The oddest week of all

The last week of the year, that week between Christmas and New Year, is the oddest week of all. It's a week made of the joys and disappointments of the year just gone, and the impending, onerous potential of the year to come. I hate New Year, I make no secret of this fact. And mostly that's made up of a fear of the pressure that the new year brings, especially as it's artificial. Just another midnight, rolling into another early morning. Also, there is a fear I can track from my deeply paranoid childhood, that this New Year's Day, the world truly will end.

But actually, this year has been pretty decent to me. If it ends, I'll be going out on a high. That makes me happy.

Spoilers

I go backwards and forwards about taking a blogging hiatus, but then I get sad about thinking about not contributing to this blog anymore, and then I write random crap to fill in a space.

Anyway.

Tonight I've been thinking about spoilers. I'm kind of control freak, and I accept this about myself. I'm getting better about dealing with uncertainties; in fact I even embrace them every so often. But it's hard. Not knowing how it all turns out is as terrifying as it is thrilling.

It takes every ounce of my self control sometimes not to peer at the end of a book, just to confirm the right person stays alive, or ends up with the right person, or just to confirm that the author is going to write crap all the way to the last sentence.

No peeking. Although in chivalrous literature, apparently the hero always peeks. Double standard.

What the hell have you been doing?!

Well, since you ask, and ask so nicely, I've been cleaning a lot of cat litter boxes. All December. It's my new thing.

Voiced

It fills my breath exhaled,
smoked down my shoulders, across my chest;
the words uttered now.
Formed past the tangle in throat, in mouth, in mind, in the dark knotted being that demands always silence inward.

Strained words, softly spoken, but now outward,
aloud and alive;
Dwelling themselves with others, who will absorb, ignore, scoff.
And perpetuate its life.

Violet Elizabeth

I've had a serious of brilliant meetings today, all to do with the project I'm about to leave. So much amazing work coming our way, and I'm going to miss it all. So like Violet Elizabeth I want to 'thcream and thcream until I'm thick'.

I know, I know, it'll be fine and worth it and I'll be grateful. But I think I'll sulk a bit into my tea tonight.

Today I'm one of those Russian Dolls

One fitting into the other; an understudy lurking behind me.

Paper

I've been keeping a diary pretty consistently since 2004. One of the sub-editors at my first job encouraged me to do it because, he said, I would regret it if I wasn't able to look back.

There's nothing particularly worth reading in these diaries, to be honest. It's mostly promises of new leaves and angst about being a failure. I never, ever, reread what I've written. I can't bring myself to turn the pages back to see what I was committing to paper two years ago. I don't want to destroy them though.

And more and more I can't bring myself to commit things to paper. I have my latest diary open to a page, and I scribble a date, and sit with a thousand thoughts waiting to be written. But I can't get them down.

I think that writing things down will make them real, and there are things I long for, or am denying, or am afraid of, that I don't want to be real quite yet, so I don't have to face up to them.

The thing that scares me most about my promotion

That they'll demand my iPad back.

*clings rebelliously to iPad*

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Promotion

So the thing that I've been working towards has come to pass - I've been promoted to project manager for a 6 month contract.

It's very exciting, but also scary and sad, because I need to leave my team and go down to one of the faculty teams, who do more conventional media production, and I'm worried that I don't know enough, won't know enough, and that I'll basically found out to be a fraud.

Like so many things, the thing that you want turns out to be bittersweet. But I'm looking forward to trying it out - I might really love it, and the bump in salary won't hurt.

So I got kittens

, a photo by liz_isabella on Flickr.

They've taken over my house and my life, but I'm told that's normal.

I've called them Samwise and Pippin, as hobbits seemed appropriate with the new movie coming out in December.

Love them already, the little fuzz balls.

Kicking ass, [changing] names

I've changed the name of this blog, having been The Inner Workings for quite a while. I'm going to live with it for a little while, see if I change my mind.

There's a lot of pressure associated with naming. But unlike cats and cars, my blog isn't going to reveal it's secret name to me.

If I could paint

I would paint a picture of red brick buildings set against an orange October sky.

