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March 09, 2005
Bugger
God only knows why it seemed a good idea to get up out of bed and fire up this piece-of-crap laptop. It's almost 5am, for god's sake.
Then again, it's not every day that one of your mother's closest friends dies, someone whose health you've been actively tracking for a year, wanting to fly over when the end seemed near.
It's also not every day that you get offered a job working for one of your dearest friends - who happens to be out of the country so she doesn't know about it - and alongside the other friends you miss so keenly, only to have it blocked by someone who still resents being challenged over a decision he made about you. (Professionalism my arse).
Actually, it's happened before, but under different circumstances - then, back in '95, when I was offered my job back, I just laughed; today, I phoned Matt, laughed a lot with him and then kept laughing for the rest of the hour. Then I felt light-headed and almost passed out. Sodding viral infections.
Also, not so often that you get to meet up with someone you've not seen for two and a half years, someone who knows you more through your writings than your emails, and still be surprised by how much you care for them as a friend.
All in all, it's a good day to be off work. Because I can tell you now, I won't be seeing too much of it.
Posted by chantal at 04:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jean
Jean, a close friend of the family (i.e. my mother and myself) finally died today, a week and a day after her 57th birthday.
She has wanted to die for so long - she was never meant to even get near double figures - she was determined to die by the end of last June, and when that failed, when I left Guatemala in early January, we were told that day that the end was imminent. When I had a few-hour layover in Costa Rica a few hours later, I wanted to phone home to see if she was still alive or not. She managed to hang on for another eight weeks.
Her body, barely functional as it was, managed to hold out for so much longer after she was so much more than willing to go; she told my mother that she'd know when she had finally died by the sound of her laughing as she passed by. We all knew how much she suffered, even before the end approached, that she wanted us all to celebrate and rejoice that her suffering was finally at an end.
She leaves a very large hole.
Posted by chantal at 02:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 04, 2005
Growl
It's such a shame. It's been a lovely evening. Any evening when ER is on is usually great, even though that's usually the evening when I also decide to blitz the flat, laundry, myself, and wind up with only about 3 hours' sleep. As it turned out, an evening with 'Supersize Me' on is even better. After that, I got an email from an Irish friend who recently moved to Berlin and even more recently visited Furstenwalde (charmap.exe being absent from this laptop) to take some photos for me and generally check it out, which has resulted in about two hours of trawling through various incarnations of Google and Yahoo to try and trace several cousins. Maybe an hour or so of reading German websites is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, I don't know.
Nevertheless, using Google.de to read Spanish-language websites about Latinos with the same name as two American cousins has easily been the most abstract event of my day.
It's now 2.30am. If I get to sleep at the same time as yesterday, I've only got another six hours of being awake. (It's definitely surreal texting Matt, Dave and Brendan after 8am knowing that all three are either getting ready for work or already there.) Thanks to a couple of people, however, I've got more than enough to do in that time.
First on the list is retype a CV. So that I can at least get a temping job while trying hard not to think what my next career change might involve. It's sitting on my Vaio, but after a month or more, my flatmate still hasn't managed to get his head around the concept of fixing what he breaks. As the hard drive for what used to be my other laptop is still AWOL - along with the email my brother sent me at about 4am before leaving the country - I am stuck shivering in front of a laptop which daily presents a sound business case for euthanasia. As it is, I doubt it'll live much longer, maybe another week or so. Drowning in email accounts as I am, I remember emailing my most up-to-date CV to some account. It turns out that that was Gmail. Gmail doesn't work on this laptop (this website barely works on this laptop as it is). All I want are the two sentences it took me most of a day to write about my last job, which is fairly crucial as my ever-trusty faulty memory has kicked in and I can barely remember my last job.
Sweeter still, in the process of trying to find my CV, Lycos decided to download all of the emails off my home account, which now brings the number of misplaced emails to somewhere just above 500. If you've emailed me in the last month and I've not yet replied, I'll apologise now as I'll never ever be able to find your email again. (Try picturing trawling through 500+ emails all from 'C Guevara' on dialup and a very ancient piece-of-crap laptop).
It's also bloody draughty and cold. (Moves laptop). And there's complete rubbish on TV at this time of night. I've given up on Love, Actually for the second time and have no intention of ever giving it a third shot; if I can survive the next 20 minutes of late-night crap, there'll be a profile of Pedro Almodovar. If I don't survive that long, there's a Charles de Lint book awaiting me about a woman having to overcome childhood traumas so that she can overcome the physical impracticalities of a recent hit-and-run. Surprisingly enjoyable.
There's also the joys of doing two loads of laundry and scrubbing the flat yet a-bloody-gain. My flatmate seems to take for granted that, in return for being heavily subsidised by his parents and myself to live here, he will wake up every Friday morning to a completely spotless flat. It's a bit unfortunate, I realise, that one of the spots that needs the most vacuuming is right outside his bedroom door, and he went to bed a few hours ago. I can't remember if he was planning an early start or not. A friend laughed a few months ago when I mentioned I was tempted to introduce him (flatmate) to the vacuum cleaner by hitting him over the head with it, but I'm fast realising that I may well have to do that after all, and soon. If this wasn't the only remaining computer out of four which has something vaguely resembling internet access, I'd hit him over the head with this too.
