Nah messing

Nice receptionist. I should know. I've been one.

The day started well as Simon Pegg (remember him?) was on GMTV this morning - many thanks to the fabulous El Clark for texting to tip me off. Even my visit to the dentist couldn't spoil it. Although their receptionist could have. My dentist has recently got a new receptionist and frankly, she's a bitch. She's rude, indiscreet, passive-agressive, rude, loud, did I mention rude? These qualities would normally endear me to a woman - like attracts like - except for one thing.

She is only nasty to other women.

That fact bites me, it bites me hard. And not in a good way. You put a man in front of the Alpha Harpy and suddenly she's this self-deprecating, cooing, overly-polite and falsely caring person. As I watched her this morning (for almost 40 minutes, my dentist was running late and I didn't take a book so I needed to read something), I felt my resentment rising as she barely made eye contact with a series of perfectly polite and inoffensive women (me not included, obviously, but there were others) yet almost oozed clean off her chair for any human with a dangly appendage.

I tried to empathize, and imagined a series of awful things that could have happened in this woman's life to make her this way. However, after about five minutes of that I realised I wasn't empathizing, I was enjoying the exercise. In the end, I did the only thing I ever do with people puzzles I cannot solve. I psychically dissolved her presence from the/my (either/or) Universe until I can figure out her problem and thus prevent it making me impotently angry.

I am fairly practiced at this: it involved a very clear will to disengage with someone and then to stop perceiving them. Usually I do this by leaving their environment, but in this instance she had to serve me later, so I spent the whole interaction looking at her right eyebrow and visualising a young, polite, red-haired woman who looked a bit like Jessica Stephenson (I told you I've been watching too much Spaced lately).

She was a lot more pleasant to deal with as a result. Well, technically, she seemed a bit bewildered and as I left, she was frantically rubbing at her right eyebrow.

Here's Terra Naomi, who you might recognise from a previous post. This one is called Vicodin, and thanks to Kit Kat for finding it for us. Doesn't it just capture the painful glory of the substance abuser?

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world. Arthur Schopenhauer

Tonight's Daily is dedicated to the art of animation. A friend of mine from the Central Library, David Kemp is an illustrator and animator and via Dave's rather fabulous Myspace site, I discovered a YouTube for Animators, called aniBOOM, which is set to become my favourite thing du jour.

One of the first animations I looked at led me immediately to the website of some Hungarian animators, whose work I loved. I watched Chaos Theory by Gergely Szelei, which I thought was disturbing and exciting all at once. Much more instantly appealing was the poignant animation, Memento, above, which you might need to watch full screen, or download and watch from the creator's website here.

I spent a long time on aniBOOM, not for the last time, I suspect. Plus, if I ever get the urge, I can also make my own animations using the Shapeshifter programme on the site - my favourite was the BatMan.

The rebellious anti-capitalist in me loved this one, but for goodness sake don't watch it at work! Swearing alert! Swearing alert!

For sheer orginal quirkiness, this one made me laugh the most.



I love Spock.

On the way home tonight, I stopped in the Coop for some dinner (Miss Sally, if you're reading, I followed your lead and bought some smoked mackerel for dinner, and you're right, I feel much better for it) and got into conversation with my old boss.

Somehow the conversation turned to the subject of masturbation - don't ask me how, the only thing I can tell you is that conversations like this follow me around - I remember, it's because he trades in old books in his spare time and he has just sold a book from 1834 on the perils of 'self-abuse'.

"Wow." I said, finally, not really knowing him well enough to comment much further.

"I know," he nodded, "Still, it's all lost on me, I was raised by Jesuits."

There was a long silence in which we stared at each other. I struggled to understand the significance of this comment, and how exactly I always manage to work myself into these conversations. He stared back at me, perhaps waiting for the dawn of understanding. It didn't appear.

"They teach you what to think about, you know so you won't......"

I nodded furiously, half-desperate for the conversation to be over and half-desperate to know what these mysterious preventative thoughts might be. Logic won out in the end. I don't want to know what those terrible thoughts that are designed to prevent what Woody Allen once described as "sex with someone I love."

I have a hard enough job of filling my spare time as it is.

Something for the weekend

The Chief has a habit sometimes of narrating our time together as if it were the product of a living novel. Sometimes he does this to make a point, for example if I say something facetious, he will say something like: "Suddenly, a car swept past at great speed, at this precise moment The Smurf stepped forward and it hit her. The Chief shed a brief tear, and walked on. He gave a beautiful speech at her funeral."

I always find this habit endearing, as well as a little disturbing, because I have done the same thing in the back of my mind since I was a child. I assumed that it was something writers did, and that this was how we knew our destiny. Of course, now that I am older and know a little of amateur psychology, I realise it is further proof of my ongoing and consistent self-obsession. But I still think it's a little endearing.

