Friday, 19th October, 2007

Sleeping With The Lights On

thaumata gush

It's all a bit hectic here, at the moment, to be honest. I mean, FFS, I'm actually keeping a diary right now — and writing things in it just so I don't lose complete track of what I'm supposed to be doing from one minute to the other.

A quick excerpt for you — spanning the next 48 hours...

finish off packing and tidy up a couple of bits of work ... 8.30am pick up van ... C & J coming round to help put things in van ... drive to Leeds via Harrogate (to pick up M) ... meet J ... unload van ... drink coffee and thank M & J ... drive back to Lancaster ... have everyone around to get drunk in empty house ... Sunday am: drop off van ... find kittens and somehow get them in cat-carriers (remember to borrow cat-carrier) ... drive to Leeds and begin New Life™

Fun Fun Fun

At some point, obviously, I need to take Erin across with me. I'm kinda reluctant to right this second, because I feel I need to put something in place as a (er) placeholder while I transition across. Something with a few links on it, rather than blank screen that times-out.

Hmm

The next two weeks are pretty hectic too, frankly — inductions, trips to York (get me) to give talks, projects to launch, work to do.

And then...

...

God, it's been an amazingly weird yet wonderful couple of weeks here. My usual online life has been all over the place really — flitting from familiar machines and networks into unchartered laptops and cables. I dropped my PowerBook the other day, and fucked the hard drive on it, so right now I'm tapping away at an unfamiliar keyboard on a MacBook Pro (which I half-inched from work).

My usual lines of communication are pretty fucked too — I'm not sure if anyone's been trying to email me or not, because all my anti-spam stuff is on inaccessible computers, and there are about two thousand suggestions that I need to increase the size of my cock to wade through before I find anything I'd actually want to read.

Actually, seriously, not wanting to suggest that I'm the centre of anyone's universe or anything, but if you have been trying to get in touch and wondering why the hell I'm being rude and not replying, it's better to send me a message via Flickr, or (if you know it) my work email.

...

Anyways

There was actually supposed to be a point to this post. You'll know, no doubt, that I'm completely fascinated with how one's 'self' transforms into other things given different (specifically online) contexts. How your voice is affected by the space that it occupies, and how the connections that you make with people within the spaces you exist are all a product of those environments.

You'll also, of course, be aware that I attribute huge significance to these 'virtual' connections, considering them as just as real as the ones I make with people I can lean over a table and touch.

But despite all this Brave New World of immersion and virtuality, I have to confess that I'm rapidly finding that as close as virtual technologies can bring you to someone else, they can also make you feel massively distant from them as well.

I'm figuring that you've probably guessed by now that I've met someone, someone very very special. I've been dropping what I thought were subtle clues all over the place, but reading back through them it's more like I've got a great big neon sign over my head that says "I <3 Thaumata".

It's amazing, really. Two weeks ago I was sat here wondering if she had any idea that I existed, and now she's fast asleep in the top corner of my screen, me clinging on to a flimsy Skype session, broken occasionally by my unreliable internets.

We're in almost continuous contact — inworld together, direct messages on Twitter when we're not at out computers, talking relentlessly in those few hours When Timezones Collide™, and watching each other sleep when they don't.

When I wake up in the morning she's there, getting ready for bed, and when I get home from work she's getting up.

It's wonderful, beautiful, amazing, and ... frustrating.

I dunno — it's hard to describe. I guess it's probably a very obvious thing — that there's no total substitute for actually holding someone in your arms, no matter how many times you type /hug. It's like someone on television drinking some fantastic wine (or something), describing the taste to you so that you get a full impression of it in your imagination, yet you not getting the actual sensation itself.

And the closer you get to that sensation — each level heightened by some more direct medium — the more you're reminded that it's not real.

(I really wanted this to be a coherent, and decent post. But my brain is rambling almost consistently at the moment, and therefore I'm finding it hard to put things into words. So I apologise for this going all over the place)

You probably think I'm gushing too much about something ephemeral. It's likely you think the pair of us are completely insane — and while I'm not so loopy as to not be able to entertain that possibility, I really am head-over-heels at the moment. I really don't think I have ever clicked so quickly and so intensely with someone before. I mean, I know it's been and incredibly short space of time (although, I have to confess, I've had a thing about her for ages), but sometimes things are just like that, aren't they? Sometimes, you just know?

The thing is though, that "it's not real" thing — it is real. The emotions, and feelings (things which I am obviously not brilliant at blogging about) are just as real as if she was sleeping in my bed rather than on my screen. The only difference is that they're tinged with the frustration that comes from being separated by four thousand miles and a thin layer of whatever-they-make-LCD-screens-out-of.

Don't get me wrong though. I am, at the end of the day, a 35-year-man with an (almost) rational head on his shoulders. And I'm very wary of jumping up and down declaring that this is the one — no matter how many times I play the Stone Roses in my car.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't think there's something quite amazing going on in my life at the moment — even if I'm not entirely sure what that thing is. In the space of two weeks, I've gone from someone quite content with the life of an Independent Singleton In The Twenty First Century™, to someone gushing every five minutes, counting down the days until she's stood in front of me at Manchester Airport.

...

Which happens to be fourteen.

That's the thing I haven't really mentioned yet, and the thing that makes most people's jaws hit the floor whenever I tell them (and mine too, whenever I think about it). In exactly two weeks time, she won't be four thousand miles and a Skype session away, she'll be here, with me, and all this frustration about being separated will vanish — for a too-short space of time.

As smitten and as gushing as I am right now, with my head floating a million miles above the clouds, I am (of course) fully aware that the intensity of emotions might not translate from the screen to meatspace. I may be someone prone to emotional flights of fancy, but I do always have one foot on the ground.

I have no idea what's going to happen. It's possible she might hate me within minutes of being here, but it's also possible that when it's time for her to leave the pair of us won't be able to say goodbye. I'm excited, and nervous. And I have no idea what will happen after she's come — maybe the 'virtuality' will be even more frustrating, or maybe it will be comforting with a memory of 'actuality' attached to it.

I can't explain or describe what's happening at the moment, but two things are certain: I'm going to enjoy finding out, and I'm going to bore yous all to tears in the process.