not a diary

'don't count your friends by their buttons until you have pushed them a few times'

I thought of several blog topics today, and this will be my last blog of 2007. so, here goes:

1.) lasts...
Lately, I've been thinking to myself, that I've done several things for the last time now (at the age of 23) and at the time (the last time I did them) I never knew they would be the last time I ever did them. I'm not talking about things like 'last day of school', because we all know to savour that one, or last day at University, even. I'm talking about 'last' times that go past and we don't notice, but we never do them again. Can any of you remember the last time you sat on one of those swings for kids in parks? probably when you were a kid, right? but when you got up, i bet you weren't thinking 'i'll never do that again'. it's a bizarre thought, savouring 'lasts' that we don't know are happening.

2.) the unknown...
Ok so the unknown is potentially a huge topic, but I just wanted to focus in on one slice of it. It's funny when you know someone, a certain amount of time goes past and before you've realised it they are one of the most important people in your life. friendships are funny like that (maybe just for me) but the way that relationships and friendships can shift and change over long periods of time fascinates me. i remember when my ex boyfriend was just 'that weird bloke with the stupid hair', for example. i remember having absolutely no feelings for him whatsoever, but only a few weeks later i thought he was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen.
a friend highlighted this even more so this morning when he reminded me that about 6 months ago, i failed to attend an important performance of his band at a theatre. if said performance was tomorrow i'd be there in a flash, cancelling plans to be there, but this time 6 months ago i wasn't there, and there was a reason, but i can't remember it. it's bizarre what time (and knowledge) can do to how we feel about people in our lives. i don't feel guilty about it, but if it happened tomorrow i'd tear myself up. i felt differently then. and nothing has happened to alter that, but time. it makes me wonder how many people in my life are waiting to step into the breach and prove their importance to me. we shall see.

3.) love
i thought i'd end 2007 with a quick discussion about love. although i rarely mention it (well not that much) in the blog, i often 'tag' it, as if it's always under the surface of everything that I write and say. well it is. it's always there, under the surface, simmering away. i love my family and friends to quite obsessive levels (and i hope this blog goes some way to showing that) but perhaps i'm not very good at showing myself the same sort of respect, care, or even angst. i've been so concerned that 2008 could be the year i let a friend down, or disappoint people. but perhaps i should be more concerned about letting myself down, disappointing myself. 2008, then. i wonder what's going to happen.

happy new year
x

so, it's christmas eve. and it's a strange one. mainly because back in the days when we were kids we'd always have a house-full of people over on christmas eve night. the place would be packed with people, food, drink and stupid christmas games. during christmas eve day we'd all be up at the crack of dawn making little pastry contraptions and there would even be an oven-rota for fear of not getting everything cooked in time for the evening.

this year, for the first time, we're not doing anything like that. instead, in just under an hour i'm going to watch my fair-lady on the telly. we've had a christmas party of sorts on saturday where i drank a lot too much wine and ended up with a bad head yesterday, so it's not as if christmas is entirely cancelled, it's just... different.

people don't like change (and change is one of my favourite blog topics after all) but change at christmas is probably even worse than change at any other time of the year. christmas is when you want everything that is old and familiar around you. but change is a part of life, 'things change, people change' as a friend once said, and so i'd better start getting used to it.

i've just had a call from my friend who now lives in germany and they are celebrating their christmas today. i don't really understand that one, to be honest, because i'm not sure what they do on christmas day, but hey. she's really missing the english way of doing christmas and she was saving up all of her presents for tomorrow. i've also just had a text from another friend who is working in a shop today, telling me she 'doesn't feel festive at all' which made me think...

exactly what makes us feel 'festive'? here's my list:

1. mince pies in the oven
2. cold, dark nights and christmas lights
3. mulled wine
4. black and white films
5. the drive to my nan's on xmas morning (my turn this year)
6. the smell of the attic (where we keep the christmas decorations)
7. parnsips and cranberry sauce
8. some sort of luxury stilton
9. trivial pursuits
10. massive boxes of assorted chocolate biscuits

so, i suppose, provided i surround myself with all of the above, friends and family, it will be nice and festive tomorrow.

merry xmas everyone
x

Hello everyone

A sudden thought occured to me on the drive home (I do all my thinking in the car, music blaring).

