Tlönista

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…

Transcribed from my journal.

December 24.

Well, here I am in a sandwich shop in the middle of Bruges, sipping hot chocolate and a little buzzed from the cup of mulled wine I had out in the square. The trip in was uneventful – train to London Bridge and then St Pancras International, then Bruxelles-Midi, then here. My hotel room is small but it’s all mine. It’s been months since I had a room to myself.

December 25.

I went off aiming for the Minnewater, but the cathedral bells drew me in and I ended up staying for the mass at Sintsalvatorskathedraal. No one else knew the hymns so I was all right there.

I tell you, the Catholics know how to do religion! First there was grand organ music and then a procession – a white-robed priest holding up a golden crucifix on a pole, then another swinging a censer. Then solemn young altarboys and altargirls in white with wooden crosses. Then solemn, nerdy-looking young priests, also in white. Then priests in cloth-of-gold with red crosses, wearing the crabby kind of expression that comes with not getting laid for about 50 or 60 years. Then one in cloth-of-gold with a mitre on, and a short man who despite not having anything on his head managed to emanate quiet authority. (Later, for some reason, he put on a red yarmulke.) [I went on Wikipedia later and figured out he must have been a Cardinal.]

Once again I intended to go to the Beguinage, but it was lunchtime by the time the service (Mass?) ended. Not as dull as I’d feared. I could catch a few words here and there [everything was in Dutch], and could tell what was a Bible reading and what was a rote reading or brakha, etc.

It being Xmas most places were closed – except – some ancestral instinct perhaps brought me past a Chinese restaurant. I couldn’t NOT go in. But my Chinese side forced me to order just about the only Chinese thing on the menu, ma po tofu. So there I was, eating alone (eccentric!) among my own people [the other patrons, who were probably Jewish], feeling ineffably at home.

After many wanderings through the cold, deserted medieval labyrinth that is Bruges on Christmas Day (the silence broken only by church bells and the odd horse-and-carriage towing tourists) I arrived at the Minnewater, a very pretty canalside park, even in the barrenness of winter. While watching white swans (their necks puffed up against the cold) and geese and hens and ducks fighting over crumbs, standing beside another tourist, I had the opportunity to try out a bit of my French: “Les oies, elles sont méchantes,” I remarked as a gray goose took a bite of down out of a fowl lower down the pecking order.

From the Minnewater it’s a hop and a jump to the Beguinage. The sense of peace and stillness there stays with me. Stark clean white-and-black buildings, the brilliantly green grass, the trees (all leaning slightly north) reaching way, way up. And everywhere little signs saying SHHHH which goes a long way towards explaining the sense of quiet…

Out again, coming across a walkway along the main canal, I began to follow it on a whim and followed it damn near halfway around the city! – I mean the “egg” of central Bruges. At some point I accidentally turned down along one of their canals and ended up back at the Markt.

Had a bite to eat there and later went in search of one of the beer cafés mentioned in Wikipedia, ’t Brugs Beertje. (Beer is bear. Ysbeer or ijsbeer – “ice-bear” – is polar bear.) Tried Stille Nacht while making small talk @ the bar with one of the locals. (Note: In Belgium – or @ least Bruges – bar staff serve you at your table, as in Canada – perhaps the practice of going up to the bar for everything is unique to Britain? Must investigate.)

By sheer chance I’d picked the beer with 12% alc. vol. & by the time I got home, tipsy, I fell straight asleep. Woke up early but decided for the first time in ages to sleep in the following day. If you can’t indulge yourself on Christmas holiday, when can you…?

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See the rest of my holiday photos.

Surprisingly accurate.

Yesterday I went shopping in Camden Town and Oxford Street and got back so tired that I fell asleep for the night, fully clothed, without taking my meds. So I lost today to venlafaxine withdrawal, which is less exciting than it sounds. And I had planned to bloooooog…

I’ve been surprisingly social considering that during the work week I generally come home and immediately fall into a coma, leaving only the weekend for going out, and one day of that is spent pottering around the house in ripped-up jeans and bedroom slippers. Quite a few college acquaintances are over here for school and I do mean to look all of them up. For starters, caught up with old classmate Will – never been able to decide whether we get along or not, but how surprisingly nice to see a familiar face. And since I got here, met fellow working holidaymaker Scot from Montreal, who’s over here trying to make it as a web designer and who can be counted upon to understand nerdy references or go on Food Adventures to new corners of London. I’ve also begun to frequent Jennie’s local pub, when she and her co-workers unwind on Fridays and also for Sunday quiz nights. Last weekend she and I and several of her co-workers spent a day doing the tourist thing round Stonehenge and Bath, actually, and I’ll get around to blogging about it after I’ve got the patience to sort through a gazillion very similar pictures of Stonehenge and pick out the decent ones. They’re very nice – her co-workers, I mean, not the photos – and come from all over, many having been international students who stayed on or came back to work.

And this being the holiday party season, doing more social things with my own co-workers as well. Being naturally timid, I’ve had difficulty fitting in and being sociable, but very very gradually things are changing. Went out to the pub on Friday with a few co-workers, a tiny place three hundred years old give or take a few, standing outside thanks to the crowd and doing what all employees do, which is gossip and bitch about the higher-ups. I bought my very first round, hurrah!

Much, much more to write about, and photos to post, but it’s far too late to be up even if I have spent the day largely asleep. Over and out.

On November fifth Guy Fawkes did not blow up Parliament. Hence, the English choose to celebrate this glad occasion by blowing things up all weekend. This bit of historical irony is due to the fact that modern Bonfire Night has only the most tenuous connection to the Gunpowder Plot and is generally an excuse to set off firecrackers and drink a lot, similar to our Victoria Day.

Jennie and I set off for the fireworks at Blackheath, recommended by her co-workers. It was really a wonderful show, only rivalled at a few moments by the nearby drunken chav punch-up. There must have been hundreds of people there, and there was no hope of getting a train, so we decided to walk partway back. Soon Jennie started recognizing the area and realized her pub was nearby, so we stopped in there for a pint. It was my first pub, definitely not the last…oh, no, not the last…The anthropologist Kate Fox in her book Watching the English declares that the pub is the one institution in which normally reserved Britons let down their guard. Pubs here are much more conducive to friendly mingling because you always go up to the bar instead of getting served at your table. This one in particular is nice because it’s off the high street and caters mostly to locals and regulars. When you walk through the door it’s as if you are shrugging on a very old and comfortable coat.

Anyway, all my fireworks pictures are up on Flickr. If you watch them as a slideshow, it’s almost like you’re there!