Piano

We have a piano in our house. Not a tinny keyboard, not even a full heavy electric job with pedals and weightings and what have you – no an actual, proper piano which RF bought from a charity shop in second year and hence has followed her within Durham.

(I have two housemates, both of whose names begin with an ‘R’, rather inconveniently for the purposes of this blog. She will hence be called RF and he will be called RM.)

Anyhow, she has just been playing it, rather lovely-ly, and I have been listening with my door open. Listening to a live piano played musically has a wonderfully calming effect on me – particularly if it feels spontaneous – if somebody is just playing for their own pleasure. Some of my favourite moments at home-home are when, just very occasionally, my Dad sits down to play and he loses himself in the music and I creep in and curl up on a sofa at the other end of the room, and I can just focus on him and his playing and the music, and without having to say or do anything just feel a part of that.

I need that calm, I really do. I don’t know how to articulate my life at the minute, but I know that the piano helps.

Still At Home

I am ill. Not scary swine flu ill, but ill enough to feel pretty shit and not to have used the train ticket that I had booked for going up to Durham on Saturday. This sucks, although as lectures don’t start ’til Thursday and I was planning on avoiding all things Fresher-related anyway, I guess the timing could be worse.

My Dad is convinced that I have brought on the illness by anxiety, and as such the path to getting better is to leap out of bed, (wo)man up, and deal with it accordingly. I am yet trying to convince him that as much as there may possibly have been anxiety-related incidents involving crying and shaking and burying into duvets, a bug is a bug and the prospect of travelling again is even less inviting if I haven’t first got rid of it, which I can’t do by willpower alone. Grump. Parents. If he’s trying to persuade me that staying at home isn’t such a great option after all, he’s doing a bloody good job of it.

However the upside of one of the above incidents is that after yet another well-intentioned invitation to Talk About Things To Us, I am increasingly sure that I am going to take a gap year after university. Or a gap six months – whatever – because the wonderful freedom about leaving the educational system is that no longer will my life have to revolve around September starts and May exams. Maybe I’ll work, maybe I’ll travel, or maybe I’ll just stay at home and remember what bonfire smoke smells like in south Birmingham on November 5th, but what I will not do is refuse to give myself time and space to breathe. Maybe, just maybe, my ideal job will come up in the meantime and I’ll go straight to there.

But I won’t have to, because I will be free! I think that I need that light at the end of the tunnel.

Power Cleaning

After a large number of years with a rather cumbersome vacuum cleaner that didn’t actually clean much, Mum finally gave in earlier this year and purchased a rather whizzy replacement. I currently in the process of trying to use it to hoover my bedroom (- I say trying because even the instruction manual has left me stumped as how to get the extender tube out).

It is both lightweight and incredibly efficient at transforming the colour of our carpets. I have discovered that it can, however, get a tad overenthusiastic…

The cleaner after I had persuaded it to relinquish its afternoon snack

Flitting

By this coming Sunday, I will have been on holiday for eight weeks exactly -and out of those eight weeks, I will have spent precisely two weeks and four days in Birmingham. I don’t regret spending the time as I have done, thankfully, but it has left me rather wondering when I will simply be able to down sticks and just be. It makes me think of when I was at school, especially, and got increasingly annoyed with my parents for taking us away every single holiday – for which I should be grateful, I know, and in many ways I am. It just did mean that we never had any time to relax at home. See previous post, etc etc.

So anyhow, this is a long and convoluted way of explaining that I have just been in the south of France for a week, that tomorrow I am travelling north to visit J, and that on Saturday I will be taking a train down in the opposite direction to go to H’s big family gathering as a university friend and Maths girly. And then I’ll be home for a few days. And then I’m being driven to Durham with various furniture bits. And then, hopefully, I will have a September where I don’t leave Birmingham for a single moment, and it will be glorious, and sewing-ful, and I can get bored to my heart’s content! I might even remember to post photos of the all of the as-yet-undocumented garments. Pigs might fly indeed.

For today though I am home, sitting in my room, on my laptop, having a full night’s sleep on my most wonderful mattress in the world :-)

Relaxation

How often do you relax? And I mean properly relax, not just nominally relax.

