Symbolic Forest

So, Big Dave has left, in a cloud of adulation and office stationery, getting ready to move house over the break. Everything is booked, and everything is ready to go, and when I get back after Christmas I will have someone new to share the office with.

Things have been a little strange lately, and not just because of Dave. Work has been very stressful, and other things have been very stressful too. I see someone and I want to try to help them, to save them from themself and from dangerous people, but I know they would not accept my help. The stress of all this, and all the work that has been piling on me at the office, makes me want to curl up for a thousand years, not sleeping, just dormant. A bit like King Arthur, maybe.

Talking of King Arthur, here’s more Susan Cooper:

For Drake is no longer sleeping in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, it all its beauty and marvellous joy.

Maybe that should be my epigram for the coming year. In the meantime, I’m going to occupy myself with the King William’s College General Knowledge Paper. I might only get a handful of answers,^* but it will keep me busy for a while.

* which may or may not include “Copernicus”, “Theodore Roosevelt”, and “The Waterloo and City Line”. That’s how random they are. Feel free to guess what questions I think those are the answers to.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, books, Celtic mythology, children's books, general knowledge, King Arthur, King William's College, literature, mythology, quiz, Silver On The Tree, Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, trivia.

Well, in addition to not being able to find any of the Christmas presents I want to buy in the shops; the computer has started misbehaving. It crashed in the middle of an update, and hasn’t been working right ever since. For those of you who have been on the internet since the early 90s: I’m posting this using the text-only browser Lynx. because it was the only one I could get working quickly whilst getting the rest of the machine back on its feet.

So if anything in this post looks a bit strange, that’s because I can’t really see what I’m doing, because the text-entry widget in Lynx is a bit…

The Plain People Of The Internet: So what was the explanation for all those other posts looking a bit strange, then?

Me: Har har.

More whining posts tomorrow; or if I’m in a good mood, I’ll tell you about the pantomime I went to see.

Update: Although Lynx lets you create posts in WordPress, it doesn’t seem to like you editing them. Grrr, again.

Keyword noise: computing, crash, IT support, Lynx, problems, Wordpress.

Samhain is coming up, so here are two vows for the next year.

Avoid getting close to people you don’t trust utterly. If you’re wary about somebody, you’re wary for a reason. The closer you let yourself get to somebody, the more you’re risking being hurt, even if neither of you realise it at the time.

Let people make their own mistakes. Some things can’t be taught; they have to be learned. Even if you can see they’re going to hurt themselves, sometimes you have to stand back and let them. If you try to stop them, they’re not going to listen, and you’re only going to make things worse.

This isn’t about you. Sometimes, when I post here, all I’m doing is talking to myself.

Keyword noise: introspection, mistakes, people, trust.

This week has mostly consisted of: coughing fits. Coughing until bent double, sometimes. It’s not fun, but it seems to be fading now.

The worst part is, I didn’t even take any time off work. My sinuses and ears were all aching, and due to the earache I was wobbly on my feet, and having trouble moving my jaw. At one point, I even fell down the stairs.* Why the hell I didn’t take any time off work, I don’t know. I might have had plenty of important work to do, but I sure as hell wasn’t up to doing it properly – I’d spend half an hour at a time changing the wrong file, and making Big Dave think I was about to cough up a lung. I’m unlikely to get any respect or kudos from the management for trying to get my work finished despite feeling shit, so why did I bother to do it?

* Why is it that I never lost my balance and fell over on flat ground? The one place I lose my balance has to be at the top of a flight of stairs, so I go thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk on my arse all the way down to the bottom.

Keyword noise: coughing, falling, sickness, sinuses, sore throat.

My throat feels like someone has been rubbing it with sandpaper. I’m sure that hasn’t actually happened. I’d remember.

Nevertheless, I have dragged myself into the office. Given that it’s Monday, everyone would get somewhat suspicious if I stayed at home and croaked down the phone at the office secretary. I’ve come in, and I’m medicating myself by sucking on jelly babies.^* They’re definitely soothing my throat more than cough sweets would.

* the secret sort that are actually made from real babies, of course

Keyword noise: illness, sickness, sore throat.

