Category
Reflections
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12.19.02Why are we waiting?I hate waiting. I'm really bad at it. See, I'm impatient at the best of times, and P frequently accuses me of wanting everything at once. It's true. Despite my previous assertion that I measure out life in doses of delayed gratification, the truth is that that's fine as long as I'm the one delaying it. Making myself wait, fine. Other people making me wait, very unfine indeed. If someone says they'll pop over this afternoon sometime, I'm completely stuck. Since they might arrive and interrupt me at any time, it's difficult to start anything properly - you can't embark on ...
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12.16.02Say CheeseI saw a photo the other day in which I was snapped while on the phone to my sister. My eyes are closed, and I am gesticulating. Caught in mid speech, I look scarily like my mother. My mum cannot have her picture taken without talking, or waving her arms about. I think it's a nerves thing. As soon as you point a camera in her direction, she starts speaking and gesticulating, saying, "oh, what do you want me to do?" or "ok, I'm waiting," or "oh no, I feel silly, just hurry up and take it." Consequently, in every photo ...
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12.16.02Missing the ReunionA little over 7,700km away from where I sit writing this, a hundred people are gathering under tall trees for my college ten year reunion. I am not there. It's weird. Ten years ago (well, twelve if we include the years at PC) each of us at college reserved a little chunk of mind space for wondering what we'd be doing by the time the ten year reunion swung around - we knew about it even when we were attending, and we relished the thought of such a distant, exotic future point. The Ten Year Reunion. It morphed into this gigantic, intangible ...
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12.16.02Piecing Together a LifeIn our old house, we used to get a lot of letters addressed to J Whelan (dcsd). We managed to deduce (by sifting through a box of her posessions left in the cupboard of our old house) that she had been a former tenant who had had an affair with a married professor, travelled to south-east asia, worked as a teacher, possibly came from Ireland, set up a company (the company chequebook was in the box, with only one cheque removed) and then emigrated to Australia. Where she presumably died.We don't know what she left in her will, or to ...
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12.16.02No ParkingI love this story: Woman, 62, carved swear words on cars. Basically, a pensioner was arrested recently, on suspicion of carving the F-Word (incidentally, I love it when the police and teachers and other people of institutional authority refer to 'four letter words' - like 'neck' and 'tone' and 'home' and 'bowl' presumably. God, we're so fucking prudish sometimes) on cars in her neighbourhood in Caldicot, Gwent. Police had spent six months searching for the vandal - they'd automatically assumed it was a juvenile delinquent, and were shocked to discover strong evidence pointing to the OAP.I love this story because ...
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12.16.02On NosesMy nose is the first bit of me to get cold. It's like a personal thermometer. (Before you ask, it doesn't look like one. It's not long, thin and with a curious red bulb on the end. Well, except when I drink excessively, but then whose isn't?) Even when the rest of me is toasty warm, the tip of my nose is sensitive enough to detect a tiny drop in temperature, and I know that if my nose is cold, the rest of me will soon follow.Noses. Curious things, really. I used to obsess over mine - not because it ...
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10.20.02Prolonged PleasureI think I've got the wrong attitude about going to the gym. I mean, I enjoy it, and I make an effort to go regularly, and I do feel like it's worthwhile, but there's a fundamental problem with the way I think about it.See, most of my gym-going friends say things like:"Oh no, I shouldn't have a biscuit because I've done all that work at the gym"...meaning that it'll undo all their hard work. I, on the other hand, find myself saying things like:"I can have a biscuit because I've done all that hard work at the gym"They're goal-based - ...
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09.26.02Yankee Doodle Dandy?I dreamt last night that I was American. That was it, the majority of the dream. Just me, being american. I'm not.While I can sum up some vague notion of americana and what it might be like to belong to a place, based on visits and books and movies, the spacious clapboard house with a porch, kitchen with an island and gigantic fridge, experience of high school and dorm-sharing in college, dependenace on car, feeling of belonging to something enormous and dirty and out of control, plus weekly trips to a store to buy household goods in a squared-bottomed paper ...
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09.12.02Recent photo"It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness" -- Chinese proverb.I wanted to send my mum a picture of a candle, and I'm pleased with the way this one came out. It seems so warm, against the blackness around it.I first heard that proverb from a good friend of my parents, my godmother Janet, who died after a long, complicated battle with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma last year. She wasn't a sufferer or a victim. She spent her entire life being outspoken, passionate, opinionated and difficult. She challenged those around her constantly, and I had such enormous respect ...
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09.11.02RememberingIt's strange to realise that you remember where you were and what you were doing a year ago, to the precise minute. We can usually remember vague weeks of holidays or happenings, prompted by the seasons, the flow of days. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, can all be pinpointed to dates, but ones full of joy, without timed moments that we are aware of.If you asked me what I was doing at lunchtime two years ago on this day, I couldn't tell you, though my archives reliably inform me that I was pondering over what we do with all the time we ...
recent posts
- When You Say Nothing At All
- Packing for a journey
- Sociable Media
- Office Temperature Watch
- Historical Artifact
- Flying Ant Day 2008
- Breaking the news
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