making the most of the daylight
I've started this entry four different ways now, and deleted all of them in turn. I don't really know if a segue exists that could smoothly transition from five months of silence to new words, but whether those words exist or not, I definitely can't find them.
For a start: hi. I'm alive, and all in one piece still. I read my flist every single day, and make happy faces and gleeful noises and clappy-hands and negative D-faces and hearthands at the screen over all of your lives, and then utterly, completely fail to comment to any of you and tell you so. It's like I've forgotten how to do anything but lurk, all over again. It was always my natural fannish state, but now I'm even doing it with my friends. I want to try to fix this, but I've definitely said that before and not done it. Fail, etc.
It's been tough to post lately. Therapy is going well, and really starting to take hold in some aspects of my life, but then I come to Livejournal and think about posting and my first thought is always, "Oh, no, but I don't have anything happy to say, so I just won't say anything." Like you guys can't handle me if I admit that I'm sad and anxious and trying to cope with those things. It's the exact same wrongthinking thing I'm trying to counter in all of my meatspace relationships, so I'm going to do my best to work past it on here too. Can't say I'll always succeed, but I can say I'm going to stop giving myself so much shit about it that I can't even look at my own blog for guilt. I feel like that's less than helpful.
A quick-and-dirty catch up on the last five months, most of which you will already know if you follow me on Twitter: I was working at a temp agency when I last posted here, in a job that was meant to be permanent. It turned out... not to be. That was for the best, as the job was NOT well suited to me and I was ill suited to the job, and trying to make it work was making me very unhappy. Them being a temp agency, they managed to turn around and immediately offer me a temporary role at a charity in Shoreditch, just a two week holiday cover. I took that starting at the end of July, and somehow managed to continue to work there right up until the beginning of November. It was not a completely ideal job, but I liked the location and the work played to my strengths, so it's a shame that it's finally finished.
I may have an interview for a copywriter position at the same charity, which would be way closer to the sort of job I want right now. If anyone's got spare fingers, I wouldn't say no to you crossing them for me.
miznarrator and I moved house in July, from our ridiculously oversized flat on the high street with its crazy expensive electric bills and constant noise to a small flat on a quieter road, still in the same general neighbourhood. It's been a bit of a struggle ever since to manage our household and our expectations about how much space we actually have (none) and how much stuff we own (way too much), but the flat is finally looking like more of a home than a storage unit these days. It's the first time Nancy and I have really lived together, by ourselves, just the two of us and the cat, and though I still yell about crumbs on the kitchen counter and she still yells about why stuff gets shoved into whatever drawer is nearest rather than actually put away in its proper place, it's all going more or less splendidly. It helps that we're pretty stupidly in love, I think.
Right after we moved, riots and looting broke out all over London. I walked home from work down our high street - on which we were living only a few weeks prior - right before our local branch of the looting started, and it was a chilling experience. Shops all closed and shuttered, groups of young-ish men on every street corner, clearly poised and ready for mayhem, waiting for some kind of subliminal signal. I had an instinctive hind-brain reaction I've never experienced before, a fight-or-flight-but-mostly-flight adrenaline rush, that carried me through until long after I got home safely that night.
Not long after the looting died down in an onslaught of heightened police presence (not much better on the old nerves, actually) me and Nancy and katie__pillar and klo_the_hobbit went camping in Cornwall. We had a week of sun and sand and sea and beer and chips and making tea on the camp stove and reading books and walking and more sea, and it was lovely.
In between getting back from Cornwall and now, I started a composition seminar at the local continuing ed college, which has been really fun even though it's not at all the kind of music I want to be writing. I decided to write in NaNoWriMo, and even though I'm so woefully behind there's no hope of winning I'm really enjoying having an excuse to write fiction, and I'm feeling encouraged and confident that I will continue to write after November's up. I've even started writing fic, really and truly writing actual fanfiction that I actually intend to post, so that's an exciting development; both are stories in the Avengers movieverse, because I have been reading all of the Steve Rogers/Tony Stark on the internet and it's ~inspiring. I am still playing with my crazy contemporary orchestra, which took a field trip to Maastricht in the Netherlands last weekend to play at a conference regarding amateur contemporary musicians. It was a super fun weekend, full of good friends and very very good beer.