I’ve been considering this this evening, having spent the five days since I got back from Durham in a hub of frenzied activity. It must be self-inflicted hub, as well, since the rest of my family are away. I don’t even know exactly what I’ve been doing to end up so tired and stressed out. I mean sure, there’s been a bit of stuff to sort out from Durham, and some odds and ends which are inevitably involved in running the house at this end. J came to stay for a couple of days as well which was lovely, and we did get some relaxing time into that – but I’m afraid that I still inflicted quite a lot of my busy-ness on him, taking him on such romantic dates as the local tip, supermarket, and washing machine.

And it’s left me with the question of when and how I ever do relax. It’s not at home. I’m not sure why, but there’s always something going on. When my family are here, there are several high-octane agendas running all at once and it always feels like you’re waiting for the next thing to happen, the next crisis to occur. Even if things are running smoothly, somebody’s always out doing something and if they’re not, they’re worrying about what they haven’t been doing and could be doing. Life runs in the fast lane, and I find it very hard to distance myself from that perpetual stress even if I’m not directly part of it.

It’s at university that I have real autonomy over my personal space and agenda, then, and feel able to dictate my time in a way that I can’t at home. University is my quiet time, but of course university is stressful in a different way. It has deadlines, and degrees, and societies, and a social life. You mustn’t waste your time at university because as everyone keeps telling us, these are the best years of your life! An opportunity missed might never come again! It’s important to shut out the student bubble every so often, but it can be easier said than done when there’s that perpetual feeling of missing out.

Then at the third end of the scale*, there’s the pseudo-relaxation, when you stop and try to take some time out but it doesn’t quite work. I find that I fritter the time away, simultaneously bored and anxious about the fact that I’m bored when I should be doing something positive to relax. I can go on the internet, or read a book, or go for a walk, but all that time there’s a little voice in my head telling myself that this is relaxation time, so relax, now! Needless to say it doesn’t work like that, and I just end up more mentally tired than ever. Thing is on days like today, I feel like I have two choices – high-strung tension or ‘relaxing’ into the black hole.

It’s a very difficult cycle to break. So yes, I’d be curious to know how often you relax, and what you do to do so. I feel like something’s gone wrong here.

x

*Hey, who said it was one-dimensional? </geek>

Protestation

I don’t want to go back.

Please don’t make me go back.

I don’t want to go back to work, and stress, and panic, and a horrendous set of exams which I’m probably going fail most of anyway, and an essay deadline, and backache, and worse backache, and food shopping stress, and a messy kitchen, and other people being stressed, and being trapped in my room when I’m having a dip, and end of things sadness, and summertime sadness, and small place claustrophobia, and not having any nice bread ‘cos I won’t have time to get any, and pretentious people irritation, and mitigation forms, and having to leave our house, and not enough time, and finalist goodbyes, and no-one there to just talk to ‘cos they’ll all be working, and doctor’s appointments, and counselling appointments, and what do you do in a relationship during third-yr exams?

x

:-(

Do. Not. Want.

Today has been one of those days of Do. Not. Want..

It’s been gloriously sunny, so I did head down to town to buy some vegetables and the like, but it took me a long while to make a decision on anything and a combination of the heaviness of my rucksack and the waves of tiredness/ faintness/ nausea that had started before leaving the house persuaded me to catch the bus back up the hill.

Then I came home, and ate an apple and some flapjack, and eventually cooked lunch. Then I read the paper. Then internet-ted while eating chocolate. Then curled up on my bed with some more of the paper and some custard creams. Nausea only turns me off orange juice, it would seem – I still manage to consume sweet and unhealthy things at an alarming rate.

I was going to go out tonight but college tutor hour’s been cancelled. I have an overdue summative essay (with extension, worry not) that is under half done. I don’t actually give a damn about it. The only constructive thing that I can contemplate doing is starting to work on the camisole that I’ve got a pattern for – but all that’s back in Birmingham, and hypothetical constructive plans are a bit of a contradiction in terms, anyway.

I could go and chat to my housemates but they’re probably working, and, well, I’m never sure exactly what to say to them when I’m in one of these moods. I’m sure that the feeling’s mutual.