I'm at a crisis of self-confidence with my writing at the moment, a crisis that I'm probably in danger of spinning out into an excuse for a period of inactivity. I've been looking at some old morning pages for inspiration over the last couple of days. The morning pages are an idea from a useful book called The Artist's Way by a woman called Julia Cameron, and they entail getting up in the morning and writing 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every day. I went through a stage in 2003 of doing the morning pages every day. I've never re-read them because there's a rule that you're not allowed to look at them for three months anyway, and once the three months were up, I just never got around to looking back over them.

I've kept the morning pages sporadically since June 2003, andI have a huge folder filled with them. Yesterday, I took the folder down from the shelf and had a look. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing, but I know that each time I read one of them it gives me a strong urge to get disgustingly drunk.

The thing about the pages is that stream-of-consciousness writing is really immediate. I suppose everyone would complete this exercise differently, but I write them in the present tense. They form a snapshot of every morning over some of the most important years of my life. Every morning of my last (and I wonder over the meaning of that) relationship of any importance is within these pages. It's probably the reason, subconsciously, why I haven't been back to them.

They're like a time-machine. And a time-bomb. Reading them hurts, and yet it fascinates me. Reading them returns me, almost entirely, through the looking glass to the past. I read the pages for the three days leading up to when I met my last lover of importance (who I may refer to as LLOI from hereon in). These are strange to read because in the pages I have no idea what's coming, as it were, but now, reading it, I know that in 3 days I'll meet him, I know that shortly after, I'll fall in love, and I know that much later, he'll leave me for a middle-aged hairdresser from Peckham.

I've tried screaming at myself to see through his charms, but it's all inevitable.

And now that I have tripped over this journey into the past, my own Life on Mars, I'm in danger of getting addicted to it. It's irrational. it feels like upper-class therapy - more over-indulgence and loneliness than working things through.

Still at least Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were on the tv this morning. I watched 5 episodes of Spaced with Kate this afternoon to celebrate. Only 2 days to go....

Feline Behaviour

'Cat silhouette' courtesy of plingan over at stock.xchng

Cat's presence changes everything. Human solitude is disturbed by the company of even another species. Sometimes I swear I can hear the plants breathing (like Plath's tulips).

His collar's bell tinkles lightly around the room like the magic on a pixie's shoe. He runs from one occupation to another, seemingly unburdened; the epitome of a zen life form. One moment is spent trying to force his chubby body under pillows he cannot force to yield, another in licking his leg for the smallest split of a second, another pacing up and down the bed, eyes roving. He smells everything, lives the world through his nose. I am less than surprised at his fascination with the duvet, even my clumsy olifactory ability notices it has the scent of a campfire.

Demanding, cats are (as Yoda once said). This one now becomes proactive in his new quest for attention - mine, as no one else is here, but if someone were, he would be less picky - moving next to me, shoving his face, without shame, against the side of my notebook as I write. Would that my pride would yield even a little to afford a fraction of his shamelessness; I would doubtlessly get laid more often as a result. Cat does not suffer with rejection. At my ignorance, my aversion to his affections, he moves away from me to the end of the bed, without concern, and begins to wash his face. Where I would crumble in the face of the horrifying No, he merely turns to grooming. There is no fuss. He jumps from the bed, to the floor.

Cat turns to washing and the sound of his slurping at his own fur and skin disturbs and disgusts me. Or perhaps I am angry that Cat is more spiritually advanced than I am, more able to adjust to the arbitrary agreements and disavowals of the world. He is self-contained. I am dependent. Damn him. He stands, walks a circle around one spot on the wooden floor and lies down, begins to wash his tail. I have been told that he is the most demanding cat in the house and for a moment I feel grateful that he has cut me some slack to allow me to write; even though all I can write of now is him. At the same time, there is a current of need in me for Cat to need my attention, too. He chooses.

He slurps at his front paw; the sound is overwhelming and immediate. I cannot stand it, so I reach across the bed, and stretch over to the floor. I place a big feather pillow on Cat so that I cannot hear his slurps and squelching tongue. So that he will see I am the most sentient (yes, I know I doesn't really work like that, but if it did, I would be the sentientist of the two of us), the more powerful. In someone else's hand, maybe, this pillow could be his death. Either he is not aware of that danger, or he doesn't care. How can I know what or Cat thinks, what or if he feels? He is either perfectly mindful-sure of his himself, or he is lucky. Maybe I could never begin to understand his experience of the world. Unless I were a cat.

When my cat, Bunty (yes, I know) died a few years ago, she held my eyes for a whole night when she fell sick and for the longest moment in which she died. I didn't know what she knew of death and I did not know if she was afraid of what was happening to her. I did not know how much pain she was in, I could not tell, even with our eyes locked together. I suppose it's the same with people, but the fact that we are capable of disturbing the long silence with so many words (that too often say nothing at all and never say enough) serves to distract from, just as much as it does to inform, what we know of each other's experience of the world, ourselves and each other.

