to help you visualize something of my stay, here is a picture of the FOAM SLIPPERS they gave me for my visit.

i saved them for this show and tell moment, because of course i have to blog about it, and somehow the foam slippers seem to signify something about my stay.

now, if this was a locked down personal kind of a blog you would get all  the gory details, or at least a stream of consciousness version of it. but since i have the temerity to categorize and tag my blog with the word ‘humor’ my intention is to keep it light. of course, who knows if i will pull that off, but at least i try to care about you, gentle reader.

obviously, it would be good if i had a fictive bone in my body, because then i could write in a way that would protect the innocent/guilty in public without fearing consequences, whatever those might be, but i am one of those accursed souls who can’t write fiction without sounding like a phoney. a recent twitter conversation about this has led me to realize that i am not alone. and the problem with having a public blog is all the disclosure. or at any rate, all the potential disclosure. it’s a challenge to say enough but not too much. so it is what it is. and what it is is a snapshot, and a little hand in the air and a weak voice crying out “i’m still here! YOO HOO!”

in any case, you have read or seen one flew over the cuckoo’s nest? that.

i’ll be drawing a veil over what led to the visit to the underworld that is a psych ward, and, drugged as i was, this particular veil is actually rather opaque, since my remembered experience of it is at odds with what actually happened, and my memory itself is foggy. however, guess what? when they are assessing you for release they really do ask you what date it is, which i am always a little vague about, and YES they actually do ask you who the prime minister is! such a cliche.

thing is, i don’t listen to, read, or watch the news any more, so pretty much all current affairs come to me through the media of topical news quizzes, twitter, and facebook. so it’s all a bit partial and slanted towards lolcatz. this is fine for everyday life, i do hear about salient topics eventually, and sometimes before people who follow the trad media do, as you doubtless know, my virtual chums. however, in politics in the uk, we currently have some sort of power sharing going on, and now that i am less drugged i can tell you that we have mr cameron and mr clegg at the helm, though it does seem that cameron makes the decisions and is hated, whereas clegg is a powerless puppet man who is satirized as being his lackey. none of this came to me in hospital, though, so i answered the question with a simple yes.

relating this story to a friend i was told a rather more worrying tale about someone who was asked about whether she knew why she was in hospital who also answered ‘yes’ and was released. certainly, she knew why she was in. (it was because of an alien conspiracy, dur.) DUR.

so anyway, i’m on new drugs, and things are swimming into view again. i expect to be somewhat up to normal transmission any time soon.

as you were.

“Hedera is Latin for ivy. Why that is relevant here is not very clear at all, but this little glyph was used back in the day to mark paragraph breaks. Seems like it was probably really hard and annoying to draw, but it looks nice.”

so what else is in the news? WATERSTONES nee WATERSTONE’S, the bookshop has abandoned it’s apostrophe! and it’s part of a wider trend, of course. my friend grace, who is an editor said

“Without the apostrophes guiding hand well all be tottering about, bumping into things and not knowing where were at. Fools!”

which a) she would, she’s an editor, and b) made me feel more attached to the apostrophe, i mean, guiding hand, aw. i hadn’t thought of the apostrophe as being helpy. when i was a teacher, and not of english, i might add, i will admit i used to tell students ‘if in doubt leave it out’ because i could see that the apostrophe was going the way of all things, but more importantly, a redundant apostrophe is WAY more glaring than a missed one. recently @mockduck asked TK MAXX why they had ditched their apostrophe in their MENS and WOMENS signage. she got a reply which makes total sense to me – the designer thought it looked cleaner. harsh, but true.

but there’s more. before either of these articles came to my attention, this article about the comma splice gave me pause. this is because if i had ever learned the finer points of comma splicing and how it IS SO WRONG apparently, then i certainly have allowed it to fade into the mists of time, because i use it all the time. and now that i know that a semicolon is the proper thing i’m just going to go right ahead and keep doing it.

it’s not that i don’t get the argument. i do use commas properly as well as improperly, i think i just am not all that fond of semicolons. does that make me demonic? maybe. and it’s not as though i can’t be pedantic. i am very against  anyone playing fast and loose with the oxford comma, for instance. when i was taught it at school, the example given was the phrasing of the act of union, which some scottish pedant RIGHTLY insisted should be listed – i forget the order; england, scotland, and wales – for example, and not; england, scotland and wales. totally different meaning. (look at me using semicolons! i will do, just not for comma splicing, i keep commas handy for that.)

anyway, that’s all the news on the grammar front for now. i think you will agree it is enough to be going on with. and i doubt i will ever write about it again, it’s more @lucysfootball‘s thing than mine. it was fun while it lasted, grammar, but you know i play fast and loose with you and you’ll never be my girl.

pip pip!

