Archive for Friends and other nice people
Imitating life and art.
So around the time I was asked the question below, I was (briefly) living it. A very desirable and pleasingly feasible third party rocked up and stuck around for five days, half of which while the Boy was out of town, the rest after the Boy returned.
(Perhaps I should come up with some fun but non-identifying handles for people, but the reason J and I used our own names at swingers parties wasn’t to make a bold lifestyle statement, it was just paucity of imagination. So Boy = J, other boy = old friend.)
Synchronous linkhronous
One of the questions in the post below merges into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few days. Handy.
How desirable/feasible is a stable multi-way relationship?
At least I don’t seem to have insomnia anymore
Ack, sleep gone very weird. Only had one proper lucid dream in the past four months but last week I had an odd two days of something like anti-lucid dreaming – knowing I was awake (sensing the bed, hearing the room around me) but not being able to control the free-flow of my thoughts, resulting in something very dreamlike.
Be the change… yada, yada… Ghandi… yawn
Life has been disrupted by work training and pitches recently, adding to the displaced feeling.
Yesterday, besides getting some thoughts on paper, for the first time in three weeks I was able to:
• Get up and do weights
• Have porridge instead of hot dogs for breakfast! (At least the training included food)
• Go out and get fresh fruit and salad for lunch
• Leave work by 7pm
• Catch up on emails
• Have a healthy dinner
I also drank more than half a bottle of wine, which usually guarantees I’ll feel depressed the next morning. Yet today I woke up without the dread, fretfulness or sinking feeling that have grown to herald in each new day.
Positive mental attitude, self-fulfilling prophesy, extra vitamins? I don’t know, but it feels good.
Displaced
I’m having trouble wrapping words around my thoughts, which means I’m not sure I understand what I feel.
In simple terms, it’s half homesickness, half performance anxiety. The more I pull at those ideas though, the more they unravel.
Every expatriate I know says that months three to six are pretty hard. Quite a few of them talked about randomly bursting into tears. I haven’t been doing that, but I did sob all the way through The Book Thief, which is perhaps equivalent.
I haven’t been feeling depressed or manic, or any of the things I know how to identify. Just bemused resignation. “This is my life now.”
I am beset by overly romantic memories of London and the occasional, “Why would I give that up?” but I still want to know the world, even if doing so takes me away from people and places I love.
So, pretty confused on that front.
But come what may, we’re here until March. And fuck knows what the next 10 months will bring. When I think of my first six months out of uni, or the first six months in my last job, it’s hard to believe those times segued into the ones that followed, so different were they.
I am impatient though, even if I am better equipped to deal with change (or waiting for change) than I have been before.
Work has been a strange merry-go-round these past months. In brief, got job, hated job, temporarily lost mind, got new job, got counter-offer from old job, moved from Health to Creative.
This is perfect because it’s a great agency and ‘proper’ creative is what I really, really want to be doing.
But it is terrifying because it’s a great agency and ‘proper’ creative is what I really, really want to be doing.
What if I’m no good? I have more than two years’ experience, so I am expected to know my stuff, but I came from a small agency that didn’t focus much on teaching so I don’t feel like I measure up to the creatives here.
I know the whole point is that I’ll learn and get better, but now I have the opportunity I’ve been waiting for, I’m scared of finding out that I’m not as good in real life as I’ve imagined being.
It’s another part of growing up I guess. Watching our imagined lives stumble and get left behind as we embrace the median.
I haven’t accepted an imaginary Nobel prize since I was 17. Maybe I’ll be ok.
You could have it all
Had a really sad dream this morning.
Started with my old art director making a video that included a clip of mitosis taking place, then he animated the whole thing in jagged black and red (I think in a kind of rotoscope fashion).
I was with my mum and sister in a long room, showing the animation to them and my first boyfriend (see post below), who was a decent artist (irl).
In the dream I was conscious of the real life time that had passed since I last saw first boyfriend, and we fell to reminiscing – looking at old photos and sharing stories.
We walked away from my mum and sister and ended up in the garden of my second house (first boyfriend never went there irl).
The garden had an abandoned air but was far more beautiful than it had been before. There were large holly bushes, huge peonies, banks of wild strawberries and tall hollyhocks.
They were all leggy and overgrown, but that somehow added to their charm, as if they had rightly claimed the garden back since I’d lived there.
I was still reminiscing with first boyfirend, and mentioned that the garden was just as beautiful as I remembered, even though I knew that much as I wanted this to be true, it wasn’t and therefore the garden wasn’t real.
I woke really incredibly sad and reluctant to leave the dream behind, and have been humming the words from Hurt ever since.
Possibly revealing post script: old art director is the only guy I’ve had a really important relationship with that hasn’t been based around sex or the promise of sex. First boyfriend is the only important sex realtionship guy that I don’t have much contact with.
Unrelated (but is it really?) post script: about a week ago I wrote a post called ‘Fuck Prudence’. It’s still in my draft folder. I’m so lame.
I bet I think this song is about me.
And then there were two
Non-monogamy is not just about sex. Love plays a big part as well.
It’s easy to love more than one person – ask anyone with kids. It’s also easy to love your friends. Once you start sleeping with the friends you already love, things do get a little tangled.
2009
What better way to start the new year than finding yourself at 0630 in the local cop shop, saucer-eyed and gurning, trying to explain that the police have requisitioned access to your building. Try even saying requisitioned with that many drugs inside you.
It turns out there was a fire. Until 0005 on 01.01.09, there was a launderette on the ground floor. Now there is just a big hole and a lot of soot.
It’s a great testament to Edwardian architecture that the rest of the building is still structurally sound, and fortunately the place was empty so no one was hurt.
But there is smoke damage, water damage and post hoc structural damage (where the fire brigade gained entry to each floor).
There is also no power – the meters are melted to a wall somewhere. It’s likely to stay that way for at least a week (a third of the days we have left in the UK) so I can’t see us letting the place anytime soon.
Happy new year!
