shadows of echoes of memories of songs

I haven't posted here for years, I haven't done a 'year in review' for years, it's already nearly halfway through this year, I can't remember how to write anything any more, I don't even know if anybody reads this, but here we go:

( Questions, questions )

I can't cope with writing a blog post a day. The days just run out too quickly & by the time they get near the end I'm too brain-tired to do anything except household chores. Yes I know I'm supposed to do it in the morning like my morning pages ahahahaha. I'll tell you about my morning routine some other time but let's just say there isn't much space in it for writing.

Anyway I've been trying to do stuff with food tonight. I got a 10p cauliflower & a 10p bag of new potatoes from the Co-op's reduced bin last week and was meaning to use them for something, & then I was away at the weekend & got tonsilitis & suddenly found I couldn't eat anything that wasn't basically a liquid. Yesterday there was only about a 2mm gap between my tonsils & I could hardly move my mouth because everything hurt, & there weren't any GP appointments for a week but the receptionist took about 15 minutes of rudeness and patronisingness to tell me this, so I took the kids to school/nursery, got home, had a bath, thought "I'll just have a lie down" & then slept (waking occasionally from weird & disturbing dreams which I fortunately forgot immediately) until 3pm, so basically forgot about food entirely until the evening at which point I tried to eat some tinned ravioli because that's quite slippery but I forgot that it's all grainy inside & the graininess got stuck on my tonsils & it was horrible. I did however accidentally invent an excellent drink: aiming for hot honey & lemon, realised I had no lemons, thought "what else is in this fridge", ended up with hot honey & garlic+ginger paste. IT IS EXCELLENT. It makes you smell of garlic but who cares. I was thinking well garlic is good for colds or something, and ginger is good for sickness, so it's all healthy stuff, & then I started feeling guilty about being so fucking stupid & went & looked up Cochrane Reviews on health benefits of garlic and ginger, expecting them to be all like "don't be so fucking stupid" and actually it was more like "eh, maybe" on garlic and "actually good for nausea, maybe good for other things" on ginger, so there we are.

This morning I felt more human & managed to eat some of the stuff from my Brexit stockpile: tinned rice pudding, tinned peaches, and a spoonful of malt extract (because I am either a) Tigger or b) from the 1950s). Felt much better. This evening I actually felt more or less normal but with a sore throat, but a throat with an ACTUAL GAP in it again, so had a baked potato with cheese & pineapple DON'T JUDGE ME, I have fond memories of baked potatoes with cheese & pineapple for £1.80 from the spud van in Loughborough town centre. I have now eaten all the rest of the tin of pineapple though, after realising it was best before some time in 2017 so I thought I'd better not keep it open long, & I'm not sure that was a good idea at all, because I think it has tried to eat my throat.

ANYWAY THOUGH, the 10p cauliflower. I thought I'd have a go at making it into some kind of cauliflower-based curry in the slow cooker, so googled for some likely recipes to follow a bit & ignore a bit, but when I went to the Co-op they didn't have half of the things that were listed, and what is red curry paste anyway? Not the Thai sort I think. So then I started googling for recipes for red curry paste, standing in the veg aisle going "sorry - sorry", and ended up buying some things that would hopefully help, and also some 10p leeks and some 10p corn-on-the-cobs, because really for 10p you might as well buy anything you're even remotely likely to eat because they'll only throw it away at the end of that night. Made something approximating a reddish curry paste based on three different recipes & a vague memory of how I used to do this 15 years ago, only that was Thai curry paste which is different, so who knows, really. It tasted OK anyway so let's see how it goes.

