warning: what follows is a rant. a petulant, self-indulgent, unkind, stomp-my-feet-temper-tantrum kind of rant. look away now if you don’t want to read further.

it’s the kind of rant borne of two cruddy, miserable days. it all started yesterday morning when the tube was suspended – i had to walk to the rail station with blistered feet in heels, and when i arrived, i was greeted with the sight of a massive hoarde of people bunching up and spilling out of the station.

this is one of the things i hate about brits: the tendency when everything goes tits up, to just wait like a herd of lowing, passive cattle, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. (told you i was going to get nasty.)

and the fact that i hate that characteristic just irritates me even further when a service like the tube (a very expensive and ill-run public service) seems to go haywire far too often. and people just put up with it.

so i was in a crummy mood. they weren’t letting people into the rail station (even though the rail *was* running, unlike the tube), and they were letting a bunch of people out a side exit, and i saw a few people slip into the station through the side exit. hell, i had a rail pass (and therefore didn’t need to validate my ticket at the gates) so i tried to do the same.

only to get violently shoved by the rail employee. yes, i was physically assaulted by a guy in a fluorescent vest on a fucking power trip who shouted, “what’s wrong with you?! you’re jumping the queue!” (i wonder if he would have dared lay a finger on a male passenger?)

because really, that’s all he cared about. not the fact that i pay through the nose for a tube service that never functions properly. not the fact that i was severely inconvenienced and made late for work. not the fact that the rail service which *was* running, was being curtailed in the name of crowd control rather than expediency.

no, no. the fact that i jumped the fucking queue gave him the right to shove me with his shoulder like a linebacker and scream in my face.

(my formal complaint of being physically assaulted, is now being dealt with – had i not been so shocked, i might have had the presence of mind to call the cops at the time.)

so i got home, and i was annoyed all evening. then today, i walked out the door to see this:

this is the shit from the neighbours. they don’t seem to understand that the front of my house is not a rubbish dump, so they regularly engage in what’s called “flytipping” here – illegal dumping of garbage, refuse, waste, etc. they dump their household rubbish bags in front of my house. they dump their old furniture in front of my house. they dump computer monitors and old ironing boards in front of my house.

this morning, i was treated to several piles of accountancy textbooks they’d apparently decided they no longer wanted. so i shoved them back in front of their driveway, and went off to work.

i had another crap day at work dealing with other people’s incompetence. (gah – can’t *anyone* do their jobs properly??!) and then came home to the pile of books… moved *back in front of my house*, papers flying up and down the street. i stormed off to the hardware store on the corner (who abut the alleyway where the entrance to these people’s flat is) and asked them if they knew who was dumping the shit. turns out, they don’t have anything to do with the people living in the flat, but have just been calling the council to come clear away the rubbish every time. same as i’ve been doing.

so this is what happens: we all know who dumps the rubbish. the council comes and cleans it up. then they just dump more rubbish again. and my tax money pays for it. argh!!!!! it’s beyond infuriating.

and finally, to cap it all off, the postman decided in his/her infinite wisdom, to leave my amazon parcel outside my front door – probably because they were too lazy to make out the collection card and drag the parcel back to the depot. when i found it, the two books which i was soo looking forward to, which were supposed to be inside were long gone.

this is what happens, though, when you’re an expat – a bad few days turns into a bout of effing and blinding about what a shithole of a country you live in, how you can’t believe you live in such a back-asswards place that’s stuck in the victorian era, how you can’t wait to get out because everyone and everything is supremely incompetent. how the most mundane things (transport, litter, post) can’t even get done properly, the natives are cattle, and it’s all gone to hell in a handbasket, god save us when the olympics arrive!

the little (and not so little) annoyances pile up until they become a mountain of self-pity that you can’t seem to dig yourself out from under. the difficulties of daily life become magnified until you attribute them to an entire country and people who can’t possibly do anything right, and it would all be different *if only you lived somewhere else*.

and i do want to live somewhere else. i am keening to live somewhere else. this smae thing happened with new york, and it happened with boston – the familiarity really does breed contempt. but when it’s another country and culture, it’s just so much easier to say the brits suck, than to acknowledge that urban living can be crummy sometimes. the city closeness starts to press in around you until you feel you can’t breathe, but you can’t yet escape, so let’s blame everything on the british. you can’t appreciate any of the beauty of the city (look! historic buildings and sushi restaurants side-by-side! the river and the theatre and the lights and the multi-culti populace and the palace!) because you’re so busy staring downcast into the dirty gutters and breathing the bus fumes. i’m sure vancouver doesn’t have any dirty gutters and bus fumes, and it certainly doesn’t have any sucky brits.

this will pass. i know it will. but right now i’m looking down at the gutters. the city is squeezing the life out of me, i have no books, and there’s rubbish outside my front door.

bloody britain.