My grandmother (who, most of you know, lives in London and is one of my favourite people in the world) fell over a few weeks ago and broke her wrist pretty badly. I was the first person whose mobile number the nurses found in her address book once she was brought to the hospital, so I got the call from her, all shaken up and in pain. It sucked beyond the telling of it, but she's recovering wonderfully now - she broke her non-dominant wrist so she can still manage a lot on her own, and her confidence is slowly coming back too. I'm glad that I got the call first, though, because my family has a bad habit of trying to protect one another from bad news that I'm single-handedly trying to break us of, and my getting the opportunity to quickly disseminate information about my gran was a big step forward.
There was an open call for volunteers to be part of the mass-movement bits of the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies a while back. I got called in for an audition last week and it was a complete blast from start to finish. Like a xoomba class for 200 people, taught in an aircraft hanger by a hip hop-dancing group of motivational speakers. I basically had all of the fun, total trainwreck of a dancer that I am, and walked out ready to find a dance class or several to get a regular fix of the crazy endorphin rush. And then I got a callback email! So the day I arrive back in London, I have to immediately zoom across town to the same studio for a "role-specific" audition. You guys, it would be so freaking cool to be in the Olympics. SO COOL. Dream-come-true levels of cool. I would, once again, appreciate any crossed fingers aimed in my direction.
And for anyone who clocked the bit about "arriving back in London" in the last paragraph, I am in San Diego for the next week visiting my parents. I had my parents book this trip for me in the middle of a really nasty depressive swing, when all I wanted to do was crawl under a rock and have my mum bring me cookies. This was, I think we can agree, not the best time to be making decisions. Still, at least I'm not missing work, being currently unemployed (again .___.), and at least I get to see my parents before Christmas and hang out with my SoCal friends and bask in the sun a little bit before winter sets in. Even though I can't afford it, I'm glad to be here.
And now, I'm going to go get a very late brunch with my parents and have a walk by the sea. It is bright and cloudless outside, and I am going to store the sunshine in my bones for the winter ahead. I am not better yet, not grown-up or stable or okay, but I am getting there, carried forward on my own two feet. Thank you all, now and forever and always, for continuing to make the journey worthwhile.
♥
For a start: hi. I'm alive, and all in one piece still. I read my flist every single day, and make happy faces and gleeful noises and clappy-hands and negative D-faces and hearthands at the screen over all of your lives, and then utterly, completely fail to comment to any of you and tell you so. It's like I've forgotten how to do anything but lurk, all over again. It was always my natural fannish state, but now I'm even doing it with my friends. I want to try to fix this, but I've definitely said that before and not done it. Fail, etc.
It's been tough to post lately. Therapy is going well, and really starting to take hold in some aspects of my life, but then I come to Livejournal and think about posting and my first thought is always, "Oh, no, but I don't have anything happy to say, so I just won't say anything." Like you guys can't handle me if I admit that I'm sad and anxious and trying to cope with those things. It's the exact same wrongthinking thing I'm trying to counter in all of my meatspace relationships, so I'm going to do my best to work past it on here too. Can't say I'll always succeed, but I can say I'm going to stop giving myself so much shit about it that I can't even look at my own blog for guilt. I feel like that's less than helpful.
A quick-and-dirty catch up on the last five months, most of which you will already know if you follow me on Twitter: I was working at a temp agency when I last posted here, in a job that was meant to be permanent. It turned out... not to be. That was for the best, as the job was NOT well suited to me and I was ill suited to the job, and trying to make it work was making me very unhappy. Them being a temp agency, they managed to turn around and immediately offer me a temporary role at a charity in Shoreditch, just a two week holiday cover. I took that starting at the end of July, and somehow managed to continue to work there right up until the beginning of November. It was not a completely ideal job, but I liked the location and the work played to my strengths, so it's a shame that it's finally finished.