I used one of the 10p leeks instead of some of the onion I didn't have for the curry, & then chopped the rest up and froze it in the hope that you can freeze leeks, because by then I was so tired of googling uselessly for all the things I don't know, my search history is like

red curry paste recipe
red curry paste recipe -Thai
simple red curry paste recipe
even simpler than that red curry paste recipe
substitute for garam masala
can you use leeks instead of onions in curry
2 cups in grams
OK then 2 cups in ml
what the fuck is a cup anyway
29 ounces in grams
29 american ounces in grams
what is wrong with you people

and so on. My mum used to make leek & mushroom pie and it was lovely, maybe I'll have a go at that one day. I also sliced up all the green bits off the outside of the cauliflower & froze them because you can fry them up like winter greens with a bit of bacon & it's edible. I would freeze some bits of bacon too (bacon is always on BOGOF but I just don't use that much of it) but I'm getting to the point where I need another bloody freezer and there isn't room unless I get rid of the filing cabinet, which I don't really want but where else would all the stuff in it go?

The problem with food is the same as the problem with stuff, though. Between the internal(ised) voice saying "you've got to get rid of everything because you're a dreadful hoarder & everybody hates you & nobody could possibly live with you & your house is a tip & your children will die of germs from the filthy kitchen floor if they don't die of stuff falling on top of them first" and the other internal voice saying "you've got to store as much actually-useful and actually-edible stuff as you can because things are going to get harder & harder & more expensive & nobody is going to be there to look after you", I feel like I'm being ripped in two, giving stuff away with one hand & buying it with the other. I'm not sure there's a fix for this, though, I think this is just the two modes you have to oscillate between because capitalism.

Time for a mug of Bovril & a bath. Got to go back to work tomorrow.

I've run out of time to write something specific for today, so have a bit of a thing I wrote a while ago:

* * *

How much juice do I pour into a glass for the kids? It suddenly seems vitally important to know how full the glass should be. How full were the glasses when I was a child? Different glasses, different juices. It was different at other people’s houses, it always is. Our everyday drinks glasses were short and squat and satisfying to hold, saved-up-for with green shield stamps, but there were also the tall glasses for special occasions, what I now suspect would be called hi-ball tumblers, but then were just unspokenly for best, or for grown up drinks, not for apple juice but for lemonade. But for every glass, everyday glasses or best glasses, there was a place to which they would be filled, and more than that would be considered greedy unless you were using up the last bit of a carton and it would have been silly to put it back in, and less than that would be considered mean. And I suddenly don’t know where the right point is on my own glasses, the 1970s ones I bought for 50p each from the hardware shop that surely can’t survive much longer with its cardboard drawers full of screws. My glasses and cups and plates are all things I have acquired, not things I have grown up with and lived with, and I don’t know how they work. Will the kids think they haven’t got enough mango juice? Will they think they’ve got too much, and worry that they can’t finish it? Things have not yet found their place in my life. When I go back to my parents’ house I use the for best glasses, because I'm an adult now, or else I drink coffee in the little brown cups we never used to use at all; the squat everyday glasses look dishwasher-scoured and sad and I can’t remember where you’re supposed to fill them to, and it matters, it matters.

Somehow it's November, which probably means it's time to admit that I am not going to get round to making any New Year's Resolutions this year.

It also means it's NaBloPoMo, which I thought wasn't actually a thing, but now that everything is a thing, it turns out it is a thing. Truly this is the Age of Thing. Or rather, since the damn thing is as old as lolcats and Twitter (I still remember my first lolcat, it was a PDF of images shared by email, also Twitter on dumbphones, 140 characters using only thumbs, jumpers for goalposts, isn't it, eh) we are probably now in the Age of Post-Thing, which means I should get on with it & post this thing before you all lose patience with me.

So anyway, what this means is that I am going to try to write something here every day this month. Much of it will probably only be of interest to me, if that (I am getting so boring in my old age that I even bore myself), but if you can think of a thing you'd like me to write about, or a question you'd like me to answer -- even one of those dopey memes that used to do the rounds on LiveJournal back in the dark ages -- then shout now. I need to get back into the habit of writing something. Even something about nothing.

It's probably about time I did a general update. Is it? I don't even know if anybody reads this. I started writing it 6 months ago and ground to a halt. I feel there's now too much backlog of backstory to start talking about anything. Maybe the answer is to forget it all.

