shadows of echoes of memories of songs

So someone has made this game where you play Tetris and Snake at the same time with the same controls. It feels like this is both a) the thing I was unwittingly training for throughout the 1980s, and b) a metaphor for my life.

After a few minutes on it I managed to get as far as 8:12 (Tetris:Snake). It's much harder than it looks. But it also feels somehow familiar, and I eventually realised that that's because I spend an awful lot of my life with my brain in split-screen mode, listening to two loudly-delivered monologues, one in each ear, which scramble my brain on different frequencies. It goes something like this:

Channel 1: "I'm going to play with my magnets. I'm making a house! Housey housey house, housey house, house house house, look! I've made a number H for Hazel! A B C D E F G H I J K ELLAMENNOPEEEEEE Q R S T U V W X Y AND ZEEEEE NOW I KNOW MY A B C NEXT TIME WON'T YOU SING WITH ME mama DID YOU HEAR my alphabet song? IT'S SINGING TIME MAMA"

Channel 2: "Oh - mum, can I tell you something that happened at school? Mum, right, so, yesterday, I mean, it wasn't yesterday, but the bit I'm going to tell you is, but on Tuesday - I mean Monday - so at lunchtime, mum, Iris said - cos I was playing with Iris when it happened - I mean, it's not a bad thing - well a bit of it was bad but I wasn't doing that bit - so yesterday, right, mum..."

and occasionally I find myself literally unable to finish thinking the half-thought I've had in my head for half an hour, something like "what do I need to put on the shopping list", but I can't even work out why I'm having trouble concentrating because the noise is completely bypassing the actual conscious noise-processing bits of my brain and going straight into some kind of background process that slowly grinds the entire system to a halt, until suddenly it breaks through into the conscious & I realise that for the last 10 minutes Img has been trying to tell me something very important about her complex web of friendships, and H has been trying to tell me something very important about a picture of a dog, and I have to stop and tell them both I'm sorry I somehow haven't heard anything you've been saying for the last 10 minutes or managed to hear myself think.

It occurs to me that I do a split-brain thing to try to get myself to sleep sometimes as well, counting backwards from 100 to 1 while visualising the numbers in the other order. So 'saying' 100 in my head but 'seeing' the number 1, 'saying' 99 while 'seeing' the number 2, and so on. Like the thing where you try to pat your head & rub your tummy at the same time (which is easy) only both the head and the tummy are in your head. God knows what the people who say it's impossible to see pictures in your head would make of that.

It does absolutely drive me round the actual bend, though, the way Img orbits elliptically around the point of what she's saying, getting asymptotically closer to the inferred point of the thing, cocooning herself in a series of infinitely-nested parentheses. I don't know WHERE she gets it from hem hem.

On the other other other hand, mind you, this. I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

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.

There's feeling full of fail, and then there's feeling full of existential fail. I've spent most of today wanting to curl up under the desk in a little ball and howl like an over-tired toddler. I was working for the Department of Fail, which always saps my will to live -- they're not really inherently full of fail, but I and my colleague J. are contracted to work a few days for them and so all the problems they save up for us are the things that are either a) completely intractable and/or incomprehensible, b) sufficiently bitty and faffy that nobody has ever had a chance to sit down and really get them, or c) enormous cans of worms (these are invariably simple-looking tasks, and for all I know they may be given to us in all innocence, but they turn out to be many-headed sharp-fanged fail-hydras from the Dark Places). It doesn't help that the DoF is also located in a vast open-plan office, flickery-fluorescent-lit, and dry as a desert; being there makes me feel exhausted and drained and even more queasy than I was already starting to feel.

[Yes, I know I'm lucky to have a job at all, and I shouldn't complain. And I know I'm lucky that I'm not suffering (yet, so far) from all the horrible things that can go wrong in pregnancy, so I should be practically rejoicing at tiredness and a bit of recurring queasiness. And depression is all in the mind so it can't be that bad. And the Tories will fix everything if we just let them get on with it.]

Today was a day of cans of worms involving ( javascript and CMS horrors )

During all this fail-wrestling I was keeping a vague eye on twitter in the hope of getting some voices of sanity filtering in through all the madness, but in fact it just made things worse: it was a non-stop stream of rants and shouting, flickering away in the background like the last TV fuzzily broadcasting the apocalypse, showing the world falling apart while I was stuck inside designing better deckchairs for the Titanic. And outside it got darker and colder and I didn't want to stay in the Department of Fail but I didn't want to go out into the cold either, and every time I get home I feel like I don't ever want to go out again, but every time I look around me here I feel as though everything is a reminder of some kind of brokenness (inside or out) which I should have either fixed or got rid of, and I want to hide from it, and there's nowhere left to hide except going to bed, and even that doesn't help because I'm uncomfortable and I sleep badly, and going to sleep just means waking up into another day of fail.

