.

The work that I was doing almost exactly a year ago has blossomed into something quite amazing. Because of a few lines of code, and a conceptual 'switch' in approach to things, I've changed the way in which a large body of people interact with the web, and got my name (or rather, two of my names) attached to a fair handful of reports and documents floating around Uni. I've carved out a little bit of a niche for myself, and I'm sitting here at the end of 2006 on the verge of cementing that into a solid job.

...

Actually, just sidetracking for a second, it occurred to me a wee while ago that for roughly the past ten years, I've been scrabbling around as a part-timer — always someone with nearly a salary, but always needing to find little bits extra to keep going. Outside of my academic work, it's been a story of little jobs here and there — little bits of freelancing that sometiems paid the bills, and sometimes didn't.

I do find it quite weird to think that in some short space of time, I'll be on an almost full-time salary again — and the decision I made about a decade ago to quit the direction I was on at the time might actually have paid off.

...

But yeah. Sorry.

Like I said, I've met some wonderful people this year. I spent the first half of the year running up and down the country — jumping on trains or into my car — to visit people like Mike and Jon — people I'd only known as blog-based avatars of themselves, frienships based on emails and chatter and snatched fragments from Flickr — people who turned out to be as lovely in 'real life' as they were in their digital forms.

And amongst all that, I grabbed whatever chance I could to see people I already knew — people like K , Becky and April (for differing reasons) — taking what few opportunities existed to feel a part of something, connected to a world outside of my normal little two-up-two-down comfort zone in the North West.

But.

And this is the weird thing. Whenever I try and picture all of this — all the fun, the flirting, the falling into ditches and losing everything (funny now, but not at the time) — I keep finding myself gravitating with a thump to a pissed-up moment sometime in June which for some reason my mind has cemented as the pivotal, er, pivot of 2006.

I dunno why, but a tiny moment of hitting the zero button one too many times at a cashpoint somewhere in North London and taking out more than the tenner I was expecting, that's become significant in my head as the moment when this year changed from a care-free romp into a bit of a headache.

...

If you've been reading this stuff for a while (almost five years now...) you'll know that I find it very difficult to keep schtum about things that go on in my life. I do — it has to be said — perhaps not know when to shut the fuck up sometimes.

Or, more exactly, I do know when to shut the fuck up, but it always frustrates me to. It frustrates me that superficially I seem to live a very 'public' life — sharing the day-to-day minutiae of tedious bollocks that go on around me — but sometimes there's backstories and sub-plots that (for one reason or another) I feel that I can't share.

I haven't, for example, shared the financial kick in the balls that I got in July — the one that spilled out only a couple of times onto these pages when I called my bank "cunts". Nor have I said anything about the girlfriend I had for a brief time over the summer — apart from once, which resulted in me going against the practice of five years' blogging and deleting an entire day's post along with all the comments.

Ack.

...

"Cabin Fever" is such a good word, isn't it? For me it conjures up images of pioneering men in plaid shirts and braces and wooly hats, huddled up against the log walls of some primitive shelter, gradually going insane.

And, for some reason, bears.

...

As I was lying in bed just there, debating whether or not to get up, I was running through the ins and outs of house-buying in my head. And it struck me that the disproportionality of it all was very strange. There I was, contemplating the logistics of shifting hundreds of thousands of pounds around from one bank to another — in between thoughts of seemingly trivial things like "I'll have to spruce this place up a bit." and "I'd better get a skip for a lot of my crap" — whilst at the same time, I was wondering whether I had enough cash lying around to buy fags for the rest of the month.

I must admit, I'm bloody scared about all of that. There are little moments where I can quite happily picture myself in a new place — freshly whitewashed walls, perfectly stripped floorboards, all the junk from ten years of frenzied Ebay-Mac collecting happily disposed of, and the hundreds of badly-chosen dresses that fill old cardboard boxes in the loft repackaged for charity shops so that other trannies can make the same mistakes that I have.

I indulge myself, sometimes, with little flights of fancy into the world of perfect home-setups — picturing Erin and CuChulainn in a new environment, one that's perfectly molded around the way that I've found myself living, rather than being a hodge-podge of cables crow-barred into a space that's grown rather than been designed.