Okay, so it's now 4.05 am and I was about to say how much I enjoyed the profile - most of my friends know how little it takes to make me happy - and that mostly I'm just fed up of so rarely seeing the friends I'm fondest of, but then I've just found out that the idiot flatmate has let the gas run out, which means shivering under multiple layers, several of which will be thermal, till my body decides it's time to wake up.
Normally I want to dismember him anyway on Thursday evenings due to his lack of any contribution whatsoever around the flat, having spent several hours ensuring it's clean and tidy; now I think I'll just settle for dismemberment for being himself.
Roll on Charles de Lint. And a sledgehammer.
Posted by chantal at 02:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 02, 2005
Mysterious Stranger
That's me. Cool.
As an improvement on last night, it's only 4.15 am right now. Which means I've only been online for just over five hours, a lot of which has been spent checking Messenger to see if anyone logged in while I wasn't looking (no soundcard on this laptop). And each time I sit back down again on the floor, I'm that little bit closer to causing myself some injury. I really should move the lamps so that they actually do something. I've also only been drinking echinacea tea for the last three hours, which means that next time I sneeze, that's what I'll be mopping up.
Predictably, my first day of no social contact has been excruciatingly painful. I don't have enough furniture to chop up, but the way today's gone, tomorrow I'll either chop down the trees in the garden or splinter my guitars for handgrips so I can make a start on climbing the walls. (Looks up at ceiling and pictures clambering along that too).
More likely, I'll just be lying feebly on the sofa sneezing a lot. God I hope that's not the case.
At least the last time I was off work, the job market was healthy enough that, between daytime telly and jobhunting, I was pretty much busy all day. Now, with only about five jobs to apply for weekly, and not having yet checked out the daytime telly situation (see the bit below about dead laptops), I'm going to have to work hard instead at ways to spend the rest of the time - writing a novel is about the only idea I've had so far - it's way too cold to do another blitz on the garden - but that would mean less sleeping and less reading. It's early days, I guess...
For whatever reason, I seem to have decided that today would be the day that I expanded my circle of virtual friends, and so looked around for an interesting weblog to read. I've spent two hours reading http://www.xeney.com/badhairdays/, getting a happy amount of laughs from it, and from the FAQ on the associated forum, and still have most of December to read through. I like her. The reason I picked her weblog is because the Google summary mentioned Buffy, but mostly I've been reading about her honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta last month.
On the forum, as I've only just registered and need bed more than I need to read through the various threads, my status is Mysterious Stranger, hence the title up above. After fifty posts, I get to use the chat room - even though I've often decided that I'm happy enough with the one chat room I use, at least when anyone else bothers to as well - so that's also something to do tomorrow. Bashing my flatmate over the head with one of my dead laptops is something I'll try hard not to do, probably by sleeping and reading in bed.
And now, as it's almost 5am and it'll be a while before I get to sleep, probably tomorrow (again) I'll miss abducting Jules at lunchtime, and pretty much all my friends / ex-colleagues while they're at work. Ho hum. (Sneezes).
Posted by chantal at 04:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 01, 2005
Speak The Word
It’s my first day of being unemployed again. In the last five months since leaving the Project, I’ve spent three weeks working for Lewisham Council chatting all day with my colleagues, three months constantly swapping jokes with my one friend at work, then another month looking like I was about to burst into tears at any minute.
That one month did teach me to search hard for anything that would make me happy, be it trawling through sheet music, books, herbal tea, curled up in the non-smoking room at work reading a good book, chatting to ex-colleagues on Messenger, or generally hijacking the Forum, remembering how huge a part of my life it was before I left the Project. The reason I needed all that was that I was stuck in a job where I had no social interaction at all, no work to do; boredom and lack of social contact are probably the two things I’ve never been able to cope with.
Which means being out of work is going to be a very disturbing experience. I basically slept all weekend, was on Messenger till 4am this morning, struggled to appear human during this morning’s job interview, grunted at my flatmate when I got home and immediately collapsed in bed. I know that sounds like a cliché, but really, muscles really do cease to exist when you reach that state of suffering. Briefly chatted to flatmate when I resurfaced, briefly chatted on the phone to Hang at the Chinese takeaway, then for about an hour when I went to pick up my dinner – I offered to help her out, as it doesn’t seem like I’ll have anything else to do for a while – and have spent the last few hours chatting online with a Forum friend. And that’s my first day.
Normally I hear from ex-colleagues that they see me as loud, friendly, sociable – not to mention quite a few other adjectives – what I’m starting to hear now is that they also see me as needing a lot of social contact, which is not something I’ve expected to hear. Certainly my last job has more than taught me how true that is – being accustomed to knowing all the smokers within a week, and the non-smokers by the end of the second week, being dependent on only one friend for months has been a shock, not to mention having to adjust to him leaving a month before I did, and having to spend that whole month in silence.