“But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.” ― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

(photo and quote put together by slaughterhouse 90210, click through pic to see this great tumblr)

did you spot my mistake? yes. you’re right. TK MAXX is the modern version of a jumble sale. you can’t really predict what you’re going to get. not based on what was in the shops and on the streets last summer anyway, as it turns out. obvs, if i had hauled myself off to the actual shops that sold said breton inspired tops and orchestra pit dresses i might have stood a better chance, but who wants to go INTO TOWN? not me.

as it was, i did very well. as a young thing full of the joys of clobber (and at art school, i might add) i LOVED clothes and happily went on buses all over the place to hit three jumble sales in a day. i would come home flushed with excitement, having forgotten most of what i had bought, so would have a fine time rediscovering and trying on my haul. happy days. happy days when i didn’t mind being a bit uncomfortable in my clothes as long as i looked AMAZING which i did, since i was skinny as a whippet and looked good in anything.

nowadays i am not skinny, i am not young, and i want to be very comfortable in my clothes. but having been a fashionista i am a bit picky about what i look like even so. so the trick is all about looking presentable (in my version of what that is) as well as being secretly as comfy as hell.

i have no wish to mock people who wear track suit bottoms, but i am not one of them. it’s a whole look, and i don’t do it. plus, i have seen trackie bottoms up close, and fail to believe that the heavily concertinaed waistband of thick material could be any kind of comfy on my waist, which is both fattish and highly sensitive.

SO. enter the yoga pant. having actually done yoga for several years, i had a working introduction to this garment. i can tell you that it is hard to find an uncomfortable pair of yoga pants. also, they are cut nicely, made of breatheable material, have a little flare rather than the runner’s max wall effect footless tight look, and sometimes they also come with what is known as a ‘soft’ waistband, which is every kind of comfy you can think of.

happily, you actually can bet on TK MAXX to have yoga pants. perhaps especially this time of year when everyone who has more money than sense or a highly developed sense of new year’s resolutionitis is hitting the shops for sports gear. this, at any rate, worked in my favour. i got three pairs of yoga pants and a pair of max walls for wearing with boots instead of leggings because they had a soft top, and as you have just seen, i am all about the soft.

not only did i win at buying legwear in a general sense, but also, two of them were from an ‘eco’ company, and are super soft due to having bamboo as one of the fibres. bamboo is FAB in textiles if you like soft. i actually have some bamboo towels, and they are not only soft but also super light. despite the vaunted eco credentials, they were not stupid enough to forego a dose of elastine, which would have been a deal breaker. i spent the late 80s in leggings which bagged out at the knee after a short while of wearing and i have no interest in turning back that particular clock.

obviously, i did not turn up at the shop and head straight for the sensibles. i tried on a handful of dresses first. awful, they were. experimental side satisfied i was happy to get on task. after getting my yoga pantage sorted out i headed for shoes in the vain hope that my perfect pair of walking boots would be waiting for me in a little bubble invisible to all but me, but it was not to be so. i tried on some serious trudgers which were designed to be totally impervious to wet, and if i lived somewhere where snow was more guaranteed then i might have given in to temptation, but i couldn’t justify their expense, and bought a pair of trainers instead.

reader, i seriously didn’t already own a pair. i know you went straight to “another pair of trainers, who needs more than one?” but it was a genuine gap in my wardrobe. i’d spent the past year or two living in MBTs, which, i can report, are generally comfy, but if you ‘off road’ to the slightest extent you will go over on your ankle. moving to what passes for ‘the country’ in my mind (zone three, i mean, it’s nearly outer london, i have a suburban landline number!) i wanted a proper pair of walking shoes next. as it happens i ended up with some timberlands which are okay, though not the walking boot of my dreams. the transition was remarkably painful, MBTs give you this rocking gait, and it makes a whole slew of small muscles lazy. however, the timberlands have a rigid sole, so another compensation. i have worn the trainers twice, now, to take the dog out. and my but isn’t it nice to have a full action including the toes? i am really enjoying the stretch of just that simple addition of articulating the toes.