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my biggest pet peeve these days? titles.

over here in the u.k., titles are *mandatory* for practically everything. every form you fill out, every account you open, every online purchase you make, you are required to choose a title.

stop! until you choose a title, you may not pass go! you may not buy that set of plastic mixing bowls for £9.99 until you answer the very important title question!

and while most of the time, it’s the standard mr./mrs./ms./miss choice, being that we live in the u.k., often the choices will include the more exotic honourifics lord/lady/sir/dame etc. etc. etc.

i’ve always been against titles on principle – there are very few instances where my gender and/or marital status are required knowledge for a retail exchange or provision of services to be carried out smoothly and successfully. it’s really wholly unnecessary in 99% of all instances. but in such places where it was required, i have always, always used ‘ms.’ as a title – partly as a nod to second wave feminism, but mostly because it’s none of their damn business whether or not i’m married and i like being cryptic.

over here though? even though i’ve always selected ‘ms.’ every bloody time they force me to use a title? they still put ‘miss’. without fail, on every item where jonno’s and my own differing surnames are included, i am ‘miss’. but even on my own bank account, my paycheque, my junk mail… all ‘miss’, every last one of them. for some reason, ‘ms.’ in the u.k. is not widely used… or, it would seem, acknowledged.

frankly, it pisses me off to no end. the insistence on a title where none is needed (does it *really* make any difference to my veg box order if i am baroness jen, or professor jen, or mrs. jen?) is idiotic enough, but in a country where arbitrary class designations are still so rife (as if by being born into a “noble” family, lord poshbottom of earlchestertonshire is somehow better than anyone else), and where the outmoded queen still sits on her throne pretending to be important in the world, i can kind of understand it.

but to force me to use a title and then not even honour my elected honourific? well that’s just galling. i may not think that titles are important, but to blatantly disregard what i choose to call myself is downright rude.

so lately i’ve been rebelling in my own childish, but amusing way – selecting titles at random. my grocery account is under ‘captain’ jen, my cable bill arrives for ‘mr.’ jen, and so on, and so forth. if they’re going to force me to play their little stupid, bullshit, classist game, then play it i will. it’s petty and small, i know, and entertains no one but myself.

but i can’t wait to use ‘marchioness’. or hell, maybe i’ll just start making some up.

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how long can you hold on to a dream?  i was talking to my work colleague the other day about our current disillusionment with our jobs.  and they’re *fine* jobs – they’re good, solid jobs that make a difference to others.  but we just sort of fell into these roles, and they’re jobs that we’re good at, but not passionate about.   we spent an hour daydreaming about the kinds of things we wished we were doing instead.  “so what do you want to be when you grow up? ha ha ha,”  – but the laughter was hollow.

then the other day, amity wrote a blog post about not knowing which direction to head in her future.   and i, (always so quick with the sage advice that i am incapable of following myself), said don’t worry! lots of people are just feeling their way along in life! you’ll get there eventually!

but those two occurrences have left me feeling very unsettled.

i don’t remember how it was that i came to know i wanted to be a therapist, but at seventeen when i was applying to university, i knew that that was my ultimate goal.  there was never any question – i’ve always just known.

and now…well, three weeks ago i turned 37.

and in talking about it, it suddenly hit me like a punch to the gut – the hard realisation that *twenty years later*, i am no closer to my dream than i was then.

fuck me. twenty years.

oh sure, i’ve got a b.a., and i’ve made two aborted half-attempts at getting into grad school.  but those jokes i make about “working on a 50 year career plan” are worn threadbare of amusement.  i look at friends who are doing jobs they really love and wonder why the hell i’m not.  i’m filled with a deep, disquieting jealousy.

how did i let this happen?  i still want to be a therapist just as much as i did those twenty eager years ago.  more so, even.  it’s all i’ve ever really wanted to do, always been my ideal.  i can even picture myself doing it – i can imagine my office, i can imagine what i would wear, i can imagine what i would say.   i know i’d be good at it too, damnit.  if there was ever anything i thought was destined to be in my life, that’s it.

and every day i spend stuck where i am now, is one more day that i’m not working towards making that dream happen.

part of the holdup is that up until now j and i have been dithering about our moving plans – i wanted to hold out for more travelling opportunities first, he wanted to get to canada as soon as possible.   back-and-forth we go about the best approach, who will apply for a visa, how much money we need in the bank, can we take off for another couple months, yadda, yadda, yadda.

it’s the paralysis of indecision, and i’m sinking in it.

so the other day when i realised it had been twenty years, twenty fucking years, since i first knew “what i want to be when i grow up”… well, it occurred to me that maybe it’s actually time to grow up.

enough with the half-assed attempts, enough with always wanting to do just-one-more-thing first, enough with being stuck in the kind of job that makes me jealous of other people’s jobs.  i’ve been casting about for something new to anchor to, a new challenge – and i think i’ve found it.

