Tlönista

Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.

James Nicoll

When I wake up it’s not quite raining. Misting.

My attempt to take a shower earlier so I don’t cut into one roommate’s shower time fails spectacularly when I cut into another roommate’s shower time. I meekly take the scolding and scurry back into my room.

At work, H. and J., who sit next to each other, whisper. I hate that; people did that a lot at my last workplace too. I get paranoid and imagine they’re whispering about how I’m going to be sacked, or about my outfit, or whatever. I know perfectly well they’re probably not talking about me at all, but it still makes me nervous. I vow to become a freelancer as soon as possible so I don’t have to work in an office.

It’s still rainy, so instead of feeding the ducks at lunch I sit in a sandwich shop and work on a comic.

L., girl-I-briefly-dated-before- she-decided-it-wasn’t-a-good-time-for -a-relationship-so-now-we’re-just-friends -even-though-I-still-kind-of-like- her-but-it’s-cool, texts me. We head out into Marylebone in the pouring rain and find a quiet corner in a pub to catch up. She’s anxious about a friend, and moving to a new city in the fall. I’m looking for a new place to live, having failed to fit in with my roommates during our initial trial period. (Their idea of fun: playing fratboy-style drinking games while blasting Britney Spears. My idea of fun: game night with the girls.) I can’t relax at work, I can’t relax at home, it’s just so pleasant to sit and eat chips and joke around with someone who gets me.

L. is signing as she talks in a cued-speech language, possibly Makaton. “…That one time I was in Liverpool — the sign for ‘Liverpool’ is the same as the sign for ‘lesbian’, did you know? I can’t think of a situation where they would be interchangeable…”

We ponder. “The Beatles were ‘from Liverpool’, if you know what I mean,” I suggest. L. laughs and pulls a face. “If you keep doing that it’ll stay that way,” I tease.

“It’s my beard-growing face,” L. says, and demonstrates. “All men make this face when they’re really trying to grow their beard out.”

“Really?”

“Really…”

She runs off to the toilets. I fiddle with my mobile. Two men, construction workers, a younger one and an older one, sit down at the next table over. They say hi, as you do with cute girls sitting alone in pubs, and we make small talk. I am struck by an idea. “Hey,” I say, “what face would you make, if you were concentrating on growing a beard?” They don’t get it. L. comes back just then, and tries to explain it, but gives up.

“So what are you two doing here?” the younger one asks.

“We’re visiting,” I say, “from Liverpool…” and L. cracks up and then gets the giggles and we laugh like crazy people for five minutes straight. The construction workers are bemused, down their pints, and head off.

Back home I lock myself in my room, not even going down for dinner. I curl up with my laptop to finally finish Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and over the next several hours it slowly quietly blows my fucking mind.

I fold up the laptop and put it away and lie in the dark, luminous with the sheer ecstasy of engaging with ideas halfway out of my ken, and coming out of the absorbed rapture I get into when I’m stuck in a book. I cry a little. I am frustrated with the confines of mental illness and general social ineptitude and my uninspiring job and the dreary dreary perpetual state of Not Fitting In. I don’t fit in. Furiously, irrationally, I think: I am brilliant. I should be more than this.

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…

Yesterday I went to Trafalgar Square to give out free hugs with other Couchsurfing people. Couchsurfing, for those not in the know: you know when you’re only in town for a couple of days so you just sleep on a friend’s couch or whatever? Couchsurfing is the same deal, except instead of a friend, it’s a perfect stranger! And it’s not creepy at all.

Anyway, afterwards the horde of CSers went to a Samuel Smith pub; the downstairs had been reserved but it was still super-crowded because so many people had come out. Jae, you would have loved it.

I fell in with a group of people who knew each other from college and got to talking about travelling and nerd stuff and what not, and after a while we went out and meandered through Soho in the rainy Saturday night, to a bar and a restaurant and then another bar…had a terrific time. And today is my pottering-around-the-house day and Jennie has promised banane-et-nutelle crêpes for dinner.

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!

On the plane, en route to Heathrow, too hyped to sleep. I’ve already realized I left behind my camera, battery, and charger — let’s hope they can be mailed to me.

We’re somewhere over the North Atlantic. There’s nothing to be seen but the wing outside the window, a few indistinct clouds and stars, and the faint, coppery spatter of city lights receding quickly behind us. It’s about halfway through the flight.

I stayed out all last night with Genna at Nuit Blanche. It’s bigger this year, more corporate, more coordinated. In a way, last year’s was more fun — we didn’t know what to expect, we’d never seen the city transformed like that before. But I quite enjoyed this year too, and found a few favourites.

Our first must-see was the Secular Confession Booth in Yorkville, a simple stall with a canvas divider where you could pour out your heart to the artist on the other side. I got a few things off my chest and felt quite purified. The other main Yorkville attraction was the installation in Lower Bay, but the lineup was far too intimidating! There’s something about a secret abandoned subway station that has mass appeal.

Two installations at the Eaton Centre also stood out. In the foyer outside Sears, people twisted and linked long balloons to create a giant, amorphous balloon pile. You could line up for a few minutes to play inside it, creating chambers and tunnels and skylights. From the outside the effect was that of a rainbow-coloured quivering amoeba, strangely fascinating to watch.

The other exhibit was at the Yonge and Dundas entrance. Astroturf, Christmas trees and a big ceiling-mounted LCD screen created the appearance of a forest meadow under a blue sky. At a long table strewn with printer paper, brushes and inkpots, attendees painted designs and pictures and then laid them out to dry in the grass. As the artist in charge scanned each picture in, it appeared in white fluffy cloud form, drifting across the screen/sky. People lay back on the grass to watch the clouds go by.

Over in Trinity-Bellwoods, one artist presented an exquisitely molded chocolate deer, which she then carved up on a table, Thanksgiving-style, and rationed out to passersby. It was good chocolate, too.

Of course, this was Nuit Blanche, so there were also lots of light-based installations: strings and blankets of stars, an illuminated swing in a playground gussied up with space-age furniture, a glowing white Buckyball-esque dome, streetlamps’ bulbs replaced with flickering reddish flame — lots of little touches that established the evening’s Halloween-in-September feel.

Quote of the night: We stopped in at Isabel Bader Theatre where they were looping a short, weird little clip of a deer and a wolf confined in a small white room. The wolf paces around, lolls on the floor, yawns, and watches the deer. The deer is very nervous. When the clip started looping again we left the theatre, and as we passed by we heard one man ask plaintively, “Where’s the carnage?”

Perhaps because the weather was very nice this time, Genna and I didn’t have trouble staying awake and on our feet all night. We spent the last hour watching short films outside OCAD, leaning back in comfy rocking seats, while the pot smoke from the guys two seats over washed over us.

I got back and showered and put on fresh clothes and crashed, and then packed and went to Word on the Street (to say good-bye to Becca) and then left. And now here I am, an uncomfortable mix of groggy and excited, rubbing my cramped knees and trying to sleep. I can see Orion outside my window. It’s beautiful.