Submerged

Water pools
beneath my ears, my heels, my elbows.
Spreads my hair like a fan,
rises to lap across my unfloating body,
unerringly flows into the spaces that join me with the
steeping ripples that flow on
and over.

Big things afoot

I have some big plans afoot, but I don't want to talk about them for fear of jinxing myself. But I'll know more soon.

Feeling flat

It's been a wringer of a week; stressful, sad, challenging, tiring, busy. I have a lot that I want to accomplish today, but I feel so hung over from the emotion of the week, I can't get started. I'm waiting to see if I get a second wind.

Literary attempts

I haven't got many literary attempts on this blog - two short stories (like, rilly, rilly short) and a handful of dodgy poems. But in the interest of organisation and also the hopes that I'll be motivated to put pen to paper more often, I've created a new page that collates all my literary type writing, so as to separate it from the bumpf of crap I write the rest of the time.

Enjoy!

Teaser Tuesday - July 24

I have a crazy number of books on the go right now, in various stages of interest and completion: Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene;  A Visit From The Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan;  The Children Of Men, by P.D. James;  D-Day June 6, 1944, by Stephen E. Ambrose; Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapters, by Sherwin B. Nuland; Shogun, by James Clavell; Committed: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Gilbert; and Night Shadow, by Nora Roberts.


I keep allowing myself to get distracted from these, because a new release or an old favourite gets in the way. But I'm determined to finish these before I buy Moon over Soho, which is the second part of Ben Aaronovitch's series about wizard coppers in London, and which I'm loving. Plus, have to finish off some Blake for my next MA block.


Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme, hosted by Should Be Reading. Here are two sentences from Committed: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Gilbert, she of Eat, Pray, Love fame. It's...ok.

"When I posed the question again, another single friend replied, 'Wanting to get married, for me, is about a desire to feel chosen.' She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event 'that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I m precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.'"

Saturday snapshot - July 21

A meme hosted by At Home With Books. I've picked up this photo because, well, it was one of the last I was able to take before all my cameras died. I really should get around to replacing them at some point.

It's July - nearly six months since I took this picture along a nearby canal. It was covered in snow. Six months to go and winter will be upon us again. But until then, it's semi-summer in Merrie Olde. 

Cricket

Oh how I love it.

I've travelled to Cork on business this week, and received amazing compliments from my boss, and been a good grown up, but really, being able to watch South Africa play England, this is the highlight of my week.

Back stories

On Friday night I went to a vinyl party hosted by a friend from work. There were a whole bunch of people I know from work there, scattered in age from about 31ish (me) to my friend Beccy, who just turned 40.

Age is a really nebulous thing at this point, I'm finding. Where ten years makes a difference between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40, ten years feels like nothing. Sometimes the cultural differences between me and people here make for a bigger gulfs than age ever could. And of course, being work colleagues, all on basically the same level and doing the same job, it's the great leveller.

Anyway, one of the woman there is doing a lot of Internet dating, and she showed us a picture of her latest, who she likes a lot and sounds really nice, and he looks so...much older. Like properly a whole generation older. But she's 36, so ten years from that is 46, heading for 50.

And then as people were chitchatting I realised one guy there had been married for nearly 20 years and has an 18 year old daughter (he got married at 20). And I thought, it's getting to that point now where everybody I meet, or am developing relationships with now, have back stories. And not just went to uni, got a job, emigrated to the UK back stories (like mine), but proper married/divorced/separated/has children from previous relationships back stories.

These are not bad things by any means, these details make people interesting, and layered, and human, and it doesn't really MATTER, when all is said and done. But I guess getting into the deep stuff with new people on this side of 30 is very different from marching alongside the people you met at university or grew through your 20s with.

I don't really have much back story (I could make one up, I guess, it would be much more interesting). And while that doesn't bother me at all, and I think I'm holding my own in this adult world, I worry that I'm being dismissed as naive or innocent by others along the way, or not being taken seriously. And you all know how dearly I like to be taken seriously.

I don't know. This is what happens when you don't follow traditional milestones - you end up being compared against them anyway, because that is the handy yardstick by which we are all measured.