The community I felt I had on LJ has gone, and maybe that community was more to do with the ages & stages of our lives than it was to do with the technology or the platform, and yet... I miss LJ, even though people are still over there. I miss IRC, even though I'm still on it occasionally. I miss usenet, even though it still exists. Those places aren't my places any more, and I don't have a new place to take its place. Twitter is still a thing, but it's horribly changed from the days when I signed up so I could text a group of people at Glastonbury.

So where am I? I'm still in the house I moved to in 2009, but not with any of the same people. These days it's just me plus Img (age 8) and H (age 2.5). How can Baby H possibly be 2 already? But here we are, she's walking and talking and thinking and singing and making jokes and counting and showing signs of starting to read (definitely recognising letters, possibly recognising words). This morning she told me we don't have wings. She's not wrong. Meanwhile Img is generally buried in a book or rolling her eyes at me. "It's MY CHOICE how I live my life!" she yelled at me the other day, week, month. (Eye)roll on the teenage years.

I have two lovely boyfriends, who we'll call A and D, but one of them is not out as poly, and the relationship with him is Complicated for Reasons, so that's ... interesting. I don't really know how to talk about relationships any more. I don't feel I'm doing very well at being there for anybody, including myself.

There is too much to do. There is ALWAYS too much to do. Someone said, ages ago now, "I don't know how you manage to do everything on your own!" and the short answer is: I don't. I don't miss having someone to help actually doing stuff around the house, because a) the Lovely Boyfriends do help when they're around, so b) the small amount of help lost is probably outweighed by help gained, and c) even if it wasn't, it would be TOTALLY outweighed by the sanity gained in the lack of obstruction and gaslighting and telling me I'm useless. I would miss having someone to help with the project-managing side of life admin, the deciding what to do rather than the doing it, except ... I don't remember ever having that? So it's hard to miss it. What I really want is to live in a commune of like-minded people and share things and concentrate on the things I'm good at. But all the people I know who share that desire are married to people who don't share it, and Being Married is more important than living your best life.

I feel like I'm not explaining any of this stuff properly.

H still doesn't sleep through the night. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a luxury. I can't function without caffeine, not in a jokey "instant human being - just add coffee!!!1" kind of way but in an "I am 100% dependent on this drug and I suspect it is slowly killing me" kind of way.

I miss the friends who have gone. Every day. Every single day.

Is this all there is?

I think I've successfully imported my LiveJournal here. It's all still in boxes and I don't know if everything survived the move and maybe eventually I'll unpack it and put things where they should be, or maybe I'll just leave it where it is and wonder occasionally why I ever thought any of it mattered.

I didn't plan this move. The writing has been on the wall for some time (by which I don't mean everybody moved to Facebook instead), but I hung on far longer than sensible until the Terms & Conditions suddenly became actually untenable. Sometimes it feels as though everything in my life is merely a clumsy metaphor for something else.

I don't have a Plan for doing something Different with this journal. Life won't wait while I sit around trying to think of a way to reinvent myself.

Is anybody even reading this? Does anybody want a recap of the story so far, or at least the latest significant plot points? Or shall we all just keep on keeping on?

So I tried to explain this to someone face-to-face, or at least side-by-side, but there are some things you can only say in the small hours of the morning with your head resting on a shoulder and your hand resting on a glass, and other things you can only write down, or at least write around, and maybe this was the other sort of thing after all. I don't really know how to get there, but here it is: I was pushing my big cargo bike up the short sharp stab of hill that I can't quite get the momentum for, and the sun was warm and the wind was cold, and I was rushing and late already in that way where a minute can't make any difference, and a red kite circled lazily overhead and I watched it until it eddied out of sight, and my heart was wishing and waiting to dance, and my head was full of a thousand things, the problems and the possibilities, and I realised: I love this fearsome cacophony of feeling, this messy tangle of compromise, the delight that trips laughing like children through the forest of spinning plates and the hours of anticipation, the needs and the hands and the faces, the unfinishedness of the poems into which I'm madly written, the songs that make me say this, yes this, just this. My fingers are full of a tangle of threads, woven through my body, leading me into the next moment and the next. Even when I'm standing still, part of me is running through the long grass, leaping into space, and silently shattering like sunlight on the river.