post shop, i am heavily fantasizing about going back and doing more. but winning at shopping is also about knowing when to stop. when i lived in bethnal green i had a street market nearby which sold french connection, toast, farhi, and great plains stuff for super cheaps. often, i could get three things for a tenner, so a total wardrobe overhaul for twenty quid. i have to remember that although TK MAXX is cheap, it’s not that cheap.

so anyway, that’s all the fashion news. i didn’t get a slew of stripey tops, i did get enough yoga pants to stay comfortable, both mentally and physically, for the near future. i didn’t get walking boots, but then i believe i might have to go to a shop where they have a selection of them to really get the dream boot sorted out, but i did get trainers, and everyone needs trainers. i did not get any number of fancy bits of tat that i would have to hide from @tenyen.

i win at shopping.

so!

pay attention! fashion news ahead!

i predict!

DRUM ROLL!

that i will mostly be buying whateveritis that other people got fed up buying last year and is now languishing in the heavily discounted section.

and, to be perfectly honest, i don’t mind. relying on prices being at rock bottom, it saves me money and it saves me having to use my imagination and “choose” stuff. and i think that, for once, i am not in that much of a minority. i am long past being gamine and am fed up wearing all black. i tried it. all that happens is that you get to a critical point in your wardrobe where you actually can’t see any of your clothes.

Auguste Raynaud (1854 - 1937) Night

plus, although black hides a multitude of sins, we are not all goths or teaching at the london school of fashion. CAST IT OFF! i say. or at least, cast some of it off and wear something else to break up the monotony.

as well as being “womanly” shaped, i am also “mature” I WILL BE 50 IN 2012!

i know. settle down.

this means a few things. crucially, for me to be a credible ‘influence’ on fashion theory and ponderings, i have seen fashion’s cycles come round a few times and i know that you can be devoted to a fabric or a style, and it can be “yours” until it comes into fashion and by the next year your whole look is OVER for everyone, but most especially, you. this is upsetting the first time it happens, but at a certain point you think hang on if i like this stuff and probably the best of it will be remainedered by the end of the season i can clean up.

hence, i have historically been happy to see tartan come in to fashion, for instance, and this year we get a really nice picking. summer 2011 saw versions of that classic coco chanel pinch, the breton shirt, all over the place. i will be snaffling myself some of those, which i will wear for a DECADE – forget a ‘year’.

::happy sigh::

another thing that was popular last summer that is still showing up in sales is black maxi dresses. there were quite a few maxi dresses around altogether, but i found the black version rather startling. people were wearing it as a day dress, and it just looked as though there were people who belonged in an orchestra pit who had lost their way to the west end wandering all over london.

oi, love, stage door’s that way i wanted to shout at them.

given that these frocks will now be under twenty quid on the racks of TK MAXX i think i might invest. they are made of t shirt material, so quite comfy, and i can see myself gardening in one.

LUVVY!!

due to being a pasty faced crip who spends all day on a chaise longue trying to win at twitter, i have rather wasted away over the past coupla years.  now, because of chronic migraine, i take pain killers every day, and recently a doc decided to give me even more pain killers to take all day long. gentle reader, i rattled.

on a whim, i decided to give up the entire hoopla of preventative painkillers, and like a crazyperson, went cold turkey and decided that i would take pain killers when i got pain LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE DO. so now, at about three or four in the morning i get up and take drugs.