I may have an interview for a copywriter position at the same charity, which would be way closer to the sort of job I want right now. If anyone's got spare fingers, I wouldn't say no to you crossing them for me.
miznarrator and I moved house in July, from our ridiculously oversized flat on the high street with its crazy expensive electric bills and constant noise to a small flat on a quieter road, still in the same general neighbourhood. It's been a bit of a struggle ever since to manage our household and our expectations about how much space we actually have (none) and how much stuff we own (way too much), but the flat is finally looking like more of a home than a storage unit these days. It's the first time Nancy and I have really lived together, by ourselves, just the two of us and the cat, and though I still yell about crumbs on the kitchen counter and she still yells about why stuff gets shoved into whatever drawer is nearest rather than actually put away in its proper place, it's all going more or less splendidly. It helps that we're pretty stupidly in love, I think.
Right after we moved, riots and looting broke out all over London. I walked home from work down our high street - on which we were living only a few weeks prior - right before our local branch of the looting started, and it was a chilling experience. Shops all closed and shuttered, groups of young-ish men on every street corner, clearly poised and ready for mayhem, waiting for some kind of subliminal signal. I had an instinctive hind-brain reaction I've never experienced before, a fight-or-flight-but-mostly-flight adrenaline rush, that carried me through until long after I got home safely that night.
Not long after the looting died down in an onslaught of heightened police presence (not much better on the old nerves, actually) me and Nancy and katie__pillar and klo_the_hobbit went camping in Cornwall. We had a week of sun and sand and sea and beer and chips and making tea on the camp stove and reading books and walking and more sea, and it was lovely.
In between getting back from Cornwall and now, I started a composition seminar at the local continuing ed college, which has been really fun even though it's not at all the kind of music I want to be writing. I decided to write in NaNoWriMo, and even though I'm so woefully behind there's no hope of winning I'm really enjoying having an excuse to write fiction, and I'm feeling encouraged and confident that I will continue to write after November's up. I've even started writing fic, really and truly writing actual fanfiction that I actually intend to post, so that's an exciting development; both are stories in the Avengers movieverse, because I have been reading all of the Steve Rogers/Tony Stark on the internet and it's ~inspiring. I am still playing with my crazy contemporary orchestra, which took a field trip to Maastricht in the Netherlands last weekend to play at a conference regarding amateur contemporary musicians. It was a super fun weekend, full of good friends and very very good beer.
My grandmother (who, most of you know, lives in London and is one of my favourite people in the world) fell over a few weeks ago and broke her wrist pretty badly. I was the first person whose mobile number the nurses found in her address book once she was brought to the hospital, so I got the call from her, all shaken up and in pain. It sucked beyond the telling of it, but she's recovering wonderfully now - she broke her non-dominant wrist so she can still manage a lot on her own, and her confidence is slowly coming back too. I'm glad that I got the call first, though, because my family has a bad habit of trying to protect one another from bad news that I'm single-handedly trying to break us of, and my getting the opportunity to quickly disseminate information about my gran was a big step forward.
There was an open call for volunteers to be part of the mass-movement bits of the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies a while back. I got called in for an audition last week and it was a complete blast from start to finish. Like a xoomba class for 200 people, taught in an aircraft hanger by a hip hop-dancing group of motivational speakers. I basically had all of the fun, total trainwreck of a dancer that I am, and walked out ready to find a dance class or several to get a regular fix of the crazy endorphin rush. And then I got a callback email! So the day I arrive back in London, I have to immediately zoom across town to the same studio for a "role-specific" audition. You guys, it would be so freaking cool to be in the Olympics. SO COOL. Dream-come-true levels of cool. I would, once again, appreciate any crossed fingers aimed in my direction.
And for anyone who clocked the bit about "arriving back in London" in the last paragraph, I am in San Diego for the next week visiting my parents. I had my parents book this trip for me in the middle of a really nasty depressive swing, when all I wanted to do was crawl under a rock and have my mum bring me cookies. This was, I think we can agree, not the best time to be making decisions. Still, at least I'm not missing work, being currently unemployed (again .___.), and at least I get to see my parents before Christmas and hang out with my SoCal friends and bask in the sun a little bit before winter sets in. Even though I can't afford it, I'm glad to be here.
And now, I'm going to go get a very late brunch with my parents and have a walk by the sea. It is bright and cloudless outside, and I am going to store the sunshine in my bones for the winter ahead. I am not better yet, not grown-up or stable or okay, but I am getting there, carried forward on my own two feet. Thank you all, now and forever and always, for continuing to make the journey worthwhile.
♥