It's been so long since I've posted anything of substance that I've basically forgotten how to do this. HOW DO I EVEN LIVEJOURNAL. So I'm just going to type and see what comes out, and then post it and then feel awful about it for a while and be avoidant about looking at the comments and oh you know how it goes.

Seriously, though, I feel like I literally don't remember how to write anything longer-form than a tweet. A series of tweets, maybe. "(1/3)". Like trying to make a speech while struggling to keep your head above water, shouting it out in gulps of air. It feels like the internet's all broken and polluted now anyway, no air between things; we didn't used to have a word for "content" when it was all content. Not that I was, of course. I guess in some ways I'm more content now, more settled -- or set -- in my ways, less inclined to stand for certain brands of bullshit. Oh god though listen to me, puffing out hot air like a pompous great wheezing walrus, "I am this, I am that", words, words, and do you see what I did there, and besides. Is any one of us not basically just wandering around in the dark? Maybe running our hands over the outlines of something half-perceived, or maybe just petulantly kicking something and hoping it isn't a wasps' nest?

I had a voice in here somewhere.

Memory goes, but not memories. I can't always remember the name of the thing any more. (It was all there, only the names were not.) Things I thought I had stored in my head turn out to be broken links, digital husks; but the fingertips of past relationships come reaching out of the mist, too too solid (oh, for goodness' sake, stop that, you are not Lord Hamlet (no, stop that, too)), and the old music gets louder, the needle returns to the -- no, don't force it, you can hear it if you just listen.

The bits that make sense are decoupling like a slow-motion explosion. Blow the bloody doors off and see all the people.

The things in my life I want to write about have too much backstory, they're compromised by context, they're anchored to things I can't say. They're shot through with the threads of other people's secrets, and untangling my own loose weave will mean unravelling other people's hidden seams. Everything is tied to someone else; sometimes it feels like every thing in the world is a place where something, a thing I was doing when. The smell of his aftershave, 10 years later, still makes me turn my head. The arms of his jumper around my shoulders. Hooks in my flesh.

Maybe if I stack up enough half-sentences they'll start becoming.

I am moving my plastic-free July posts to my shopping blog (first posts there in about a year...) because that seems like a more sensible place for them. I won't delete the versions here, but subsequent plastic-free July posts will be over there instead. I've massively cut the first day's post to take out most of the rambling emo; the second is more or less unchanged, and today's is ALL NEW. Sorry to all those who've already commented on the first two here, no obligation to go and comment again!

I have a big backlog of things I want to post about, but I'm going to grit my teeth and pretend it's not there so I can get on and post about Plastic-Free July.

Last year I thought "oh yes, that sounds like a good idea, I'll try to do that," and then July caught me a bit by surprise, and on the first day I bought a packet of crisps (having apparently completely forgotten that the PLASTIC BAG counted as plastic) and was so fed up with my inability to remember a) what month it was or b) what things were made of that I gave up. To be honest I think that says more about my sticking power than about the all-pervasiveness of plastic.

This year July still caught me by surprise; I guess I've only had 36 years to figure out what comes after June. However I was working from home today so I was in a slightly better position to avoid accidentally buying plastic-wrapped food; in fact I managed not to buy anything plastic today because I didn't buy anything.

Of course, that doesn't mean I didn't use any plastic... far from it. Since I didn't buy anything, I tried just to keep an eye on everything I used, and make a note of it all here.

( Very very long rambling account of all the plastic )

I think the take-home lesson here is "don't buy anything, ever; but even then you will be full of fail in some other way". But that's a rather depressing conclusion.

Also, now I've written all this it's probably too late at night for me to have a bath. My shampoo, of course, is in a plastic bottle. :-/