Christina Bothwell.

what i have noticed is that i get a lot of pain from carrying even really light things, like a bag of dog poo for five minutes. (that’s good in imperial as well as metric, right?) and i know that in the past the best thing for that is to have some muscle around to take the strain.

now, since i moved to the tottenham riviera, i have made myself not so handy for facilities in general, but if i can get to and from the swimming pool here, i could start doing lengths, and i know that this is going to be the best way to support my wretched back. and all this is made more likely by the helpfully arranged poolside steam and sauna stuff. so i am guessing i can pace my exercise (including the walk there) with a bit of well timed loafing.

this is less by the way of a new year’s resolution, and more like a serious attempt to get on top of what has become unmanageable. i mean, not taking painkillers prophylactically and also having halved my sleep medications means i get up in the night and move around, which is arguably good, and the pain in my back is driving me to my yoga mat which is also good. i mean, nobody does yoga if they don’t have to.

my real new year’s resolution is for @tenyen to go on a massage course. i’m not stupid, i don’t make resolutions for myself. that’s just asking for disappointment.

i had hoped to get my neighbour, @StephenChristos , roped in for the ride to the pool and for the company, but needs must when the devil drives, and it is more important for me to get on with this stuff than to hang around waiting to see who’s in. if i accrue chums along the way, all well and good, but i am perfectly capable of going swimming on my own. I AM.

so while i am not making new year’s resolutions for myself what else am i planning for next year? well, i want to get to know my camera better. i was a fool to myself when i got it, because i prioritized pocketability over lens. i am living to regret this. it’s like i had this big epiphany about how important lenses are and now i hate my camera. but that’s okay, when you are not in love with your camera you hate it, and so that’s alright. i am just doing the hating the camera, that’s all.

damn thing is complicated though. and i know if i actually learned how to use it i’d get more out of it. i am swithering about getting a blipfoto account, like @lahikmajoe but i can’t decide whether the ‘photo a day’ thing would be helpful or just one of those things which you give up sometime around mid february.

like all those people who start the year with a gym membership who i am already trying hard not to look like, thankyou.

i mean, you can see his point. tractors are pretty cool.

anyway, what happened was that i became too ill to do my job, took a while to get anywhere near on my feet, took a little backstage job to get me used to working again, got given SSRIs, promptly went mental, presented myself at college to start teaching again, got sent home. end of career. after my initial, quite frightening, experience on the SSRIs, i said that i wouldn’t take psych meds unless they were prescribed by a psychiatrist. why yes, i was a little naive. bless me.

after some months of hanging around, i finally got my appointment. as it happened, the guy i was supposed to see had been suspended because he was accused of sexually abusing a patient. after several months the case was dismissed, and he got his job back (i wouldn’t weep too hard for him, he was on full pay the whole time and was apparently big into speed boats). but, in the meantime, his office was occupied by one saul seneviratne. it was the work of moments to quickly cyber stalk him just now, and i find he is doing very well as a forensic pshychiatrist. i did topicalize his wearing of a clip on tie one time – he told me that he was moonlighting in the cop shop. paid off, too, so it would seem.

now, here in the uk, it is perfectly usual to get bounced around, barely seeing one person twice, and having appointments every couple of months if you are lucky. i guess sene had some time on his hands, because he saw me a LOT. and no, it wasn’t because i was a big time mental criminal, stop thinking that. we talked about a lot of things, including the bands we’d seen when we were at college – being the same age, we had a fair bit in common. in between actually trying to get me effective treatments, he also proposed something more whimsical; what did i think of the idea that i might be neurasthenic?

wikipedia was launched in 2001, and this was maybe just before it’s launch or a couple of years after. don’t quote me. but you can imagine, when i looked up neurasthenia when i got home, i didn’t get quite as many hits as i did yesterday, when, on a whim, i decided to look it up again. what i found out first go round, was that it was a victorian diagnosis for people for whom modern life was really too much. the advice at the time was that the patient should stay in bed, drink hot milk, and have her maid send away visitors. clearly not an ailment for the hoi polloi. this pleased me, sort of, but it seemed irrelevant, since it hadn’t been used as a diagnosis for some time. the symtoms, of extreme sensitivity, pain, fatigue, mental weakness, seemed familiar enough, though it wasn’t many years til i got a positive diagnosis of fibromyalgia. incidentally, i listened to the audiobook of remembrance of things past and it features a character who clearly had fibro or CFS, and it turns out proust was diagnosed with neurasthenia, himself. as was virginia woolf.

i don’t know what prompted me to look neurasthenia up again, over a decade later, but there is a lot more material online now. i was surprised to discover that it is still recognized by the WHO, since it is still actively diagnosed in many countries. it seemed it peaked in the uk around WW1, and as many men as women were diagnosed with it. it was so closely identified with the stressors of modern life, that it was also called “AMERICANITIS”!