for twenty years, it’s been there all along.

distopian dream girl – built to spill

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yesterday “jen’s den of iniquity” passed its 6 year anniversary.

the form and function of this little blog have evolved so much since its inception. saying that, this has been a difficult year for me as a blogger – i’ve had more than a passing thought this last year about hanging it all up. small personal blogs like mine feel like they’ve been outmoded in many ways – unless you have a particular theme or tailor your writing for a specific audience (something i’ve steadfastly refused to do – for me it would just feel so artificial), it’s become really hard to build up a following. without concerted effort at self-promotion, the “community” of bloggers seems less organic than it was back in 2004. it’s particularly difficult if you don’t have any kids – so much of blogging seems to revolve around parents these days. that’s no knock on parents who blog … just the reality of who is reading and who is writing. for reasons i can’t quite pinpoint, i seem to have lost a large portion of my viewership this year, and (if i’m honest) spent some time sulking about that.

i spent a few months grappling with the atrophy of readers – it is difficult to feel that you are writing into a void. it’s hard not to take it personally when you spend a lot of effort writing something, only to have it go unnoticed. it makes it terribly difficult to stay motivated. i hate to admit how much even a few words of external validation mean to me. it’s *painful* to feel like you’re the last kid picked for the kickball team. this is not an appeal for anyone’s pity – just a recognition of why it bothered me so much.

but in all my pondering, sulking and mulling, i kept returning to this: it would pain me far more to not write at all. even if i only have an audience of one, writing has become so important to my daily life, so central to my being, that i could never quit it.

it’s become reflexive – i write in my head even when i can’t get to a keyboard. i write in my heart, even when it means nothing to anyone else.

i just can’t seem to quit you, my little den of iniquity.

so even if it’s just you and me and nobody else out there, happy anniversary.

last year – akron/family

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so 2010 didn’t get off to a great start for me. it all began back in 2009, when our boiler decided to cut out a few days before christmas, leaving us without any heat or hot water.

in an old flat with lots of falling-apart single pane windows – we’re talking stand in front of one and feel your hair blowing with the outdoor breezes.

during a 2 week cold snap with average temperatures of 0C (32F).

the thermometer read 12C (53F)… indoors.

thus began a 12 day saga to get the bloody boiler fixed. it included a mad dash for a space heater on Christmas day, waiting around for five plumbers appointments (two no-shows, and two where they didn’t actually even open the boiler) countless irate emails to our landlord, one denied request to stay at a hotel, one registered faux-legalese letter threatening to report it to the local council, and one episode of taking off work in the middle of the day to go home and identify the boiler model number. not to mention countless hours banging on the boiler fruitlessly, countless kettles boiled in order to take a lukewarm bath, countless tears of frustration, and countless hours huddled under blankets shivering.

it was hell. it was pure misery. it ruined my holidays.

finally, blessedly on monday we got our heat and hot water back. even now, two days later, i keep touching the radiators for their reassuring warmth.

imagine my reaction, then, when on New Year’s Day i awoke to an internet outage. which lasted six days. area outage, we were told – every day we would call up and be informed that it was estimated to be fixed by later that day, only to go to bed with the green modem light blinking sadly instead of glowing happily. finally they began telling us they couldn’t estimate when it would be fixed, and we stopped calling. thank god for 3g service – on those overlapping days when i was unshowered, freezing cold and internet-less, my iphone saved my sanity.

and then this morning i woke up to a happy modem light. praise jeebus and pass the beer nuts! there was a hairsbreadth line between me and the men in white jackets.

i may have previously mentioned my white hot hatred of virgin media.

this did not help.

so – not an auspicious start to the new year. but now i’m showered, warm, and fully connected again. it’s got to get better from here on out…right?

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now that it’s officially december, and only 3 short weeks until christmas/my birthday, i like to give those who may need multiple gift ideas for me (read: jonno) a few helpful hints. with that in mind, i present my annual “gimme gimme gimme” list!

tokyomilk “honey and the moon” perfume.

i very rarely fall in love with perfumes this quickly, but i love this – it’s sweet and spicy, and just a little bit complicated. unfortunately it’s only available either shipped internationally, or at the new anthropologie store on regent street. but it’s a steal at about £25

alternatively, fresh “sugar” perfume.

in a word, delicious. this has been on my wishlist for years now, and now there’s an actual fresh store in london!

the crumpler new delhi 230 camera bag

now that i have a camera worth protecting, and extra lenses to lug, i need a new camera bag. but this also wonderfully doubles as a regular messenger bag when you remove the camera pouch! so i can use it as an all in one when i want to bring my camera but also need to stash my wallet/keys/etc, but also not look like a big dork if i use it for other stuff.