Cat plays with the pillow - if he could I am certain he would laugh at it; Cat would take his own death with perfect poise, he is the Noel Coward of cats - kicking at it with his feet, rolling out from underneath and then back again, biting and stretching his neck. He toys for a while and then stands and walks across the room to investigate the corner. I put down my pen and think about getting up. We are finished with one another.

Il n'y a point do heros pour son valet de chambre. Madame Cornuel

Go on, Google it. It won't kill you. First one to post the meaning as a comment wins a Kinder Egg. Straight up.

Let No Man Scare You, by Mark Jenkins (2006)
He does some great street installations, which you should check out at his website. Now.

Casabianca by Elizabeth Bishop

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.

A rainy afternoon in an empty office can give rise to the best conversations.

Miss Sally and I passed an hour in the Ministry on Friday pinning down the nature of love, or trying to. Do we choose with whom we fall in love? Are we destined to repeat that first relationship (or the absence of it) that we learned from our parents, guardians or other places of early influence? And can we change who we love, over time, if we start to realize the choices we have made are harmful to us?

They are simplified questions, I suppose, in lots of ways, which is paradoxical, as perhaps love should never be separated from the peculiarity of its circumstance; becomes meaningless when you reduce (or elevate) it to an abstract. And of course, we came to no conclusions, though I think we both learnt a lot more about each other than we knew previously.

I know I will never tire, for instance, of hearing about Sally's mother, just as I never tire of hearing about Violet, my (it's a long story, but technically, great) grandmother. But then again, maybe the stories exchanged in an afternoon in the deserted Ministry - civil servants, it would seem, do not need the Pompey Chimes to know when it's four o'clock on a Friday - were all about the same thing. There is not a great leap from love to family in the end - whether it's the one you were born into, the one you choose, or, if you're damn lucky, even both.

Real love isn't ambivalent. Belize, Angels in America

Emma Thompson as the Angel of America

I know my relationship with alcohol has taken a new lease of life when I confess to being hungover in the office and the First response is “Again?” Damn my personal passion for wine. Damn my inability to know my limits and damn my commitment to ignoring them.

I paid the price for my hangover by only being fit to function for half the day (and I’m stretching the literal meaning of the word ‘fit’ even there). I had to go home and sleep for most of the day (I did a deal with the Chief via the wonderful Miss Sally that I would go home yesterday and work my off day on Friday instead – expensive things, hangovers), and having rebalanced myself, I settled myself in to watch ‘Angels in America.’

If you haven’t seen it – and I suspect you probably have, as most of the people I’ve spoken to acted slightly surprised that I didn’t know what it was – then this incredibly difficult to describe series is a must see. The plays were originally written by Tony Kushner, as two separate plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, and were refilmed together as a mini-series by HBO in 2003, which is the version I watched yesterday. It's incredibly moving, well-written, witty and political viewing (don't let that put you off though) and The Daily highly recommends.

Now, there's an event of great cultural importance appearing on the horizon next week. It's intricately connected to love and beauty and the appreciation of both. It's an event that all of us, deep down, feel a stirring about, and it's one that The Daily cannot ignore. In the words of philosopher Rolf Harris, can you guess what it is yet?

One more clue. It's happening on February 14th and it makes your heart beat faster just to think about it.

You guessed. It's the release day for Hot Fuzz!! Brilliant! I know, like me, fans of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, and those that worship the Pegg and Frost combination (that's pretty much me and Lou): you may not find it easy to wait that long, but it's ok! Here's the trailer for your delectation and delight. Ahhhhhh.

Humankind cannot stand very much reality. T. S. Eliot

I passed a hazy, hormonal day at the Ministry today. Although my mind was present and I completed all the duties I had been allotted for the day, my emotional self was out and running free through the labyrinthine corridors at the back of my mind. This makes me very scatty, unable to make decisions and highly emotional. I had to keep nipping out to the loos to cry, and ten minutes later, laughing hysterically. In an ideal world, days like this would be passed in bed while handsome men brought you chocolates and tangerines. Fact.

Lunch with the lovely Shonagh placed a pleasant centrepoint to my day and reminded me that whilst I am a long way from normal, that's exactly why the people close to me love me.

The NSN's have gone rather quiet. Actually, they've gone completely silent. This has started to worry me. Firstly because they might have completely exerted themselves the other night and have done themselves harm. Maybe they completely dehydrated themselves and their dried out husks are lying empty and undiscovered on the floor. More likely though, is my worry that I've been so loudly describing to everyone their noisy sex exploits that now they daren't even ask each other to pass the salt. They've probably taken up sign language. Either way, I can never, never see them again.

The talk of poetry in yesterday's comments made me want to post this unusual one, from the Poetry 180 website (for info, the poetry website Mark mentions, which will also send you a poem every day if you want to subscribe to their emailing list, is Poetry Chaikhana, here).

Did I Miss Anything?
Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here