i kid you not!

in japan it is treated with something called ‘morita therapy‘. now this i wish i had known about. instinctively i landed myself at the buddhist’s doorstep to learn meditation and mindfulness, and this therapy is a lot about that, but it has other parts to it’s structure i now wish i’d known about. not because i haven’t come to many of the same conclusions about how i need to live, myself, but just not in that order, and perhaps if i had done, i might be in a better state of health today. as it is, i have done the meditation and the living in silence, and quite coincidentally, i have also written journals, both on paper and online. i have quite often wished for the kind of sanitorium that rich folks of yesteryear might go to. sipping hot chocolate on an alp with a blanket over my knees, ministered to by a kind nurse. or looking over the ocean. however, the nhs doesn’t run to such things, and most probably, nor should they. having said that, whatever an actual rest cure might cost, if i were recovered i would be a lot more cost effective, since i am well qualified and have a professional career behind me, and am now contributing nothing and living on the state. who wins at that game?

anyway, it’s nice to see that sene is doing so well. and clever of me to move to the tottenham riviera.

the view from my garden.

there is a reason we stay in and decorate the cave with bits of  tree and hoard food.

anyway, what i do know is that it’s a wasted opportunity, to treat it as if it were just like any other day, and not celebrating in any way is just asking to end up in A&E with suicidal ideations having marinaded too long in self pity. i am guessing that xmas day is like a saturday night on steroids in the emergency room – all the drunk miserable angry people you could wish for, if you like that sort of thing, as well as season based burn and cut victims. and children who swallowed a train set.

so, back on topic, i am planning to follow the ‘jews go to the cinema day’ of yore. only, at home, and with lovefilm and chinese ready meals. i am so glad that i visited LA at christmas time, one year, and was advised of the cinema/chinese food option. it appealed to me immediately and became a no brainer for this year’s festivities.

not that i wish you a horrid time of it, were i to be plugged in to a satisfactory full bells and whistles experience i dare say i would be into it, but this year is one for the construction of a viewing pit, all the popcorn we can eat, and back to back film viewing.

so far, i plan to watch tiny furniture, last train home, kissing jessica stein, Banlieue 13 (+ sequel if good), and tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. that ought to more or less cover it, though i am still open to suggestions, especially of a funny/foreign/murdery persuasion.

also, though, i do like visitors, and am perfectly happy to have seasonably damaged visitors who need to escape from their own festivities or simply failed to arrange to do anything. this tends to lead to quite a long and fairly unpredictable festive season, but i am not against it. in the past this low key open house has made for pleasing meetings of friends. better not say more in case i hex it.

so yeah, enjoy your running around if you are doing it. and if it gets a bit stressful think of me chilling out, and know there is an alternative.

i usually put a sparkly light on her collar so she can be seen, but i forgot, this morning.

anyway, no cyclists were drowned in the making of this post. i did however have a strange encounter with a walker in the park. okay. so it is dark, and poppet is dark, and she is a dog, and quite quiet, so i can get how having her skip merrily/EMERGE FROM THE DARKNESS towards you could be disconcerting.

here’s the bit where i give you advice. whether you are foreign or not, surely to god you can think of a better thing to shout than “HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! HEY! HEY! HEY!”?

because, in poppet’s world, much like many other dog’s world, that sounds like encouragement. it just does.

nothing against teh foreigns. i have been foreign many times myself.

here’s what  spanish i know; si (yes) no (no) soy (i am) muy (most) ambivalente (ambivalent) jamón (ham) bano  – sp? (bathroom) and lo siento (sorry). i learned jamón while i was there, miming and pointing, because the spanish sure know how to eat ham, and you certainly want to have what they’re having. also lo siento, though i was told i was using it wrongly. the spanish only use that to say “i apologise” not the way the english use sorry as if it were pepper – their word for that is triste which i just had to look up, since i am probably quite rude and mainly want ‘sorry’ for actual apologies.

so there you have it! you don’t need ambivalente, i learned that for my own reasons – and because it’s virtually the same as in english i remembered it.