a philips wake up light alarm clock

i’ve heard people rave about these for years. in the winter, my sleep gets all kinds of messed up, and prising my eyes open in the pitch-black morning is pure torture. i’ve heard tell that these alarm clocks help wake you up gently over the course of a half hour, and you awake feeling alert. which would be a fine change from my generalised discombobulation.

sonicare toothbrush

i want to upgrade my electric toothbrush. nuff said.

almost forgot! some yoga blocks

i’ve been working on my jump through for a year now, and still can’t manage it with straight legs. so i need some blocks to practice. and hey! cheap present!

and finally at the other end of the spectrum: an imac

i admit it, i want one. my first ever computer was a mac, and since i got my iphone earlier this year, i remembered why i loved them so much. my current computer is already 3 years old, and starting to show signs of wear. however since they start at £900, i have a feeling santa won’t be dropping one down my chimney any time soon.

so there you have it – my greedy little heart, version 2009. truthfully, though, i’d be so happy with just the company of good friends, some good food, and peace and health for all my loved ones.

but if you were on your way out to the apple store, i won’t stop you…

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i’m at that point where i’ve got about 6 or 7 half drafts sitting in the queue – the lonely stepchildren waiting for their deserved attention. the problem being that none of them seem quite worthy – they’re only old thoughts, rehashed, retreads. nothing novel, no diamonds in the rough. i give them a halfhearted pass every once in a while, but they’re just a handful of unpolished pebbles.

things in my life are starting to feel a bit like that as well. nothing new or exciting. the holidays are rolling around again in spite of my protest, and i have a feeble commitment to *do something* about them that resembles celebration and cheer. and i do mean it. sorta.

it’s this horrible sense of blah that gets me every time. give me emotional ups and downs and work and stress and drama and love and despair… but if you want to kill me properly, boring will do the trick. what other people embrace as calm and contentment is pure torture for me. it all makes me feel a bit deadened, numb. which is a problem of my personality, i freely admit (and given a big enough vacuum, will manufacture something myself) – but i just can’t help it. there’s time to be boring when you’re dead – that’s my motto.

but writing about boredom is boring. so i wait. i’m waiting for that next challenge or new glittering thing. waiting for the holidays. waiting for inspiration. waiting for boredom and winter and blahs to end.

i hope i’m not waiting too long.

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i was reading on facebook today about my cousin applying to medical school. and for a split second, i had that stomach-plunging feeling of guilt tinged with shame. only for a split second, but it happened nonetheless. so i shook my head to banish the negative thoughts before they could take root, clicked off the page, and went on with the rest of my evening.

it’s a reflexive reaction, this guilt – the guilt of someone who was always labeled as “gifted”, who was always told how talented and intelligent she was, who was always at the top of the class without even trying… and who has spent the past 20 years doing sweet fuck all.

i remember the first time i was singled out in some way – in the first grade, my teacher took those three of us who could already read and write aside, and gave us the primers for the second grade to begin on. a few years later, i was given an iq test. by the time i got to fourth grade, i was being taken out of class once a week and bussed to an “enrichment programme” to play with computers and work on logic puzzles. by 6th grade the advanced kids were segregated into different classes altogether. by high school, we were being encouraged to take calculus and physics to beef up our scores for a demanding university application. even within in those segregated classes, i was always in the top ten with ease. i applied to two very selective universities, and got into both.

don’t get me wrong – this guilt, this pressure to achieve “great things” has always been completely internally generated. no one ever told me i had to achieve – but with an educational upbringing like that, somewhere the seed that there were *expectations* was planted. to whom much is given, much is expected, after all. so i’ve always had the idea that i was supposed to be a neurosurgeon or human rights lawyer or research scientist – some noble profession that involved academic rigours and long years of selfless sacrifice hunched over in a lab or reading briefs late into the night, but making a notable contribution to the greater good. needless to say, i’ve clearly never pursued those paths. alternatively, i also saw myself perhaps becoming a missionary-type, dedicating my life to helping the poor in underdeveloped countries, leading some important ngo, speaking 4 lanugages and wearing lots of flowing linen and silver jewelery.

yeah, that never quite happened either.

instead, i’ve turned into a middle manager. i live, by all accounts, an ordinary life. i do some interesting things sometimes. i do some boring things a lot of the time. i’m not terribly ambitious about my current career. some of what i do matters to some people – but if i were to die tomorrow, the whole of humanity would not be diminished by my unfinished work. and that’s okay.

i am, by and large, happy. i do things i’ve always wanted to do. my parents and family are proud of me. my friends think i am a good person. it’s all i would ever expect or want for anyone else i know.

yet there are these flashes of doubt. this nagging idea that i have squandered my gifts. every once in a while that internal pressure rises up into my chest and makes me feel guilty for being happy at being ordinary. so when i read about my cousin who is doing research into hiv and preparing for medical school, i can’t help but wonder if i shouldn’t be doing something more than being content with being ordinary.