I expect too much from my friends. People have told me this in the past but I have been unwilling to see myself as the kind of person who needs people. It's obvious tho, I do need people pretty badly at the moment and I keep myself at such a high level of 'I'm here, I'm here, I'm here' that if someone even takes a pigeon step out of line, I feel tremendously let down. My friend Kate is a huge advocate of this theory and always used to tell me when we were at University. 'Your problem is, you operate all your friendships on such a high, intense level, and most people... they just don't.'

She's completely right.
But it doesn't really stop me feeling rubbish about it.

I suppose the more I need my friends to say and do the right things, the more selfish I become, and the more guilty I feel about that selfishness. But I do need them now more than ever. It will be a difficult christmas without them.

I'm really nervous about the concert tonight.

In a few minutes I'm finishing work and I'm starting to freak out and hope it all goes well. I'm rather too far away from one of my best support mechanisms.

All in all is gets me thinking about the phrase 'you don't know what you've got til it's gone' which i sometimes think isn't true, especially because most of the time i'm aware of just how good people are to me and how much i need them. i think for me it's possibly more along the lines of 'you don't know what you've got until you need it', and then I suppose you learn what really matters.

I have a selection of thoughts this evening to share.

The first is a poem, I've found it in my favourite book of poems. It makes me think of several people I know. Maybe it reminds me of myself too.

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
and peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

My second thought is of a friend who has landed up miles away and who's absence I can actually feel a bit like a disappointing chocolate pudding which you put your spoon in to discover it's just plain sponge, no gooey bits. or, maybe a bit like a sofa which looks so appealing in a shop, you go over to sit on it and it's really not that squishy or comfortable, and so you spring back up again. it's praps a bit like a frosty morning and no hot chocolate when you return from the papershop. which is of course a funny way of saying i miss them, but it's a missing which comes out in other things.

My third thought is of christmas. The family had some painful discussions last night. Every year we have the 'what are we doing for christmas' conversation, and every year the plan changes slightly from what we've 'always' done. for about 16 years of my life we always did the same thing - huge family and friends party on xmas eve night. christmas day just the four of us at home, and then boxing day some sort of event somewhere else, which has become the horse racing at kempton park.
we are facing a difficult christmas with the departure of a figure head of our family, one of the central posts holding the ceiling up, so plans have changed. we are now having a 'quiet' christmas, with just the four of us going to the races on boxing day. we are replacing our huge xmas eve party with a party on the saturday before xmas. suddenly everything has become 'precious'. christmas can't be about the extended hoards this year. people want 'immediate family only' and i can't say that i blame them, but it saddens me.

tomorrow night my choir is doing our big xmas gig actually at my work. slightly terrifying. so my final thought is that i'm nervous of how it's all going to go, and trying to remember i don't have to sing by myself. 50 friends getting together over a glass of wine for a sing a long is all it really is. i hope it feels that way tomorrow evening.

goodnight all

Hello everyone

It's saturday, it's freezing cold and i've just returned from my first proper go at the christmas shops. everyone, of course, had the same idea as me. i've managed to get quite a long way down the list now. i took dad with me, mainly because he can't 'do' shopping alone, and he proceeded to cough all his way around the shopping centre. cough, cough, cough. 'oh, how about this shirt?' cough, cough, cough. we've concluded he has a 'stress-cough', it's psychological. it's not accompanied by any pain, or a cold or anything like that. it comes from his mind, like a nervous tick.

thinking of psychological pains, i've had a bit of an eventful week which resulted in me being curled up in bed on wednesday night with stomach ache purely caused by another person's pain. which is odd, especially because the other person's pain wasn't a stomach ache. i tend to get so caught up in wanting to help people that i sometimes physically feel the impact. the phrase 'my heart goes out to them' is over-used, but its meaning has never been more clear to me. at the moment my heart is pretty much 'out there'.