if you find yourself being a bit foreign somewhere and you have an unwanted dog bounding up to you, my advice is not to say hello or hey. or to shout. say no. even say sorry if you have it, but don’t give a dog a mixed message, you’ll fuse it’s head.

end of public service announcement. i hope my lesson in spanish for people who don’t mind miming a lot but draw the line at “bathroom” is helpful to you, and also the lesson in talking to dogs.

that’s all the skills i want to share right now. the sun is coming up and i need to eat breakfast or i will never win a campervan.

poppet at ian’s. taken with his iphone.

now. during my long derailment with cystitis from hell i could do literally nothing except lying down and things involving laptop. this means that i am now winning at twitter as witnessed by the fact that i have finally customized my page @elaine4queen with a nice bit of tiling involving no grout, and my favourite biscuit. and i changed the colours for the rest of it as well because i was on a ROLL.

so, anyway, another thing is that i got very excited this morning reading this post travelswithpain.com/2011/11/11/yotel-experience/ i mean, look at THIS!

you can play moon or space oddesey or, if you like, alien. or you can pretend you are japanese and you are in a love hotel – you could actually do that last one very easily since you don’t even need to book a whole night, just units of four hours at a time.

heathrow is a good couple of hours away from here no matter how you cut it. i might not bother with it on the outward leg, but somehow coming back from anywhere is draining. and it also depends what time you get in. like, when i went to spain a couple of years ago it was all adventurey and nice on the way out, even though it was a long trip, and it was all daytime. but on the way back we had turbulence, it seemed to take longer, and we arrived back in london in time for drunk people to be on the tube at night. i mean, i don’t even do night. and i do still want to go to america again, and that is really killer on the return flight.

so, because this is a site for criptastic* travelers, she also mentions a site for autistic travelers www.autisticglobetrotting.com/ which looks pretty good. and, you know autistic spectrum people are kind of picky, so if you’re not autistic but you are a picky bastard, then i think you’re still allowed to read.

what else? well, i have been mostly eating alkaline forming foods www.a1-natural-beauty.com/acid-alkaline-rebalance.html in my efforts to minimize the heinous attack of cystitis that i have had for the past couple of weeks. and ten says i am not allowed ANY chips until i am completely better. hence the dog going on holiday – i couldn’t exactly put a lead on her and take her to the toilet and call it a walk. anyway, i’ve been the doctor’s and it was my first time with someone at that practice, and i was quite heartened by his general efficiency and also by the fact that he was unfazed by me asking for a thrush treatment to follow on from the antibiotics. i think after a fortnight of cystitis we can leave out the bit where i get thrush next. thanks.

*don’t repeat this word in front of people unless you are prepared to trail blaze – some people like it when i’ve said it, but i don’t know if it’s “allowed”. i’m not sure if i made it up or not, but whatever. you don’t want to be all reviled like ricky gervais. use your skill and judgement.

apartment therapy

in other news, there are now many many things that worry me. mainly health related, so if you are worried about health based moaning then i’d advise you to look away now.

anyone still reading? jeez, well you are better than i would be, probably. or, indeed, am. lately, i have been stricken by dreadful depression, and no sooner than i had got an emergency appt to get a sticking plaster for that, i up and got a shocking dose of cystitis cunningly wrapped in a migrainous loop involving possibly sinus based pain triggered by short bursts of crying. literally. i can cry for a few minutes and it will be enough to set up a kind of permatrigger for migraine. meanwhile, not only am i utterly immobilised and shattered by a cystitis that doesn’t want to go away, but all the meds clash and the only thing that has made any of this manageable has been the installation of a ten shaped person willing to go far beyond boyfriendly duties. while. he. is. here.

obvs, i am not massively pleased to have frankly unmanageable symptoms while still trying to eat regular meals to fend off those migraines, plus, now i have to only eat alkaline forming foods because the medication is really not enough to fend off the cystitis, and those foods are all hard to cook, impossible for me to fetch from shops myself… aaarghhh – i can’t even make this into a proper sentence. suffice to say, i am DOOMED. and ten is cooking. and when he leaves i will starve to death, the end.

i have even thought that i should get a friend to come and take the dog away for a while when he goes. i have managed the morning walk, but none of the others, the past few days.

i have a doctor’s appointment next thursday. i don’t even know where to begin.