It does, sometiems, feel wonderful — the thought of actually having something solid around me, rather than the Heath-Robinson-esque way in which my day-to-day life has evolved ... but it's scarey.

Even so — scarey or not (and trust me, the thought of letting go of all the memory-laden and personal-investmented things around me is fucking scarey sometimes) — I just wish it would hurry up, and this personally-induced limbo could end.

...

Nah. "Limbo" is the wrong word. "Hibernation is probably better.

...

Ack, I dunno.

What was really getting to me, lying in bed just there, was the frustration of being "nearly there". You know that thing where you're climbing a mountain, and you think you're at the top but then there's a false peak and you realise you've still got more to climb?

(For some reason, that metaphor is always connected in my head to Slieve Donard which I used to climb as a kid)

I think that's just what the past six months have felt like for me. Every time I thought I was almost sorted out, something crops up and sets a new 'target'.

...

Sorry.

I'm always very wary of moaning about things like this, because I don't have to look too far to find examples of people in a much worse position than myself. You know, sometimes I think I've got it all far too hard, that life is just "So unfair" — and then I remember that actually, I'm pretty fucking lucky in the way that I live my life.

Striding up Princess Street in a huge red ballgown for example — that's something I know a lot of people can't ever do. But still, if I'm honest, I do sometimes feel hugely frustrated watching things happen from the sidelines — unable to just 'jump in' and join with the fun.

...

Ack, again, I don't know.

I'm sorry.

...

It's coming up to eight o'clock. I've just spent a good few minutes standing over the loo, wondering whether or not it's too early to flush it, and whether or not doing so would wake up the neighbours.

Biscuit is sitting in front of the fire, forlornly staring at the almost-dead embers from last night, wondering where the Magic Dancing Orange Pixies™ have gone to, and why it's cold in her usual toasty spot.

I've just remembered that I promised myself that if I was up early enough (I'd pictured myself having a lie-in this morning) I'd send a text message to my friends who were planning on speeding home up North so we could exchange keys before I headed down South and take up The Mantle Of Cat Duties™, telling them not to hurry because actually, I don't trust my car to go that far, and dammit I wish I'd sorted things out sooner so I could have got cheap train tickets.

I think I'll wait a few minutes — I bet they're awake and up, but I'd rather be sure.

...

Earlier this year, April took a photo of me and K that I hope she doesn't mind me using here.

Every time I look at that photo, it always makes me smile — it sums up, for me, a moment of playful happiness. A carefree, unselfconscious moment. A little fragment of time when my sometimes-usual bouts of introvertedness had left me.

It was a glorious afternoon. Spring was in full bloom. We'd spent the day wandering around London, snatching little moments inbetween the tourists, and met up with K for stupid amounts of booze near where she worked.

And if I think back, this year was full of moments like that. The times that I connected with people — really, and digitally — were wonderful. Stunningly wonderful.

Off the top of my head...

...bumbling around with an almighty hangover on the first day of the year, still wearing the dress from the night before.

...hijacking a champagne moment in a restaurant in Milton Keynes, and loudly declaring it was my birthday.

...being made to feel so welcome in an 'industrial goth' bar in Nottingham, and being taken care of when I'd obviously drunk too much.

...meeting new people in Oxford, and marvelling at just how lovely those people were.

...standing in the doorway of a warehouse party, in a little frilly denim skirt, confronted by a line of police about to raid the place.

...watching a friend conjure objects in space, and finally getting the point of it all.

...lying face-down on a sofa, feeling like a cat who just got the cream.

...falling off a chair in a free bar, surrounded by geeks, and hesitating at the doorway of a party — about to gatecrash but wisely deciding to pass.

...bumping into the TARDIS, randomly, in the middle of London.

...walking up Princess Street in That Dress™.

...thrashing out code with someone, and ending up with a pretty sweet little piece of colaboration.

...parading around an old theatre, wearing three hundred feet of fabric.

...standing in the desert, watching fireworks, and feeling part of something.

There are many more, obviously. Many many more moments where everything slotted into place.

...