Things that would make my life better:

• A better job^*
• Living away from the parents
• A social life that is closer to home
• A partner who, also, was reasonably close to home
• The self-belief to always do what I want to do.
• The wisdom to know what I need to do.
• And the self-confidence to be content with what I can do, rather than being disappointed at not doing what other people can.

This post was brought to you by Self-Reflective Lunchtime Breaks, Ltd – purveyors of angst to twentysomethings everywhere. Feel free to add further suggestions.

* but “better” is such a nebulous term there.

Keyword noise: angst, self-reflection.

Talking about pets: the cat has vanished. Not near home, either.

The mother was taking him to the vet, on Monday, in his cat box. She was a few paces away from the surgery – a mile or so from home – and the cat box, in her words, “fell apart”. It’s a plastic affair, with a removable lid, and it’s picked up by the lid too; so if you haven’t done up the catches right, it will fall apart. And The Mother has never shown any ability to be able to do up the catches right. I have shown her how to do it many, many times, but she still refuses to learn.

The cat immediately scarpered, and hasn’t been seen since. Since then we’ve had thunderstorms and constant rain, and The Mother – when she isn’t out looking for him – keeps saying things like “oh the poor dear, I hope he’s found shelter somewhere.” Which makes me think: no, you’re not allowed to say that. You would be allowed to say that if the whole thing wasn’t completely your own fault.

More than anything, I’m angry. I’m always angry with my parents at some level, because they are intensely annoying people. This, though, has left me angrier than normal. My mother has always been annoyingly semi-competant, being able to grasp 90% of an idea, but missing out the 10% that actually gives it its shape and flavour.^* Most of the time it isn’t a big problem, but occasionally, it matters.

* Like the time she saw “Thai curry sauce” in the supermarket, the sort that you add to stir-fried vegetables, and thought “Ooh, I’ll make a Thai curry.” So she cooked some mince, heated it up in a pan with some tinned kidney beans, and added the stir-fry sauce to it. Ta-daa, “Thai curry”. It wasn’t inedible, but she didn’t seem to understand that she’d actually made something entirely different.

Keyword noise: The Cat, cooking, disappeared, lost, missing, pets, The Mother.

I am my own worst enemy.

I’ve never been good at socialising, and I’ve never been good at meeting new people. This means that when I’m in a crowded place, with few people I know, lots that I don’t, I panic. I shut down. I sit in a corner on my own, feeling awful, assuming that everybody else there knows everybody else, that I’m the only lonely person there, that I may as well just go home because noone else would want to talk to me anyway. No doubt this is all nonsense, but it’s what I convince myself.

I should learn that none of it is true, that I could go up to strangers and talk to them, if I wanted. Because once I do start having conversations, interacting, doing stuff, I end up having a wonderful time. The only problem is that I’m rarely able to make that first step for myself. That’s what I need to learn to be able to do.

Keyword noise: loneliness, meeting people, making friends, shyness, socialising.

Bleurgh. Cold. All blocked up. Runny nose. No appetite. Can’t stop sneezing.

Don’t think I’ve been near any seabirds lately, though…

Keyword noise: bird flu, cold, flu, sickness.

Well, I was glad Gordon Brown did take my hints on a couple of things.^* I’m just disappointed that he didn’t single out blue cars for rebates.

Current small reasons to feel pleased with myself: I’ve managed to completely avoid watching anything at all to do with the Commonwealth Games, even though one of the medal-winners is a teacher at my old school. Hopefully I’ll manage to keep avoiding it until all the fuss is over again.

Current small reasons to get pissed off: the computer keeps crashing, usually at the most inappropriate moments. I know what the problem is: a very obscure bug in the disk controller driver which very few people have come across, and nobody seems to know the cause of.^** Bah.

On the other hand, I do have a large box of biscuits on my desk at the moment. But not for long, I suspect. Hurrah!

* although, to be fair, everyone else in the country had already vaguely guessed the road tax changes.

*** it only comes up if you have a Promise SATA disk controller, a Maxtor SATA disk, and are running one of some Linux 2.6 subversions. But not all – the problem apparently disappeared in one revision of the driver, only to come back in the next.

Keyword noise: biscuits, budget, Commonwealth Games, computing, crash, economics, Gordon Brown, Linux.