24th October 2008
Alternatives to listening in lectures, as observed of late….
- having a note conversation on the, or rather a, Christian perspective on masturbation
- playing 4×4x4 three-dimensional noughts and crosses
Who said Maths was boring, eh?
28th September 2008
“And everyone is blonde, and everyone is beautiful…”
This is the line that always jumps out at me from the Beautiful South song. It pretty neatly sums up how I feel at Durham at times. I walk into a lecture room or the library or wherever, and find myself looking about me and wondering, ‘…but where are the fat people? Where are the ugly people?’. And for all the confidence that I have built up over the last two years, I am taken straight back to the me of school. The tall, chunky, geeky, awkward person who sits on the edge of the group, trying to feel included but somehow always saying the wrong thing (or in extreme cases of stress losing grip on the English language altogether). The boffin, one of the Maths kids. The only person not to be wearing jeans on ‘Jeans for Genes’ day. Wasn’t my fault I didn’t own any.
I’ve got better, don’t get me wrong, and after the initial heavy culture-shock
September 2008 sometime
I have a very love-hate relationship with driving.
Some of the time, I can’t stand it. I don’t like the backache, I don’t like the fact that I am essentially too tall for the car I drive*, I feel guilty that I am taking up more space on the road and churning out more gases into the atmosphere. I also get stressed pretty easily, which is a general statement but it does apply on the road, and that’s when the standard of my driving plummets and it starts to get dangerous. I’ve not yet found a common cause. Certain passengers make me anxious (mentioning no names :-P) but it’s not because they’re bad passengers or side-seat drivers; idiots at roundabouts worry me, mainly because I know the potential for problems (and have a recent hefty mark of the back of the car to prove it); I dread driving on small country lanes because I have had very little experience of their higher speed limits and reduced visibility.
But then there are times, like last night when I drove the four miles to school to collect my sister, that I love being in a car. The independence it gives, yes, but it’s more than that. The weight of the steering**, the smooth hum of the engine, the puzzle-like quality of navigating a busy junction – and the capsule quality that being in a car has. On a night like last night, it was the beauty of the rhythm of driving that won over any stupid road setups or speeding motorbikes. I was driving well, on roads that I knew, and stress was as far from my mind
Maybe part of it is the novelty of enjoying a car. My parents really do dislike driving, so we tend to go places on public transport if at all possible. In two years of being at university, I have been to Durham in a car twice, back once – a pain from a luggage point of view, but fine otherwise. Having the hub of Network Rail as your local big station does help!
And yet I miss driving when it’s not there.
*not ‘my car’, ‘the car I drive’. This is regularly pointed out to me by my parents, but then they do pay for my insurance so I can’t really complain!
**Power steering is for wimps! Seriously, I keep hoping that I’m going to get toned arms, it’s that unresponsive…
Callan’s visit to his ‘Drafts’ folder a while back got me looking at mine. I may* publish some of the bits in the coming few weeks, for your enjoyment, perusal, boredom, official records, hair loss, and any other symptoms that you may experience as a result of taking this medicine.
And yes, I know several of them probably don’t make any sense whatsoever!
*that is to say, will
The gods of t’internet must have noticed that ‘Fluoxetine’ was looming disproportionately large over the category cloud at the right of this blog, and have realised that for it still to be that dominant (in a bad way), som’ing was up. Or maybe that was just me. Either way, that category will loom no larger as I have a new one to replace it.
So yeh, I guess we’re back to Day One again, so to speak.
I thought I’d spare you the Wikipedia-combing this time :-)
As a partial response to a Facebook conversation I am currently having with Jenny, may I present to you a swirly tailed, single round eared, three-legged and bearded mouse? This one has no tummy button, in which it is lacking somewhat.
x
(Original source. Excuse the cringeworthy blogging style, if you will. It’s amazing what you think of yourself from an older and questionably wiser perspective..)
You’ve got to hand it to algorithm-generated content, sometimes, that it does make you laugh…!
“Once you write something, it’s not your own anymore and it bears different meanings to everyone who reads it”
I read this today on one of the blogs that I read. It felt terribly appropriate, somehow.
Day 27 was good, and it finally felt like the Fluoxetine was doing something positive. Day 28 was catastrophic. Day 29 was OK, but not great. Day 30 was, if anything, worse than Day 28.
Today is Day 31. Pills come in packs of thirty, so I opened up the new bag from the pharmacist this morning. Being a generic drug, I’ve been given capsules manufactured by a different company. The old ones were green and pale yellow. These new ones are pale blue and white, and have a different code number on. It shouldn’t matter, but it does…
x
Bopping about the internet, as one does, I seem to have come across an increasing number of blogs which relate to depression, and people’s struggles with thereof. Some people, like me, integrate it into their normal blogs, which itself chronicles how much it’s taking over their life at any one time. Some people have separate ‘depression blogs’ – it’s a place where they can talk about it without their friends seeing, maybe, or a way of letting it all out without it dominating what else they might want to write. These ones tend to explore the issues behind the immediate crazyness/ pill-taking, so I would imagine are relatively more therapeutic.
There are a few which I read regularly, and have been doing so for some months now. I won’t link to them, or not yet anyway. But while it’s not exactly a cheerful choice of reading matter, it’s quite comforting to know that other people are out there, and more comforting still to recognise the differences. Depressives have as many personality variations and as many ways of dealing with stuff as any other section of the population, and that is something that I think is very easy for other people to forget.
How well do you communicate?
I’ve been considering this quite a bit in the past couple of weeks or so. I’ve never been a great verbal communicator. I’m better in slightly more formal contexts or when talking to people older than myself, but put me in a stressful social situation and I have a tendency to lose my grasp on the English language altogether, flailing around for words and meaning, desperately hoping that somebody will bail me out before I make too much of an idiot of myself. Phone calls can be similarly awkward, although it does depend who I’m talking to. I know this, it’s the way it is, I can deal with it. I’m a mathematician and therefore entitled to suck at words (- and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it!)
When it comes to body language, however, I’ve always thought of myself as someone who wore their heart on their sleeve – even if I’m not saying something, I’ve always been pretty sure that people can tell what’s going on, simply because I’m just not that good at acting otherwise. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned of late it’s that this clearly isn’t the case.
The realisation started to come a few weeks into first term last autumn when one of my housemates asked me to make a ’status board’ for my door because when I came in and went up to my room, just to dump my bag or whatever, they simply couldn’t gauge my mood. My body language was clearly not sufficient to distinguish between ‘thinking hard about something problematic’ and ‘tired but contented’. ‘I’m in a foul mood’ would have been marginally easier, I’d imagine, but perhaps not as clear as I thought since I found that stating the fact calmly but explicitly got the message across much faster (and with better results all round). It’s not even to do with the length of time that I have known people – a close, long-standing home friend recently told me that she can only tell when I’m annoyed because she knows what’s likely to annoy me. Even my family have varying degrees of reaction time (- it’s my Dad, I think, who tunes in the fastest, probably because we’re quite similar).
Maybe this apparent lack of open communication would explain my interesting time with relationships over the years. What’s chicken and what’s egg?
I think it’s probably in writing that I consistently succeed best when it comes to communicating. Edited, thought-out, structured writing. Is that a true representation of the thought process that goes on behind the letter or the email or the blog? The irony is that no-one can do the controlled experiment and ever be able to tell!
It’s frustrating. It really is.
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