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’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 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…

I want to go back in time and slap whoever thought velo binding was a good idea.

I would slap them so hard.

i will become a COMIXVEDETTE

I’m edging dangerously near emo-indie-cartoonist territory here. Luckily, I have made a solemn vow that I will go out and troll for dates and tawdry sex on Gumtree rather than make comics about how I have no life and can’t get laid, so you all are safe.

Yes yes yes, I will write about Angoulême…but now I’m desperately catching up, and there’s simply not enough time in the day. I had planned to take a bath after work and there wasn’t even time for that.

Looking at my budget. Living here is affordable because our rent is outrageously cheap but I can’t count on that with the next place. I’m going to need another job. Seems like everything on Gumtree is either a) during my work hours, or b) super dodgy — but — I will persevere…

So today I caught some well-deserved flak for forgetting to pass on an important phone message to one of my co-workers. Then a former client rang, angrily asserting that we had mislaid a terrible lot of his money, and the person dealing would have to be the same co-worker. And then the temp had a seizure.

The weekend can’t come soon enough.

Party in Nio Esseia

Friday was one of the secretaries’ last day at work, so afterwards we all went out to a cozy little bar nearby that serves about a gazillion different kinds of Belgian beer, and chips and mayo in pint glasses, and stayed for hours drinking and having a laugh and what not. A few lawyers who’ve worked at the firm in the past dropped by, too. Just a nice relaxing evening after a long day and a truly long week.

It was much better than the previous Friday, which was another such get-together in a posh City bar/club. Now, I know I’m a lightweight, but I’m not such a lightweight that I should get drunk on two glasses of wine, and be sick to boot. My co-workers bundled me into a cab and sent me home and I was the object of much gentle ribbing on Monday. My first time being drunk and frankly I don’t see the appeal. I was quite embarrassed, but told myself that if I can’t have a youthful indiscretion or two now, honestly, when can I?

Jet Lag

When I was younger it was far too early to imagine what I would be doing “when I grew up”, and later on it got bad and there was no future I could see for myself but annihilation – self-hatred and anxiety drowned out all thought. Now I come out on the other side of it, newly born, as gawky and awkward as if I were a teenager again, muddling along and euphoric with independence.

It’s not exaggeration, I think, to say that that years-long spell of depression was a transformative experience, and the shock of so rapidly going from there to here has me reeling yet with a kind of existential jet lag.

Chelsea Dagger

Sitting in the little café over my lunch break having a jacket potato with beans instead of cheese, because of that article in the Metro comparing the relative health benefits. It’s very cloudy outside, about to rain any minute. Here I have to carry an umbrella with me all the time.

There’s a damp draft by my regular seat by the door and I’ve got to go back to work in five minutes. Then that Fratellis song comes on the radio and for a few moments all my everyday worries become insubstantial, and I feel light as air.