until i click off the page, pour a glass of wine, settle into the couch with my husband and cat. and spend a few moments in revelling in just how extraordinary being ordinary can be.

ordinary – the alternate routes

I’ve been wasting my days, Good and reckless and true, I have danced in the dark at the edge of the water, Swinging my hips at the black and the blue, When you die will you be surrounded by friends? Will they pray for a heaven out loud, a hope that somehow they will see you again? And at the end of the day, knowing not what it means, Will you stand in the ashes, building a flame for the rest of your dreams? Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? I know its hard but I can’t see you trying, Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? ‘Cause I can’t see you trying now

And I see strangers at war, I see strangers at peace, Still I hang my head in confusion, It’s always been a choice that’s been harder for me, And at the end of the day, knowing not what it means, Will you stand in the ashes, building a flame for the rest of your dreams? Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? I know it’s hard but I can’t see you trying, Would you love, could you love to be ordinary? No I can’t see you trying now

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so: oh my god. i just manually upgraded two wordpress installations in under 15 minutes. (if you run wordpress and haven’t already upgraded to 2.8.4, you need to do it now!)

back when i first started this blog, 5 and a half years ago, very few people had self-hosted wordpress installations. and really? i had no idea what i was doing. i knew from nothing about css or php or mysql. i couldn’t tell a php declaration from a hole in the wall. and every time you upgraded your wordpress installation, you had to do it all manually. so this here, is what i used to go through each and every time. it all *sounds* easy enough. but really, it was a bitch.

the quickest way to start learning css and php and mysql? when upgrading goes horribly wrong.

the blood! the sweat! the tears! oh, the tears.

and so through much trial and error, i would spend hours figuring out what had fucked up. where the files had become corrupted. how to restore from the backup database. etc., etc., etc. it was all very painful, and i began to associate upgrading with the kind of post-traumatic stress usually only seen in shell-shocked veterans. ah, those were the good old days.

praise jeezus, upgrading these days is practically a touch-button process if you have a standard installation. a few weeks ago my friend amity was having trouble upgrading her wordpress, and we managed to do it from a starbucks. it all seemed pretty blase to her, of course. she’s only ever experienced the modern-day wordpress.

but for people like me who, by necessity, learned the ins-and-outs of the wordpress – the admin configs, the template code, the calls and querys of “the loop”, the table indexes – it all seems pretty miraculous. so while i still sat down at the computer this morning with not a small amount of dread, my upgrading fear is truly gone. i had a cup of coffee, upgraded, and sat down to blog about it

hallelujah.

fear and convenience – thao and the get down, stay down

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i just woke to this terribly sad news.

i have always been so proud of the things ted kennedy stood for and fought for over his career. i have always been so fiercely proud to call him my senator.

the world has lost a truly great humanitarian, one of the last great liberals. he made me proud to be a liberal.

i hope that we can continue to carry on his legacy, and succeed in his last great quest: universal healthcare.

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back in april, when the metropolitan weather office was optimistically forecasting a “hot and dry” summer season ahead, i sniggered. in may, when they began warning of a genuine heatwave and recommending people paint their houses white, i laughed. i nearly bust a gut laughing – that info practically became the punchline to the running joke that is british summer. it may take me a while to catch on, but after 6 years here, i’ve finally come to understand its cruel annual tease.

still, in spite of my cynicism, some part of me was kind of hoping it would prove true. sadly, this morning’s news was an all too familiar refrain: august will be wet and cold. as per fucking usual.