making positive choices or taking positive action out of incredibly tough and negative situations is never easy. quite often the hardest thing to do is to roll up your trousers and march into the freezing cold sea, mainly because you can't be certain when you'll next find land. i told someone this week that happiness is a fight. you have to fight on your own side to make yourself happy. i can find this pretty difficult a lot of the time. the worse the situation becomes, the harder it is to get 'out there' and fight hard in your own corner.

having encountered a friend in quite a lot of pain this week, i then went back to the office with a different perspective on the smaller issues i fight day after day. i'm beginning to get entirely sick of 'bullet points' or being told 'well, shouldn't this be a priority?' when to be honest, i think i know what the priorities are by now. yesterday i was even heard to mutter 'oh, grow some balls, for godsake' under my breath at a work colleague. it's unlike me to lose my patience with other people completely, because i try to crawl into someone's skin and have a look out of their eyes in order to rationalise the way they think of behave. this tends to help me think 'ok... that's not how i would handle it, but ok...' but after seeing a slice of reality this week i'm afraid i lost my patience quite a few times. life issues got put into perspective. 'grow some balls' is possibly an under-used phrase, anyway.

it will be a bizarre weekend on all fronts, i think. it will be a weekend of reconsidering exactly where the land lies, what my priorities should be, and what exactly the priorities of others in my life really are. whether i'm on the list where i think i should be. wandering around town with my christmas list today i did start to wonder 'how many lists am i on?'

hello all

i thought that i probably wouldn't blog for a while. too much on my plate. work really gets to me. but then i think if i can't blog about it, what can i do?
it's only tuesday and already i need the week to be over. i need to lie low, put the duvet cover over my head and turn the music up. it's like getting half way up everest day after day after day, and then sliding steadily down again while you sleep. or don't sleep, if you're anything like me.

the worst thing about the work pressure has to be the way it affects my interactions with those i care about. sometimes i just open and close my mouth and no words come out. i avoid returning calls. i rarely seem to reply to personal emails. i just don't want to start an email or a phone call with 'well, this is happening at work'. a friend said to me today, it's just a job, and i know i have friends in much worse positions than i am.

it's a vicious circle really. the more i worry about work, the more i need my friends. the more i need my friends, the more i worry that i'm acting bizarrely or irrationally, or that perhaps i need them to unnatural levels and nobody else obsesses as much as i do, gives as much as i give or takes as much as i take. there doesn't seem to be a way out. a good way to kill the pressure, or some of it, is to halve it. give half of it to someone else. but if i ever let people know the sorts of decisions i was facing i think i'd worry them more than if i don't.

what can't be cured must be endured, i guess.

hello everyone.

i have returned from a cold weekend in germany which was punctuated by feelings of loss, guilt and sadness. i must now sweep myself back up into the long-term timebomb which is my general existence, and keep on ticking for another week.

one of my closest friends lives in hamburg with her boyfriend. she's been there for over a year and i can't remember her ever telling me in that time about how happy she is, or even that things are 'just ok'. i long to hear her talk about being 'alright, i guess', even. she's put herself in a tricky situation where she shifted her entire life for the sake of a long distance relationship, and now she is left fitting into a complete life, whilst giving up her own.

when does compromise simply become sacrifice?

because of the amount of life changes she's faced, and because of living in a forgeign country where nothing seems to make sense (electric-points in the bathroom for plugging in your hairdryer, for example...think of the water + electicity MADNESS)... anyway because of all these changes she magnifies the situations she faces with her relationship to 110%, until things are said which really only meant exactly one thing but are doubled or tripled to mean horrible things which i absolutely hate her having to think about. i stood in the airport as i was leaving with her sobbing on my shoulder feeling myself a bit like a crab which had just had its shell removed. i was in no fit mental state to deal with that this weekend.

i've had my own moments of realisation this weekend too. i would give absolutely everything to each one of my friends and i'm not sure anymore exactly what i would ever receive in return. just like we can't influence another person's feelings, we equally can't influence another person's actions. i spend too much time desperate to be liked that i tend to forget there might not be too many people out there who would always drop everything for me in a crisis. it doesn't matter how far i'm willing to jump, or how high. there i was in germany, having flown hundreds of miles to be with a friend in a crisis, but i was left wondering what would happen to me in a similar situation.

who, if anyone, would i be picking up from arrivals?

x