And there's not enough time left before everything runs out of time. Working days, days before Christmas, days before the baby arrives ... days before the end of something, of everything. When I die they'll cut me open and find nothing inside but small charred fragments of to-do lists.

A couple of fragments both labelled 'food' (OK, food.tmp and food_2.tmp, since you ask) -- the first was clearly intended to be a comment (judging by the first line, anyway), then got a bit rambly, then I guess decided to rework it as a post, & then I added bits of another post at the end, & then I never did anything with it. So it's posted here unedited:

This is a really interesting post -- thank you!

barrysarll mentioned "Sudden Adult Death Syndrome" a while ago, as an extreme example of the disconnect between effort and results: as he put it, "In amongst all the health and terror scares, while everyone tries to improve their odds, SADS is the Reaper's little way of reminding us that the house always wins."

This also reminds me of a brilliant post by rhodri: Stop press: Everything causes and doesn't cause cancer. Which in turn reminded me of something said to me by a biochemist I briefly shared a house with, while I was an undergraduate, which has made me think ever since. He told me that he didn't want scientists to find a cure for cancer. "Everybody has to die of something," he said. "If they take away cancer, what are people going to die of?" I still disagree with his wish to avoid a cure (he's too late, anyway: cancer is no longer the death sentence it once was) but his point seems tangential to one of the ones you're making, and one that keeps occurring to me: increasingly, people seem to believe that they have a Right to avoid ill health altogether. That if they didn't do anything wrong, and they still get ill, somebody must be to blame. Maybe it's
the government, for not banning food (because a food allergy could have been responsible). Maybe it's their parents (either nature or nurture).


In the long run, we're all dead.


"Gosh, that looks healthy"

Suggestion that 'healthy' is abnormal (worthy of comment) and that choosing "healthy food" is something that people would not normally do. I feel the need to defend myself against (perceived) allegations of weight-loss dieting; I want to say that I'm just eating things I like and/or things that are convenient, but I want to do this without *denying* that it's healthy, without denying that I *try* to eat healthy food.

Yes, I want to be healthy. How many people would say that they want to be unhealthy, if asked?

What is "healthy" food? Most things are fine in moderation; most things are bad for you in excess.

And yes, I've had it forcefully explained to me since then that actually lots of people do want to be unhealthy (not just to do unhealthy things from time to time, e.g. drinking/smoking, but to be unhealthy, persistently and permanently) and that's their Inalienable Right as well, and by suggesting otherwise I am a Health Nazi and probably also guilty of Bad Fail. Too tired to deal with that argument though, because it all bleeds into the question of whether deliberately self-inflicted injuries should be treated on the NHS (which is a rusty-edged can of poisonous worms, so at the risk of being boring and "healthy" I'm not going to pick it up, I'm just going to nudge it out of the way with a very long stick), so perhaps we could just agree that it's a bit irritating when colleagues say "Gosh, that looks a bit healthy" in a kind of mocking way when we eat salads at work. Isn't it. And that anybody who says "rabbit food" when they see me shovelling an entire pot of hummous into my mouth using a couple of sticks of celery as a spoon has really not understood the insignificance of the celery in this picture.

So, enough of that, and on to the other fragment (unedited except for making the link work):

"It is cheaper to buy a Big Mac than to source focaccia, fresh tomatoes, carrots, organic beef and watercress."
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404251&c=1

Well, yes. But you're comparing apples with oranges. If you want something cheaper than a Big Mac, it's foolish to go out and attempt to construct a Big Mac out of more expensive materials.

Big Mac =

Pack of 4 frozen beefburgers
Pack of 4 rolls
lettuce
fresh tomatoes

No, I didn't work out the costs of the beefburgers, rolls, lettuce, etc., but I suspect it would be a lot closer to the cost of a Big Mac. Also, since I started posting this it has (quite coincidentally) been pointed out by a friend on twitter that there's nothing wrong with comparing apples and oranges. To which I replied that there is: it's a waste of time when you could be eating them.

I do seem to argue with articles about food a lot in my head. But I am currently too cold and tired and hungry to have any of these arguments, and I am wishing November was over, because I have so little to say and so little energy to say it with.