so, unsurprisingly, no sun outdoors. luckily, i’ve got my own supply in…

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it’s getting late, and i’m starting to get anxious.  check the clock – 10:00 pm.  too early? the ache in my shoulders and neck tells me it’s not.  my eyelids are beginning to burn with the desire to close.  my ritual ablutions – contact lenses, wash face, brush teeth.  dim the lights and slip between the cool, heavy sheets, head sinking deeply into the pillow.  ahhhh.  i hear street noise outside, and feel a knot starting to form in my stomach.  relax, i tell myself – you’ve lived in noisy places for a long time, you can tune it out.  but my mind begins to click and whir – what if i can’t drop off?  jonno’s still awake – what if he awakens me when he comes to bed? what if i’m awake all night? what if i can’t function tomorrow? what if i have that sick, laggy feeling and can’t be on point for my important meeting? it’s okay, it’s okay – if i can’t fall asleep by 1:00, i’ll take an antihistamine.  concentrate.  relax your toes.  now relax your ankles.  relax your calves.  relax your knees.  relax your knees.  relax your knees.  shit, this isn’t working. *it isn’t working*.  okay, okay, listen to your meditation podcast.  damnit, jonno’s climbing in bed now. why does he always come to bed just as i’m falling asleep?!  don’t worry – just curl up next to him.  listen to his breathing.  slow, deep, steady.  try to breathe in rhythm with his breath.  wow, how can he fall asleep just like that?  the streetlight’s too bright through the window – flip over.  try your eyeshade and earplugs.  whatever you do, don’t look at the clock.  fuck, it’s 1:00.  should i get up and take an antihistamine?  i hate taking it, though, i’m so muzzy-headed the next day.  give it another few minutes.  but all i can hear with these earplugs in is my own hyperaudible pulse and breath.  take them out, it’s quiet now.  drifting, drfiting.  who’s shouting in the street like that?  what’s going on?  gotta check from the window.  just a couple of drunks.  they’re wandering off now, back in bed.  1:40.  stop looking at the clock, you’ve functioned on no sleep before, and you can do it again if you have to.  checking the clock won’t help you sleep.  unfurrow your forehead.  brain, shut the fuck up please, you are not helping.  empty your head.  jeezus – jonno’s got his restless legs tonight.  fantastic – why do i have to sleep next to mr. twitchy??  how am i supposed to sleep when he keeps kicking me?  maybe i should head into the other bedroom.  but then i’ll have to unplug my alarm clock, bring it into the other room and reset it.  just give it a few minutes, i’ve got to fall asleep soon, i’m soooo tired, i’ll fall asleep soon.  oh dear god, cat, i’m going to murderize you – why are you awake at this hour?! oh wow, it’s 4:00, i must have dozed off.  but that cat won’t shut up.  i’ll put him in the other room.  crap, now he’s scratching at the door.  can’t have that.  ohpleaseohpleaseohplease zeke.  please.  pleasegobacktosleepplease.  oh god, i’m getting all worked up – that’s not conducive to sleep.  i’m just so tired i could cry.  i am crying.  it’s 5 am and i’m crying.  fuck!!!!  why is jonno’s alarm going off?!?!?!  he doesn’t even get up until 7, why does he set it for 5:30!!??!! i’m going to throw that stupid thing out the window, i swear to god, i’ve asked him a million times not to set it for 5:30.  he doesn’t even wake up! i wake up and have to wake him up to turn it off!! okay, quiet, if you just relax you can get another 45 minutes.  great, the cat heard the alarm go off, thinks he’s getting fed now.  maybe if i feed him now, *just this once*, i can get a few more minutes.  oh that will never work, he’ll just wake me up early every morning to get fed.  don’t give in. don’t give in.  also, don’t kill the cat.  also, don’t kill the husband.  god it’s bright in here already.  pillow over head.  tomorrow night will be better, as long as you don’t get all wound up.   you get too anxious.  just rest your eyes, quiet your thoughts.

alarm. 6:15.

shit.

i’m so tired – the beatles

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the reason i’ve been so quiet this week?  i got an iphone.

i know that i’ve prattled on about this to friends already, but this device is the new love of my life.  for someone as addicted to being connected as i am (and i have been a heavy addict since 1994), this is either my salvation or downfall.  probably both.

i’ve already had two people threaten to do bad things to my precious iphone, should i ever whip it out in their presence.  and i can’t say i blame them.  i apologise in advance if i become an iphone twat – one of those people who rudely text/tweet/surf while mid-conversation, or sit in the corner at parties streaming videos, or who only want to talk about the newest apps.  i don’t want to be one of those people.  really, i don’t.

i fear, though, that it may be inevitable.  i am thoroughly entranced.  taking it out gives me a little shiver of thrill every time, while i think to myself, “ah… this is 21st century living.” yesterday alone, i sent a voice message to sing “happy birthday”, read the new york times on the way to work, listened to a live stream of my favourite boston radio station while trying to write a report in my open-plan office, checked facebook and email and my diary between meetings, checked the tube service and played a quick game of pac man on my journey home from work, got a reminder to buy sugar on my way past the shop.  in the past few days, i’ve watched read books on it (jonno appreciates i no longer leave the light on to read at night), tracked my run route via gps, watched a red sox game from bed, and emailed a video of my cat.  it does everything but brush my teeth.

and so my advance apology is only half-hearted, at best.  so far, i am happiest around other friends who are also iphone twats – we’ve been known to sit together in the pub, geekily tap-tap-tapping along simultaneously, oblivious to what others would perceive as the height of rudeness.  and i was never prouder than last night when i could whip out my phone to correctly predict the last tube departure, ensuring we all made it home.

i’m sure the novelty will wear off eventually – but it might be a while.

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so much to say – about iran, about rape in south africa, about the vagaries of life.

but for now, it will have to wait.  i’m off for a 5 day boston blitz holiday with my friend suzanne.  we’re storming boston, cape cod, and martha’s vineyard.  a date at fenway park is in there somewhere too.  the weather forecast is none too promising at the moment, but i’m ignoring that in favour of blind optimism.

til then, ciao ciao!

