Tlönista

…I’ve been waiting ages to use that one. Yeah. Employment: sorted. Now I’m going to go eat, and buy myself a summery skirt or a dress or something to celebrate.

I’ve got a new place, a room in a council flat out in the East End. The sky is dominated by the glittering towers of Canary Wharf and the stark Hawksmoorean bulk of St Anne’s Limehouse. The water’s edge is never far away, whether it’s a sleepy canal bordered by long-neglected towpaths or the swank bar patios of West India Quay. It reminds me of Harbourfront. I feel very much at home.

My roommates are an Irish couple and an Australian girl, all around my age, primarily concerned with scraping by, going out, and saving up to travel. There is a miniscule balcony which is half taken up with a barbecue, a basket of scraggly red geraniums, and a pigeon’s nest with one egg in it. They’ve named the pigeon Pepper.

I took my last week off work. I can’t seem to get through a week without Crashing – that is, a bout of depression. I am supposed to be finding a new job but lately I find it enough of a challenge to get out of bed and get moving in the morning. I sink into a cold drowsy torpor and can’t get anything done. I am hard on myself for not getting it together, but Ben says to work on the little things first. On Monday it took me an hour to wake up, walk across the street to the convenience store, and buy bread. But yesterday I went to the Jobcentre and printed out listings, and got out to the Asda to stock the cupboard and buy a few things to liven up my room: candleholders, a lamp. This morning I slept in for hours, but surprised myself by making a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, and cottage cheese. It felt as if it took no effort at all.

The chestnut trees are starting to bloom. I think longingly of L., the girl back in Forest Hill. I want to see her again but shouldn’t I wait till I’m at least decently functional? It’s been weeks, surely she’d have gotten in touch if she’d wanted to see me. Oh, fuck it…

Slowly, slowly, a bit at a time. One of my problems is that I’m so damned impatient, when things end up happening in their own good time anyway.

I am sick in just about every way a person could be sick: dehydrated, starving hungry, all wonky because I went into coma-like nap yesterday and missed a dose of Life-Giving Antidepressants, and oh yeah, still with Teh Crazy. Working on sorting it.

And I don’t have any plans. I can’t not do Passover, people. A year without Passover is a year without awesome.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack. A bit later than Jennie because I got that stupid AirPort has a self-assigned IP and may not be able to connect to the Internet error. I don’t know how I fixed it; I tried every damn thing. Anyway, I will try to get posting at the usual lazy rate as soon as I can.

I soothe myself with little things. The cat was sleeping on my bed when I came home and I kicked him off to throw the sheets in the wash. I was perched on top of the bare pillows and duvet, looking through the list of flat shares downloaded at lunch, when he came crawling back, meowed in an aggrieved tone, and curled up with his head on my feet purring. You wouldn’t have had the heart to push him off a second time, either.

Dinner was soup and garlic bread, with yogurt for dessert. I’m finding that the cheapest store brand tomato soup can be made halfway decent if you let it simmer long enough with shallots and garlic and olive oil and fresh pepper and salt. Oh bugger, I forgot about the cherry tomatoes in the fridge. Tomorrow, with the gnocchi…

Then I took a nice hot bath, a proper one, no other word for it, that went all the way up to my shoulders. In the mornings there’s never enough hot water to soak, I have to pour water over my hair with the blue squishy bowl, and I just don’t feel as clean.

Still haven’t had my pills yet, so I’m going to go make a cup of Ribena with hot water and have them with that while I look over my CV, and then take my sheets out of the dryer and go to bed.

I took today off work, at the doctor’s suggestion. She said I could take as much as a week off for sick leave without needing a doctor’s note, but I’d feel bad about taking more time off after spending the week before Easter on holiday.

It was wonderful getting to see Ben again. We were holed up for a week in a poky little room in Harlesden. The price shocked me but he assured me it had been the cheapest option. We went and saw touristy things and hung around the West End and Bankside, but also wandered into the Inns of Court, the Docklands and Spitalfields, and picnicked on my own One Tree Hill. We were going to have high tea in Kensington, too, but just ended up in a pub with pie and beer.

After that real life crashed back in. I had to finish up my job on the side transcribing lectures for a law student, and go back to my full-time work, and catch up with friends, and it was just like before. I feel a bit bad about it, but I really do have an entire separate life here.

I was tapering off the venlafaxine, too, taking a lower dose. The symptoms – dizziness, trembling, and nausea if I didn’t take the pill soon enough – faded after a week and things seemed to be going all right, but then this week all of a sudden depression returned with a vengeance. Feeling weepy, feeling foggy, feeling as if everything in my life was insupportable, on the verge of quitting my job, breaking up with Ben [note: not actually breaking up with Ben], moving out of here. Well, I did give notice to the landlady and started looking up rooms to rent on Gumtree, but everything else seemed much more tolerable in the With me my mood drops in the afternoon and by nighttime I’m damn near non-functional. The doctor said most depressed people are the opposite, go figure.

And then everything did go really wrong. My computer refuses to work – it doesn’t recognise that the adapter’s plugged in, even after resetting the PMU a lot – and we still don’t have Internet and the isolation is maddening. And being depressed I kept picking at myself about Ben and why couldn’t I be monogamous, like a good girlfriend would. And in my distraught state everything at work was driving me crazy and two days in a row I snapped at two different co-workers over things that I just would have kept inside normally. And then I got my one month’s notice at work – the housing market is crashing badly and one solicitor had been let go already, so I’d known for a while my days were numbered, but this was just bad timing, really.

Anyway, on Friday I went home in tears and by the time I got back I was as low as I’d ever been. Pulled myself together, took a bath, and went over to drink wine and eat ice cream and tell bad jokes with L., and resolved to put everything out of my mind this weekend. On Saturday went to Dr. Sketchy’s and had dinner with K., and on Sunday went to see an apartment in Bow, a lazy afternoon soaking up the sun in the East End, and got laundry done. But when the sun set the gloom set in and I felt that if I had to go to work tomorrow morning and go back to face everyone, after they’d no doubt been talking about me all weekend about my bizarre behaviour and how impolite and unprofessional I had been, I would honestly rather jump in front of the fast train. The goddamn phone booking system at the practice wasn’t working, and I’d been trying to get an appointment all weekend. I called NHS Direct and they put me through to an out-of-hours doctor service thing and they contacted the practice overnight, but luckily I could get an appointment first thing that morning. And then right before bed Ben phoned and I sat out front between the curtained living-room windows and the hedge (to get a little privacy, and the door to the garden was locked) and we talked and I felt so much less isolated.

I felt better after talking to the doctor, who said that I shouldn’t be tapering off at such a difficult time, and got a new prescription and took the day off. There’s no quick fixes for stuff like this, but I need a quick fix because so much is happening and I can’t be out of my mind during it!

I think I will go to one of the parks and walk around, and then get some errands done and hopefully find an Internet café and post this. Just so you know, I probably won’t have Internet at home till I find a new place, at the end of April, and will be making do with going on at work and the odd café on the weekends. I am regularly Twittering from my mobile, and the best way to get in touch with me directly is to go on Twitter and direct message me by prefacing your message with “d tlonista”, e. g., “d tlonista Lose the game”, because I receive those as SMSs. The second-best way is email. Too busy to spend time on Facebook, although I do keep up with your blogs. Oh! Also added the latest roll to Flickr.

Now off to Get Shit Done…

…just without Internet access for the next God-knows-when. Today Ben and I spent a rainy afternoon in the British Museum on the pretext of getting some culture and promptly ruined it by taking pictures of ancient artifacts in order to LOLcaption them.

Time running out at the cafe gotta go