I've been feeling the baby moving for a while now -- the first "hmm, was that a tiny wriggle or was it just wind?" was on 1st November, with a more definite wriggle a couple of days later -- and for the last couple of weeks she's been dancing about like a mad badger. On Wednesday night the kicking (or whatever she's doing in there) was strong enough for addedentry to be able to feel it from the outside (at last!). Then this morning I actually saw the movement from the outside for the first time -- not a foot or hand protruding or anything Alien-esque like that, just a visible blip in the bump as I lay in the bath staring at the increasingly vast (for me) expanse of stomach. I'm now trying to resist the temptation to sit and literally gaze at my navel (still slowly turning inside out bit by bit) for ages, watching for another movement.

This has to be the slowest and most bizarre way to get to meet someone. I'm trying not to project a personality on to her (it would seem odd to talk about 'anthropomorphising' something that's already human, but you know what I mean) before she has a chance to develop her own, but I am definitely starting to think about her as a 'someone' rather than a 'something' -- just before the last scan I was thinking "cool, I get to see her again soon". She was unusually quiet at that one -- ironically, having been dancing a non-stop fandango for the last couple of weeks, when prodded with the ultrasound widget she stuck her thumb in her mouth (at least that's what it looked like) and refused to budge to give them a better angle on the bits they were trying to measure. "She's got a beautiful mouth", said the sonographer -- which was kind of a nice thing to say, but no, I don't know how anybody can tell at that size and resolution (and I can't help idly wondering whether they'd've said something like that about a boy baby, or one where they didn't know / weren't revealing the sex). The views of her face on the scans still look a bit strange and skull-like, to be honest, but as you can see I found one (from an earlier scan) that looks human enough for an LJ icon.

I'm now looking forward to the next scan (I get several more for the Intergrowth study). At this rate we'll have filled a photo album before she's even born!

Last night I had a variant on the "late for work" anxiety dream, a more specific one in which I was late for the meeting I was supposed to be going to this morning. ( classic anxiety-dream nonsense )

In practice (back in the real awake world) I got into work on time, quickly wrote up the notes I'd made last night into a more readable form from which I could refer to them in the meeting, checked my email, went to the meeting, and had a constructive 2 hours (!) discussing my job, my role on the team, where I want to go, what I want to learn, how we can make the team better, etc. with my two new line-managers (I haven't moved role, we've just had a bit of a middle-management reshuffle, & they are enthusiastically and laudably being very proactive about taking responsibility for the team and setting its direction rather than just letting us all keep drifting). Anyway, I came out of the meeting with useful specific short-term goals and a better picture of some possible longer-term goals and directions (as well as some helpful input into the decisions about maternity leave and coming back afterwards). The notes I'd made were useful, and I managed to mention everything on them. Over all I ended up feeling much more positive about work than I have done for a while.

The silly thing is, it's not even as if the anxiety dreams spur me to do better; I'd already done the prep for the meeting last night (over a bagel and a large hot chocolate in G&Ds, between work and choir) because I knew I'd get more out of the meeting if I was prepared for it. The dreams just make me feel fuzzy-headed in the morning (fortunately the freezing cold cycle ride in helped with that) and worried about things where I don't need to worry.

Now to deal with all the things I do need to worry about.

Another fragment (looks like it was originally a comment in response to someone else, but I can't remember who/where) because I'm too tired to put together a more coherent or contentful post:

I wish I were like you. But I'm lazy.

I do not believe that there's some kind of little on-off switch in my genes which I, or God, or even the Holy Richard Dawkins can flip to "lazy" or "not-lazy". I believe that it's about doing, not being; I am not "a lazy person", I am a person who can make lazy choices. But each choice is a new choice. Okay, I went to the supermarket instead of the market; but next time I can make a different choice. Each choice is a new event.

Saying "I wish I were less lazy" is IMHO just like saying "I pray every day that God will make me a less lazy person" (& all sorts of people who would scorn the latter say the former). Even postulating the existence of God, it's not remotely clear to me how (not 'by what divine force' but 'in what describable way') God would make someone a less lazy person except by making them make the non-lazy choices. And since I don't think God (or wishing) can actually pick a person up from the road to Sainsburys and plonk them down in the middle of Borough Market, I think it comes down to individual choice and will. The bit where you decide to move your legs in one direction or another. I like to believe I have some control over that.

I mean, basically (at the risk of repeating myself) IMHO it's not a question of wishing you were the sort of person who makes that choice; the only thing that distinguishes "the sort of person who makes that choice" from the sort of person who doesn't is the making of the choice. The difference is situated in the action, not some kind of difference in the colour of your aura, the health of your soul, or wherever you choose to lay the blame.