On the positive side, though, I’m a week into taking the citalopram and so far so OK. It’s not lifted me up particularly, it is true, and there are a couple of new side effects (: perceived raised temperature and faintness). But I have been feeling mildly more balanced recently and haven’t had any of the plummeting lows in the last week, so I am hopeful yet – especially given that it’s meant to take a couple of weeks to kick in anyway and I’ve probably still got a fair amount of t’other in my system.

If it wasn’t for the whole anonymity/ shred of self-dignity thing, I would post a picture of just how much I’ve been screwing my face up for the greater part of today. It’s not pretty, but does have the same sort of satisfaction factor that kids get from crossing their eyes and sticking out their tongue…

Plan For The Week

This week is going to be spent tying up loose ends, so to speak. Getting my hair cut and (more importantly) thinned. Going to the chiropractor. Cashing in a prescription. Seeing the one or two friends who are still about. Playing the Kegelstatt Trio (and no doubt discovering just how out of practice I am!). Sorting out a mound of clarinet music, not to mention a large pile of receipts. Getting to the rag market if I have time after trying to finish my final garment for the summer.

Going through the Choral Soc treasury folder and printing off the auditions rota – weird to think that I am no longer the scared, overwhelmed, flu-ridden fresher, but the one to be showing people in and assessing their singing/ sight-reading skills!*

Emails, urgh. I’ve reached my storage limit on the university server and despite my best efforts at rationalising as I go along, my inbox is in a complete mess. Does your place send out tens of the damn things every day as well? Yeh, thought so. I think that takes priority over my laptop’s hard-drive, also long in need of rationalisation – that will have to wait for another year, probably.

Sorting out my third-year module choices, preferably before I have to start attending the lectures. This isn’t actually as crucial as it sounds – provided I haven’t missed anything, I can still change my mind up to October 31st or thereabouts, so it’s perfectly possible to hedge my bets and attend too many modules with a view to getting a better idea of what each involves. But it’d still be nice to be able to attack things with certainty. Maybe even doing some preliminary reading for the modules that I am certain on, although in all honesty that probably won’t happen, not least because I don’t have any of the books.

Packing. ParcelForce proofing and organising and delivering. Defending the number of clothes that I want to take up North, yes really! Repacking. Spending the last couple of nights in a room that looks too tidy and bare to be mine. Navigating the train journey from hell due to big engineering works on the line between Chesterfield and Sheffield.

Saying goodbye to Birmingham for ten weeks. Going from home (where hardly anyone has any concept of my university life) to university (where hardly anyone has any concept of my home life). Playing hunt-the-fellow-Midlander, a game that never gets old because success rates are so occasional and surprising. Meeting hordes of new people, and having to remember to be sociable.

Being with too-long-separated-from friends and housemates. Going back home :-)

x

*We’ll give them a grade. The range goes from A : “You’re a soprano and we’ve got too many sopranos but wow, you’re amazing, and there’s no way we’re not going to take you!” to E : “You’re a tenor, every choir in the country is desperate for tenors, but absolutely no way”

Belonging

It’s a funny feeling, the wrench of leaving home to go home.

It’s one that I had, not for the first time, as I packed the final bits and bobs in order to leave my university-home in Durham on Monday. I’ve been in Durham for two years and now have enough associations, enough people that I know (mainly but not exclusively within the university bubble), and enough knowledge of the place that I feel like I belong there for more than just nine or ten week ‘holidays’. That’s not to say that there aren’t times when I miss home-home, and it’s not to say that I can yet quite get my head around just I lucky I am to live there. But it does have that easy familiarity now, and being up out of term-time just consolidated that, I think.

Where do you belong?

x

On a not dissimilar note, I was thinking yet again about Flix’s bedroom snapshots chain and trying to work out why my university-home bedroom of just under a year feels more like mine than my home-home bedroom of nine years and counting, despite the fairly liberal scattering of possessions across both. And I worked it out! The answer lies in these three photos:

My duvet covers. Chosen by me, for me. And the lower image is a pillowcase that has been part of the household for as long as I can remember. Where I sleep at night. Part of a space that is most definitely my own :-)