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as the clock hands stretch past midnight, the house becomes still – just the soft creaking sounds of an old house settling to keep me company.  and as i relax into the darkness, a quiet contentment steals up on me.  after a hard day’s work, i look around to see my books placed on shelves, my photos hung on the wall, furniture that i’ve selected arranged just so.  it’s been so long since i bought anything of solidity, or was able to arrange the few possessions i had.

for the first time in a long time, i feel comfortable.  plain as it is, this home finally reflects something of me – i’ve been so self-contained for the past 6 years, owning not a single extraneous piece of paper, or mote of dust, always paring down to the bare minimum.  but finally i have a space to fill up as i like, and as i sit here revelling in it, the sense of *release* washes over me, catching me off guard, stinging my eyes.

during the luscious hours of sunshine today, i spent some time digging in the dirt.  i’ve been working on rehabilitating the neglected garden, and there was just one task remaining – uprooting a weed that had been so long-entrenched  it had grown into a small tree.  i sweated and pulled and yanked that sucker out, all the way down to the rootball.  it finally came free with a massive heave, leaving a satisfying blank slate for the new plants i’d bought at the garden centre.

i hadn’t wanted this move after all – it was jonno’s idea, jonno’s initiative.  i was loathe to uproot.  but as difficult as all the upheaval has been, i am so grateful for this fresh start.  a blank slate to create a place of my own – and i had no idea just how much i needed it.

jonatha brooke – your house

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this is the before picture:

people who’ve known me for a while will have heard the story of “the day jen decided to start gardening”. shortly after i’d moved back to boston, i found myself unemployed, up early one morning with nothing to do and contemplating my new back yard. having my own back yard was a novelty to me, having just come from 8 years spent in a shoebox of a new york apartment – i finally had an overgrown patch of earth to call my own. and by “overgrown”, i really mean junglefied. it had been sorely neglected for many years; while there was a corner of the yard that had evidence of once being a garden, there were large thickets of bamboo grass, unruly grapevines with an invasive stranglehold, and stands of weeds higher than my head. and so, as i stood there on the back porch with my coffee one unseasonably warm spring morning, surveying my newfound expanse of land and overlooking the overgrowth, i thought i’d start taking out just a few of the biggest weeds. wandering in wearing my pyjamas and slippers, i grabbed hold and started pulling. after a few short minutes, i came across a weed i’d never encountered before – it had tuberous roots, thick as fingers, that went straight down deep into the ground like underground cables. trying to pull only resulted in the roots breaking off beneath the surface, a definite no-no if you want to eradicate weeds. i had no proper gardening implements, but looking around i found a big stick… and started digging to china.

i spent 10 straight hours that day, digging up weeds, lopping back branches, and sifting through soil. i spent the entire day in the blazing sun up to my eyeballs in dirt, and by the time dusk fell, my shoulders were knotted, my face burnt, my pyjamas ruined. but i had transformed that wildly tangled eyesore into a square of beautifully groomed and prepared soil, with nothing but my stick and brute force. it was (and remains) one of the most satisfying things i’ve ever undertaken.

that summer, my garden became my oasis. i planted vegetables, flowers and herbs – i still remember the layout, where the snapdragons and sunflowers were staked along the fence, the thick bumper crops of basil and tomatoes that i gave away to friends and neighbours in brown paper bags, the exuberant orange daylilies that edged the perimeter. on my way home from work in the afternoons, i’d stop off for a six pack of sam adams and a newspaper. let the dog out to roll around on the lawn, set up the armchair in the sun, turn on the radio, and read the paper while nursing my beer and listening to music backed by the soft chug-chug-chug of the sprinkler. i tenderly nurtured those small green shoots, watched with pride as they grew bigger and stronger, and silently mourned as the blooms faded and fell. years after i’d long-since moved from that apartment, i’d find myself wondering if new tenants had kept it up, or even noticed the care and attention i’d invested for so long.

this is my second garden, and while it doesn’t hold a candle to the size of my first, i found myself out in my pyjamas last saturday, hacking away with a small pair of pruners and pulling down giant swathes of creeper. lots more work to do, but it’s a start:

parlour steps – the garden

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so after two long and painful weeks, i am back online.  i also now hate virgin media with the intensity of a thousand suns, but that’s another story.

how’s everything been going in the interim?  well the move has turned into one of the worst-planned-and-executed operations since napoleon’s waterloo.  however we’re now fully here, sans sofa and a few other essential items.  up until a few days ago, the place was chaos – thanks to the determined efforts of j, it is now a slightly more refined chaos. here’s a peek.

the kitchen:

the lounge (and air mattress we’re sitting on in lieu of a couch)

the hideous orange hallway (why??!)