And yes, actions are habit-forming -- but that goes for the less-lazy actions as well as the lazy ones. The hard bit is rarely the actual action itself, it's the recognition of your own ability to make the choice: because if you could make the choice, then you have to take responsibility for the fact that you haven't. It is far, far easier to say "I care about this stuff, but it's difficult" than to admit that you could change your habits; it's easier, too, to say "I care about this stuff, but I'm lazy". That looks like accepting responsibility, but it's really only one step away from blaming God or genes for things you could change. And all of these things are easier than saying "Actually, I don't care about this enough to do something different."

I think I still agree with this (and while I certainly don't think it makes it easy to change ingrained habits, I do personally find it a more helpful way of framing the problem), but I'm not sure I want to deal with the possible arguments that could spin off from it -- not because I'm lazy but because I'm extremely tired, I'm likely to be very busy for the next few days, and I don't like arguments.

Is November nearly over yet?

More fragments today:

1. declutter_ideas. I think this may have been intended as part of a post to unclutter_2009 when I was still doing that (I gave up when we moved house because it all just became too complicated to keep track of -- we have been furiously decluttering since then anyway, but not itemising it all).

Throwing away v recycling - PLEASE RECYCLE EVERYTHING YOU CAN and if your local council doesn't accept something that other places do, write to them and ask. [make up draft letter]

"Why don't charity shops accept x y z..." - because sorting/pricing things that won't sell wastes volunteer time (ie money), and putting things out on shelves that won't sell (or won't make any significant amount of money) wastes space (ie money) and makes the shop less attractive (ie loses money).

The important thing about the decluttering is not just to get stuff out of the house but to think about how it got there. e.g. do you buy cans/bottles/jars of stuff you wouldn't normally use "because they're really cheap" rather than because you need (or even particularly want) them, & then find that they just sit there and go off (especially since they're probably only cheap in the first place because they're near the end of their shelf life)? Do you buy several of a thing "just in case" when one would do just fine? (I cite these examples because they're things I know I'm guilty of. :-)

The problem is there's two types of shopping: the sort where you work out what you need (at least roughly) and go and find it; and the sort where you wander round in a daze looking at lots of shiny things which have been packaged & presented to look appealing, and -- surprise, surprise -- you find that the billions of pounds' worth of marketing works on you as well even though you're really clever and never ever get influenced by adverts.

(I love the note-to-self of '[make up draft letter]'. I have never written to the council to tell them they ought to be recycling more things, I never get round to writing that sort of letter at all. Possibly this is part of the reason why I decided not to make such a preachy post.)

2. Another news-story-with-comment:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/oct/19/less-meat-debate

"Our all-or-nothing approach to meat eating leaves us with no understanding -- and little tolerance -- of the concept of a low-meat meat diet. It's awkward telling friends who know you eat meat that you'd rather have a specially prepared vegetarian option when you're invited round for dinner. It smacks of the sort of hypocritical vegetarianism that people love to sniff out and ridicule and it's much easier to just avoid the issue and eat whatever's going."

Either deal with the awkwardness, or fix the thing you *can* fix: the bits of your diet that *you* control. Saying "I can't have a low-meat diet because it's awkward telling friends" is just making excuses, unless you really eat out at friends' houses for every meal.

I know why I don't post these things; what I don't know is why I bother writing them down in the first place. Sometimes, with the responses-to-news-stories, I'm not sure why I bother thinking them: having arguments in my head with people who can't hear me just raises my blood pressure (incidentally my actual non-metaphorical blood pressure is absolutely fine, I know this because I'm getting it measured quite frequently at the moment) and wears me out. It's arguably even more pointless than posting comments on Have Your Say; at least there the idiots are probably feeling some kind of positive bond with other idiots, whereas I'm just doing the equivalent of sitting on the sofa at home on my own and shouting at the telly.

So, yeah, sorry about all these dull bits and bobs. I was going to post about making a Christmas pudding, which is what I was doing (among other things!) today, but I think I said everything interesting I can think of to say about this on last year's Stir-up Sunday. The only thing to add is that last year's pudding (which we forgot about & eventually got round to eating in February, ahem) was delicious, so I've gone for the same recipe again, but this time with the right amount of suet and with fewer bits of ancient dried fruit from the back of the cupboard. The things you leave lying around in cupboards don't get any tastier the longer you leave them. That would be the moral of this story, except that morals in stories are a bit like sixpences in puddings: an interesting idea with the weight of tradition behind it, but in practice you just break your teeth on them.

I'm just making this up as I go along. I bet you'd never have guessed.

Just thought I'd write a few notes (partly for my own benefit) about physical/mental changes now I'm 20 weeks pregnant (hopefully halfway through!).

( sickness, bump, twinges, mental health, and a baby ninja )

So that's where we are at the moment. Hope this is of interest to someone other than me, but if not, eh, tough. :-)