And yet.

...

I'm convinced that 2007 is going to be a good year, but the first three months (at least) are going to be complicated. I had thought that everything would be OK by now — both short-termly and long-termly. For example, I turn 35 in a couple of months, and I'd had it in my head that by the time I got to that age, I'd be a lot more 'sorted' about things.

It seemed like a good milestone — hell, I'd even considered at one point that that was the age to stop smoking.

I'm hoping that the whole Moving To Leeds Thing™ turns out to be the right decision, and that it'll mark the start of a bit more of an 'extrospective' period — I mean, for one thing, getting to London from there is a lot easier than from here. And also, maybe there's a tranny scene in Leeds — or at least a gay scene I can worm my way into.

For various reasons this year (or, at least, the latter half of this year) — sometimes financial, sometimes romantic, sometimes just good old My Brain Hurts™ reasons — I've managed to cut myself off from the world around me. And I'm really annoyed with myself for that.

...

Usually, blog posts like these end up with the words "but not any more!", and some kind of multi-trumpeted fanfare declaring great swathes of intent and promises.

But then again, that assumes some kind of intent within the post itself, rather than it just being something to do because you woke up at five thirty am, and couldn't get back to sleep.

I was wondering when that would turn up...

Crap Telly

Camp, over-the-top dramatics; rubbish special effects; a very flimsy grasp on physics; far-too-loud orchestral music; all wrapped up in a glitzy superfluous theme "for teh kidz"...

...yup, it's The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures¹ (Channel Five, all this week).

As much as I'd like to pick apart some of the things that Marcus du Sautoy was over-enthusuatically barking on about in the "Elusive Shapes" (or whatever) last night (like I don't think you can really call an egg "a sphere" — but, to give him credit, he did refute the widely-held fallacy that raindrops are "tear" shaped), I'd just like to ask one little question:

A what point did we become so afraid of learning, that we started finding it necessary to disguise it as "fun" so that children wouldn't know we were trying to teach them things?

¹ D'ya see what I did there?

The 2006 top ten mistakes in web design

"teensy teensy horrid little type" — I'm just curious — I mean, it might be my browser, but does anyone else get this appearing in teensy teensy horrid little serif type? [wired.com]

You know what I found amusing though? For some reason, they've decided to do this year "in the round", and have the presenter not with his back to an overhead projector (like it was in my day, grumble grumble), but with a permanent TV backdrop of kids intead.

And even despite the bouncing around, the high-pitched enthusiatic voices, the cardboard cutouts, and the "Hey, science is a bit like a PlayStation", I swear I counted more yawns from the kids on the front row than I do when my mother is giving a sermon in church.

I almost managed to convince myself that I saw one child waving its clenched fist backwards and forwards in the time-honoured "wanker" sign at one point.

Indeed — thus heightening the visible futility of trying to make education "fun".

I have another question BTW. Whatever happened to Igor, or Bagcroft, or Whatshisface — you know, the guy who always used to be the (slightly sinister) assistant?

They seem to have replaced him with Blue Peter knockoffs.

Oh, and also, I was just skimming through a list of the lecturers, and apart from the mental image stuck in my head of Michael Farady gushing "Hey kids! See how the frog twitches!", I'm wondering if the demise of the Christmas Lectures has something to do with letting the media-whoring likes of Kevin Warwick take them, rather than the more cerebral stuff we had when I was a kid.

I mean, Carl Fucking Sagan vs Kevin I AM AN ANDROID Warwick ... and they try to tell you TV isn't dumbing down these days

Apparently, that was shot across the river from me. Oh yes.

Bryson

As much as it pains me to say it¹, Becky, thank you!

¹ Not really

On... Mailing Lists (again)

Do you ever just find yourself wanting to dive into dicussions with phrases like "OFFS, you're a twat" and "Dear god man, I have never heard such pointless bollocks in all my life"?

"And can you please quote people properly, or is hitting the "reply" button some kind of panaecenic medication for you? Dickwad."

Academics: Never let them near computers, unless they're me.

The same goes for transvestites, natch.

Oh that's easy. It's called "Firefox"

You're wasted on kids...