the peculiar toilet/utility room (i *hate* when they do stuff like this, in a effort to appeal to sharers)

the spare bedroom, cute husband (and icky drapes)

the “master” bedroom with soon-to-be-replaced velvet curtains

the bathroom

the decked patio

the in-need-of-overhaul garden

still needs a lot of work and cleaning.

i’m absolutely run down, falling apart at the seams exhausted.  in addition to the move and between-two-apartments limbo, i’ve been working like crazy (late even! and i never stay late!), and running like mad.  i’m now rather worried, as i’m suffering some sort of painful hip muscle strain and pretty sure i’ve got a stress fracture happening in my foot (which i’m ignoring).  only 2 weeks until the marathon, and i’d be devastated if i couldn’t finish it, so i’m stressing – trying to rest *and* maintain my conditioning.  i just feel run into the ground, like a could take a long nap at any given point during the day.

so i’ve been coming home late, running, eating and falling into bed.  then last weekend, a girls weekend in brighton with my heavily pregnant friend tonia…

and j’s birthday on the sunday…

… the sunday which also happened to be mother’s day in the u.s., and which i missed.  guilt.  also, a sad indicator of how reliant i am on those little email pop-up reminders and other internet-based cues, none of which i had access to. also a strong indicator of how very fried i’ve been.  so happy belated to my mum and my two sisters (one of which is due with her second little boy quite soon!) and my stepmom  i’m so sorry i missed telling you what fantastic mothers you’ve been, and how much i love you all.

so that’s what’s been up with me… what’s been up with all of you?

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just to say

a) we’re sort-of kind-of moved, and it was awful

b) in the 21st century it apparently still takes 2 frikken weeks to get internet set up (where are my flying cars?)

c) i’m going through serious connectivity withdrawals (what’s this strange shaking?)

d) i’m really liking our new place and can’t wait to regale you with photos and ikea stories

i miss you my darlings!  til then, big kisses.

***mwah!***

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life is pretty crazy at the moment.  i’m acting up into my boss’s position – which means i’m suddenly managing a whole team with year-end deadlines to meet this week.  we’re moving this weekend – with no boxes, no preparation, and no time to pack.  oh, and in between all that, i’m in the last big weeks of my marathon training, with a 20 mile run scheduled for saturday.

so, the past two weeks i’ve been working late, coming home, going running for an hour or two, trying to pack, then falling into bed.  fun.

it’s madness, and i’m knackered – physically and mentally worn *out*.  in between, i’m feeling stressed, excited and melancholy all at once.

so: if all goes well, you may hear from me on monday.

if not, send out a search party.

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cherry blossoms always remind me of you.

we walked along the common, dusk rising up around us, the deep rose purple bruising the early evening sky, the soft light of gas lamps gentling the darkness.  it had been an unseasonably warm spring day, and as we walked beneath the bower of budding branches that stretched the length of the avenue, a breeze stirred a wild blizzard of petals to shower down, enveloping us, glowing against the dark, the scented confetti adorning our hair, swirling and eddying around our feet.

it was a perfect, enchanted moment, like a scene from a movie, or perhaps a wedding.  we smiled at each other in the twilight, and i nearly reached for your hand.

air – cherry blossom girl

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i must really love my husband, because i really hate flat hunting.  the hours spent sifting through thousands of internet ads, all either slick with deception (a stylish two bedroom cottage house with delightful private rear garden – great location, ideal for a professional couple!) or full of crazy.

like crazy ideas of geography. for the record: streatham is not tooting.  mitcham is not tooting.  stockwell? sorry, not tooting.

or crazy ideas of distance.  being nearly 1.5 miles from the tube station is *not* “moments away”.  nor is it “conveniently located”.

or crazy photos.  is this supposed to make me want to rent your “delightful 2 double bedroom flat in great condition, spacious and modern”?  really??!??

how about this “great size double bedroom”??

and this is supposed to show… “heaps of character”?

this is the only photo of a “2 bedroom garden flat”.  enticing, no?

this estate agent was a particularly talented photographer.  god only knows what these photos are supposed to be featuring.  someone actually waited for these to upload.

and this piece de resistance is a “stunning luxury flat”

i don’t know about you, but i’m sure stunned.

so there’s the deception and the crazy, but also the disappointment.  asking to view a particular advertised flat, but the estate agent taking you to see one you’ll “like better”… at £200 over your max budget.  getting excited about one place that ticks all the boxes and thinking you’ve secured it, only to find out there was a miscommunication and another couple had already put down a deposit.  taking a sunday afternoon off to see a place that looks lovely in the photos, but cheerless, dingy and dark in real life.

i know we’ll find a place eventually.  but it’s just such a thoroughly depressing cycle of expectation and disillusionment.  this is why i hate flat hunting.

i swear – we are never moving again.

ben kweller – my apartment

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