So what my last job taught me is that that’s true – that I do crave and need human contact on a near-constant basis, but I don’t want to believe there’s anything bizarre about that. Just as I have never felt at home in England, back in Central America, life is lived externally, whether through carting your tables and chairs onto the pavement and spending the evening there, or simply maintaining a lifestyle where human contact plays a large part. Bartering is not about getting the best deal you can and ripping off a vendor, it’s about the social byplay involved, to make a transaction more than an impersonal event. When you walk down a street, you make eye contact and say hello to all that you pass. Many of the friends I’ve had are due to sitting next to them in random cafes or buses, and I’ve not questioned that, any more than the fact that many of my friends are people I’ve not actually met.
My mother maintains a very reclusive lifestyle back home, but she has repeatedly said that the key thing which distinguishes living in Guatemala from London or the States is the personal contact she has with the people she relies on – from bonding with her vet, receiving Christmas presents from her deli, the very sweet little man who is her tailor but botched repairing the pockets of my long leather jacket, her florists and all rest who help her maintain her lifestyle – and having that contact helps balance out the solitude of her lifestyle, just as my ex-colleagues do for me.
Unfortunately the Council of British Archaeology doesn’t archive its articles, at least not as far back as I’m looking; one of our lecturers, Gustav Milne, once wrote an article for them which discussed how little hominid life has evolved from caveman days, in that we are all designed to live in closeknit communities, and how we compensate when that is taken away from us, given modern society’s constraints. Curtain-twitching and soap operas were examples of how we attempt to bond with an external community in compensation, shopping and football were substitutes for the normal chores of hunting and gathering. Certainly each culture has evolved in its own way, apparently with England and the States the hastiest to shrug off any ties to the family unit, other cultures retaining their links and nurturing them regardless of actual closeness.
We all need a community, whether it’s composed of our family or people from a similar background. Gina, who I met in December, had only been in London a short while and had already formed a closeknit circle of fellow Latinos; Fil has his brothers and cousins who are based here; Sammi has her mix of extremely neurotic teenage schoolfriends and adult Forum members; my stepfather never got around to learning English properly, even after around 30 years of living in London, because his entire social network consisted of fellow Chilean exiles. In the short few years that he and my mother spent together, everyone’s English and Spanish deteriorated noticeably.
The reason I’ve spent so much time thinking about communities recently and what they mean is because I don’t have an obvious one. My family covers Germany, Poland, Russia, the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, America, Holland, Scotland and Ireland, which means that none of the relevant communities are going to be particularly open to me. Nor would I feel comfortable among the London-based Mexicans or other Latinos, knowing that I’m only with them as a favour. It also doesn’t help that half-Mexicans have a reputation for being particularly, um, weird.
So my community is primarily based of ex-colleagues – who I ardently wish were still colleagues – but that makes full sense to me, given I’ve spent forty hours a week with them, which is far more than can be said for my other friends. Even in my dancing days, I’d only spend about 15 hours weekly in the studio, and even then it would erratic who’d be able to make it. (Not to mention about four hours a week in the pub with them, although that mostly depended on John and whenever he decided to leave). God only knows what they made of me on the Project – with my overactive humour, my desktop rainforest, my pharmacy of herbal teas and tendency towards bizarre error messages – the only feedback I’ve had since is from my new ex-colleague, who I’ve gone out of my way not to help, is that I’m a stroppy cow. I still chat to Zak from Lewisham pretty much every day, so I can’t imagine they thought too badly of me there.
But I’m digressing. It’s after 3.30 am, I’m tired, and my bed and Discman are calling me. Point: we all need a community to call our own. Whether it’s of friends like us, or friends we want to be like, we still hunt them out regardless until we have them, till they complement us or maybe offer us something to aspire to. Because we all need both - companionship and pointers where to head next, otherwise we’d be no better than proverbial cavemen, sealing up the entrances and living out our lifetimes dwelling inside our own heads. For me, my happiest times have been when I’ve had circles of friends around me, and my inspirations have come from passing friends and authors, and having memories to chuckle over mean most of all. People are all fundamentally the same, which no doubt means that the same matters to everyone else too. Yes, some people do seek out solitude, but being alone is unnatural, just as being unloved is painful.
It’s 4.15am now. God I’m tired, and I still need to wrestle my sleeping bag (wrapped around me for most of the evening as it’s been so cold) back onto my bed. I try not to question that most of my social contact is virtual – email, Messenger, texting, Forum; similarly, I try hard not to think of the financial issue which would let me maintain those friendships from elsewhere. Much as I need constant contact with all of them, none of them particularly need me to be based in London, or England, any more than I myself need to be based here any longer. And yet, I can never stop thinking – today – that it’s not enough. Messenger, Forum, email, friendly shopkeepers – I’ve had two conversations and one argument today, and what those people said is true, I really am someone who needs so much more than that, be it random conversations with complete strangers or quality conversations with good friends. It just took four months of a job I loathed almost every second of to teach me exactly how out of step my social needs are with what I can expect whilst living here. And yet, six years ago, I chose to stay here for the friends I had; and even now, I’ll still choose to do the same.
Posted by chantal at 04:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack