Babel Fish

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

― Nelson Mandela

I have an ear for languages. I rarely progress past a certain level of fluency - around the point when the grammar starts to get really hard, and I have to put a whole lot more work into it, I usually fall down. I don't always find the time or energy (or money!) to take classes, and I've never been someone who studies well on my own - I much prefer the structure of school to distance-learning, even if I only go to class once a week.

Common wisdom has always been that if you want kids to find languages easy, then raise them speaking more than one, because they're much easier to pick up as a child. I don't know how true this is for everyone, but it's certainly been that way for me. The surprising thing, though, is that some of the languages that come most naturally are ones I had little or no exposure to as a child.

I grew up in Menorca, which means I had to know Castilian (regular) Spanish and Catalan - schools teach in both, switching back and forth between, and businesses use both or either. (Government changed from Castilian Spanish to Catalan in the last eighties and early nineties, much to the horror of many of the island's inhabitants - even in 2014 it's still common to find road signs defaced and the Castilian spelling of things written in. Frankly, I don't blame them. I don't like Catalan either.)

In addition to Catalan and Castilian Spanish, many inhabitants of Menorca speak a dialect called Menorquín or Menorquí, which is spoken nowhere but the island. Kids don't want to be left out, and the town kids spoke it while playing, so I learned it too, though never as well as I'd have liked.

After moving back to England, I attended a private school for a while, where they taught Latin. Classics are avoided in state schools in England (though some let you take them as extras, after school), but my little private girls' school taught Latin as part of the general curriculum. I only took it there for a year - the school closed the year after I started learning it - but it's something I'd like to go back to at some point. I enjoy the structure of Latin.

In 1992, I had an au pair from Northern Spain, who gave me daily lessons in Basque. The uninitiated might think this is just another Spanish dialect, easily learned - wrong. Basque is what's known as a language isolate - it's not related to any other language on the planet - and I found it brutally hard, and never continued.

All English school kids learn some amount of French, or at least they did in my day. My school made you take French from Year 7 until the end of Year 9, and then a second language (Spanish or German; I took Spanish because I was lazy) for Year 8 and Year 9. In Year 10 you can carry on either or both, but you have to do at least one (I dropped French - there just weren't enough hours in the week. I needed Hermione's Time-Turner). So I took three years of French, plus four extra years of Spanish, and got to a reasonable level of fluency in both, though I wish I'd carried on with French instead of the useless art and drama classes I ended up taking. I also wish I'd tackled German instead of lazily choosing a language I already spoke - though I had a German boyfriend all through high school, it is one language that I've never learned and always wanted to. Though I did pick up ancient Nordic runes from my German boyfriend - not a language per se, but I've always liked symbols and codes.

I picked up basic Greek in my last two years of high school, purely for fun. I needed to know the alphabet anyway, for math and physics (and occasionally biology) so it didn't seem like a hardship to learn a bit more. It was handy when we went on holiday to Corfu for two weeks at the end of Year 10, too - all the road signs were in Greek, so I ended up the designated navigator every day.

After school, I fell into Italian, sort of against my will. I briefly dated a guy in Spain (when I moved back there in my teens) who was from Naples. He spoke no English; I spoke no Italian at the time. I figured we could meet in the middle and speak Spanish - we were in Spain, after all - but no. He couldn't handle Spanish. So I learned basic Italian. Though the relationship was brief, I used the Italian again when we had an Italian lodger who avoided house rules by refusing to learn English (I can say "please flush the toilet" with the best of them!) and a third time when my doctor ordered me to take up opera to help improve my lungs after repeated bouts of pneumonia. Now I'm supposed to be learning properly, in preparation to live in Milan, but my plans keep falling by the wayside - once again there are not enough hours in the day to do all that needs doing. The handy thing about being brought up speaking Spanish is that Catalan, Italian and Portuguese (which I don't speak, but can sometimes translate) - and even French at times - come much more easily, as the Romance languages have similar structures.

When I got the head injury in 2005 and lost my memory, I lost many of my language skills. D'oh. I can still read and translate - poorly - in Spanish and Catalan and sometimes Italian and French, but can't have a conversation. I can read the Greek letters but have no idea what any of the words mean. The funny thing about my memory since the brain damage is that I still have some of the information in my brain, but it's no longer organised the way it used to be and I often don't know that I have information about a subject until I need to access it. Even nine years later, it's common for a subject to come up (language or anything else), upon which I find I have a wealth of knowledge to impart. Afterwards friends will look at me like, "I didn't know you knew anything about..." (Australian snakes / the Dogon people of Mali / how to build ships / cross-pollination of pepper plants / 18th century French court clothing / etc ad infinitum...) Yeah, I didn't know I knew anything either, till I needed it. Due to this oddity, I hold on to the possibility that my language skills will make a miraculous return if I ever find myself in the middle of a bunch of Greeks / Italians / Menorquí people.

After the brain damage and the resulting fallout, I needed a change, so one day, out of the blue, I bought myself a DS game called My Japanese Coach. I was hooked from the first lesson. That autumn I booked myself on a part-time Japanese course at our local uni, and here I am four years later. Everyone thought I was crazy and tried to discourage me. "Why do you want to learn Japanese? You've never learned anything like it before. You can't use it in a career..." Both reasons were exactly why I wanted to learn it. Japanese was the first thing I'd ever done, in my entire life, that was mine. It wasn't for school, it wasn't future career planning, it wasn't because it would help me do my job better or because I was dating a guy who spoke it or because I intended to take a vacation there. It was for no reason other than it was fun and I wanted to. While I'd always enjoyed learning other languages - and everything else I learned - I'd never done anything in my life purely because I wanted to. Every choice I'd ever made, everything I'd learned, every book I'd read and CD I'd listened to, every hobby I'd done, had been about either pleasing my parents, taking recommendations from friends and boyfriends, or acquiring skills that might help me somewhere down the line. Japanese wasn't any of those things. I didn't think I'd ever use it. Japanese was mine.

I'm off school this semester, due to lack of money and the pressures of moving house, but in the autumn I plan to go back to Japanese and pick up Mandarin, if I'm near a school that teaches it. (My current university does, but I don't know where I'll be living come autumn.) I'd also like to start Cantonese, but I haven't found a part-time course yet. Those two are half-fun and half-future planning. With China being the economic power it is these days, it seems smart to speak the languages, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enthralled by the challenge. It's been a while since I took up something right from scratch, with no prior knowledge - I think Japanese was the last thing, back in 2009. I always like to have something to get my teeth into.

Not all languages come well to me. I seem to have a mental block against Russian and Hebrew - I've tried to learn them several times, and it's never gone well. It's not the writing systems either - in addition to the western alphabet I read Greek upper and lowercase, Nordic runes, hiragana, katakana and some kanji; there's no logical reason why I shouldn't be able to learn Russian and Hebrew. It's just a mental thing. I've never tried Arabic, and that is one that I really should have learned a long while ago, given my job. There are a dozen languages that would help me in my job as a social worker in South and East London - Yoruba, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are at the top of the list. And I want to learn Vietnamese and Korean some day, just because they're beautiful.

If I lived another hundred years I would only make a dent in all the things I want to learn.

I can never decide whether that fact makes me sad or happy.

Holding Back The Darkness

WARNING: dark and triggery.

I've never raised a child. I was foster mommy for two years to a teenager, and I've played the roles of surrogate mom, big sister, counsellor and teacher to three dozen other teens over the years, but I've never been responsible for raising a child fully; for instilling values in someone.

I've read a lot about parenting. All the books in the world can't make up for lack of hands-on experience. That said, time and books and interactions with other humans have taught me some of the key things that kids need. Not all, but some. They need love, support, room to explore and learn for themselves and still know someone will catch them when they fall. They need discipline that's firm but not cruel, and that knows when to bend. They need space to grow up gradually and take on more responsibilities and privileges as they grow, rather than being wrapped in cotton wool for eighteen years and then overnight handed freedom that they won't have learned to use wisely. They need to know that mistakes are okay as long as you learn from them, that they don't have to know everything and get everything right, that one of the main things that makes any relationship strong is the ability to forgive and be forgiven.

They also need to get gentle reality checks. Kids are dreamers. They're excitable. They need to know that dreams are good but better if they have solid foundations; that hope is always a good thing if you also have resilience when things go wrong. That life is a mix of good and bad. That sometimes they won't get that job offer no matter how hard they try; that sometimes they'll get their heart broken; that not everything is fair. That they're wonderful and loved and special to their parents, but they're not the centre of the universe.

I never got the memo for that last bit.

I was born for one purpose and have lived for thirty years with that single goal in mind: keeping my mother alive and sane. From the first time that my stepfather and brother patted me on the head and told me to be a big girl and look after mom - I think I was two at the time - my mother's wellbeing has been my main, if not sole, concern.

I clearly remember the first time my mother tried to kill herself. At least, the first time since I was born. Oddly, I don't know how old I was. I can use a few markers to estimate - we're at Daddy Mike's house on Beaumont Avenue, and I'm old enough to read, and Tony still has the light blue car with the tail fins, so I'm somewhere between 2 and 5 - but I can't pinpoint it further than that. Mama's been acting strangely for a few days, and this morning she dropped me at Daddy Mike's house and then disappeared. She's somewhere in the house, I know, because she guards me militantly and wouldn't leave without saying goodbye - she doesn't even let me stay with babysitters, and never goes out alone. Daddy's wringing his hands and looking worried, and I know he doesn't know how to deal with me - he's not used to looking after me, so I'm trying to be unobtrusive and not make trouble for anyone. He's given me orange-and-pineapple squash and some of those hard biscuits with the scalloped edges and the raisins (the type that come in a tea time selection pack and are always left after I eat the jam ones and the chocolate ones) - two things I hate, but I don't complain. I want mama. But daddy says she wants to be alone and that I should let her be, and I have to stay in the front room with my squash and biscuits and book.

It's a book of children's poetry, half as tall as I am, and it's a struggle to keep it on my lap, but I sit on the pale blue couch with the white diamond pattern, with my doll and brown bear by my side and the book on my lap, and I get caught up in nursery rhymes about the sun and moon, and mice, and the jabberwocky, and a spinning dreidel - what's a dreidel? Maybe daddy knows, but daddy's gone off somewhere too - and flowers and cats and ribbons:

Run a little this way,
Run a little that,
Fine new flowers
For a fine straw hat.
A fine straw hat
For a lady fair -
Run around and turn about
And jump in the air!

Run a little this way,
Run a little that,
White silk ribbon
For a black silk cat.
A black silk cat
For the Lord Mayor's wife,
Run around and dance about
And jump for your life!

Mama said I could have my own cat, but I think she's forgotten. I want a black silk cat with a white silk ribbon, and a straw hat with flowers on. Maybe if I find mama she'll take me to buy a cat? I put the book down and search for mama. I don't find her in the house, or daddy, but I can hear someone outside so I walk into the back garden and follow the noise.

Mama's not in the garden. She's in the shed halfway down the garden. The door's shut, but I can hear sounds coming from it, like somebody's hurt, so I open the door. Mama's hiding, sitting on the floor behind an old mattress with her knees pulled up to her chest. She's crying - that's nothing new, because she's always crying - but this is different, she's crying and choking and it sounds like she's trying to scream but her throat won't make the screaming sounds. She's chewing on her hand and wrist, shoving them into her mouth and down her throat, and she's been sick several times, all down the front and the arm of the black rollneck sweater that I like so much, but it's not enough, she keeps making herself sicker and sicker, clawing at her face and mouth and throat, and she's babbling about how maybe if she takes things to make her sick like Micky did then she'll die like Micky did - Micky was my brother, he got sick in his sleep and died a few years ago - and how she wants to die. I'm there, right in front of her, begging her to stop, but she doesn't even see me.

I scream. It seems like I'm screaming forever, but eventually Daddy comes. He shoves me aside and screams at mama to tell him what she's done. What did you take, Carol? Drugs? Rat poison?

I don't know what happens then. Everything goes blank for a while. Mama goes away, I don't know for how long, and then when she comes back she's still sad but she pretends to be happy. Until anything goes wrong. She gets sad easily when things go wrong. If I scrape my knee or hit my head, she falls apart and cries and wails about what a bad mother she is. If I'm ever rude or ungrateful, she gets angry and then gets sick and cries.

So I guess I just have to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, right?

And this is what I did for years. Tried to be perfect, to make sure everything in life was as close to perfect as was possible. I went to school and laughed and made sure everyone knew everything was fine. I got good grades and scored the highest marks on tests. I was friendly and sweet and well-liked, but not *too* friendly, which was a difficult balancing act - I needed to be popular enough that my mom would be proud and happy, but not so popular that it would make demands on my time that would cut into my time with her. If I kept life running along smoothly, if I made sure I was never sad and never angry and never rude or insensitive or cruel, then mama would stay happy, or happy enough, and if she stayed happy then she would stay alive.

Some kids go off the rails when they have this kind of upbringing. Some, like me, gain an overactive sense of responsibility and a tremendous capacity for guilt. Because sometimes I wasn't happy. Sometimes I was sad or angry or rude or insensitive, and I made my mother cry, or scream, or get sick. And every time this happened, I mentally and emotionally - and at times, physically - flagellated myself. I still do, any time I step out of line even a little. Not just with my mother - with anyone. The smallest offence that I commit feels like a mortal sin to me.

My mother, ironically enough, took courses in psychology and grief therapies over the years, and eventually became a counsellor. I say ironically because, while she became excellent at helping others to cope with their tragedies, she is almost entirely lost when it comes to understanding her daughter. Some post-traumatic amnesia came into play with her, and she has little to no memory of the years of meltdowns and suicide threats. Sometimes she will talk about what an idyllic childhood I had - and to be fair, when it wasn't hideous it was wonderful, there was nothing inbetween - and as she cannot remember, she cannot understand where my crushing burden of guilt and responsibility comes from. Nobody in the family talks about that dark time, nobody even acknowledges that anything happened. To acknowledge it would be to admit that leaving a grief-stricken, suicidal woman who'd previously struggled with bipolar disorder and probable borderline personality disorder in the care of a child under five was not an okay thing to do. And nobody wants to admit that.

Ironic it is, that a family who are so good at talking the talk about the need for openness and good communication, are so very good at sweeping things under the carpet, both amongst ourselves and when dealing with the world in general. We give the impression of being a close family. We give the impression of being strong, happy, mentally healthy, sociable.

After she recovered from that first breakdown, my mom had others occasionally, when anything went badly - but never in public. Behind closed doors she was often sick or depressed or occasionally raging (although not all, or even the majority of the time - I don't mean to give the impression that the meltdowns were a daily, or even a weekly, thing; indeed much of the time everything was happy-happy, the way manic-depressives often are), but in public she was the charming ingenue that everybody loved. This has continued to this day - although she is something of a recluse now, and it's a struggle to get her out of bed some days, when she DOES go out she shines golden light upon everyone she meets. Everybody loves my mother. Literally, everybody. I can't think of a single person who doesn't get on well with her. There have been a few people in the past who weren't captivated by her, but all, bar none, have come round in time. Even the ex-wives of her past boyfriends, even the widow of the neighbour she had a fling with - they chat to her in a friendly manner and tell me constantly what a nice person she is. My friends today all love her. My friends from school all used to wish she was their mom.

It is odd that a woman so universally liked doesn't have any real friends. But over the last decade, and probably a few more years besides, she hasn't been willing to put in the effort to make and keep people close to her. For years I reminded, nagged, cajoled and occasionally bribed her to return phone calls or make coffee dates or write letters to any of the people who were constantly trying to keep in touch with her. Now I've stopped trying, and they've stopped calling and writing, although if we run into them at any time, they still want to chat with her. I don't know if she's lonely. Sometimes she'll say something about how she doesn't have any friends, but any time I make suggestions about how she can meet people, she finds a reason to reject them.

Nothing ever mattered much to mom other than her husband and children. Her husband was gone long ago - my mom and my Daddy Mike (who is not my biological father) were separated long before I was born, although they are only in the process of divorcing now - and when we lost my brother, a part of her died too. Tony, my surviving brother, was already in university at the time Micky died, and he has never moved back home with my mom. He was established in the life of a normal young man, and has progressed through life in a similar way to most of his peers. Oh, he has had his ups and downs, but his life has been reasonably normal. He had already had eighteen years of normality before our family broke. He knew how to carry on the pattern once the dust settled.

By contrast, I have been the touchstone that links my mother to the world. I have been the caretaker, the security blanket to which she clings so tightly.

I didn't go out much with the neighbourhood kids when I was younger. I was always the one who wasn't allowed to leave the garden. I barely dated in high school. The few casual boyfriends that I had, I hid from everyone lest word get back to my mother that I was doing something risky like dating. I am now thirty years old and I have never had a proper boyfriend, never lived with a man except the one who rented a room from my mother, never taken a vacation with a man or alone. Never had someone that I was committed to above all else. How could I, when I was already committed?

I have had a succession of part-time, low-paying jobs, most of them temporary, because for years I have listened to her worries of how my health is too poor to handle a normal job, how I am too fragile to work full-time at something that would be demanding and pay well. I currently work from home, 24 hours a week, for which I bring home about £2500 a year. Yes, I am disabled and physically fragile. But I do not believe that this should have prevented me from trying to do a normal job. Plenty of people who are sick and disabled work outside the home. Plenty of sick and disabled people go to university and try for a degree, even if it takes them twice as long to complete as the average student, but although I was accepted to five medical schools - including Brunel, which runs a program that gets more than a thousand undergrad applications every year and accepts eighty of them - I let myself be convinced that I couldn't handle going to school full-time.

I have never ridden a motorbike. Never parachuted. Never scuba dived in the ocean (though I trained in a pool) or gone white-water rafting. My mother begs me to "PLEASE be careful, and don't overdo" when I go to the gym to spend half an hour on the treadmill and crosstrainer.

I will be running and walking a 5K in June, the first physical challenge I have ever set myself. It's important to me. Nobody will be there to watch me. Mom thinks it would be too nerve-wracking for her to be there. She doesn't say whether she's worried about my nerves or her own.

I lived away from my mother once, for a year, to attend a sixth form college when I was 17. She seemed reasonably healthy then. She was living in Spain, enjoying better physical health than normal (in addition to her emotional issues, she has bad osteoarthritis, and has had a hip replacement and many surgeries on her spine), and had friends, including a steady man friend. We coped with the separation quite well, until my health started to deteriorate and she came home to take care of me. Since I moved back into her home at the end of that year, I have spent less than forty nights away from her, most of them spent house-sitting for my father and stepmother, or visiting them. In the last fourteen years the sum total of my vacations have been a day and two nights in Germany in 2004 (with my mother), four days visiting a boyfriend in Liverpool in 2008 (the one and only time I ever put my foot down and said that I was going to visit this man whether she liked it or not), and one night alone in the Hatfield Travelodge - five miles away - for my birthday last year.

The funny thing about all this is that people look in from the outside and think that I'm getting a pretty cushy deal. Living at home with your mother looking after you, cooking your dinner and doing your laundry! Rent-free! What an ungrateful daughter you must be, to think that you could ever complain! You should be thanking her every day, and paying your share of the rent and bills! What people don't see is that I spend hours every day helping her bathe and dress, reminding her to eat or to put on more clothes if she's cold, moving furniture and boxes because she can't decide where she wants them, sorting out her medication, emptying her bedpans, washing her hair, buying groceries, trying to rid the house of some of the hoards that she's managed to acquire, seeing to accounts, making sure mail is read and answered, trying to make sure she gets out of bed and dressed every day, trying to keep things clean and tidy - almost all of it against her will. The hours that I'm not actively working, I'm on call. I'm on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, aside from the few hours a week that I spend in class or grocery shopping or at the gym. I rarely go out for anything other than those three things. I sleep lightly and hypervigilantly, on constant alert for sickness or asthma attacks. I try not to lose my patience. If I did, it wouldn't be the end of the world - while her physical health has declined greatly in the last few years, and she's become more reclusive, she's also been blessed with much more stable moods, and if I ever say something insensitive or impatient or snappy, at worst it causes an argument and some hurt feelings, and often it just gets laughed off. I still beat myself up over those moments. It's become a habit by now.

I do my own laundry, btw, as well as hers most of the time, and cook for myself if I'm ever hungry, which I'm not often.

And I am very vulnerable to criticism when it comes to my relationship with my mother, and my treatment of her. In my head I know that I am not rotten or neglectful or cruel. But my heart and gut never manage to get the message. You would think that with as much criticism as I've taken over it, as many people who've accused me over the years of being a terrible daughter, that I'd be used to it. I'm not. Every time someone accuses me of mistreating her, of not honouring her the way kids should honour their parents, of being cold or mean, it sinks into me, a stone in the depths of my belly that I can't ever reach to remove. Any time someone accuses me of being a bad daughter it just echoes everything that I've ever told myself, everything about myself that I hate, that I've hated ever since I gained the ability to think. Everything that I've felt deep down since I was born and my brother died, since my birth became the catalyst for a chain of events that broke us. That voice inside tells me that I broke my family, and anything that I have to do to patch it up - even though those patches are never anything but temporary bandaids - any sacrifices that I have to make, are nothing less than I deserve. No matter how much the things people say hurt, they're only echoes of what I've always believed about myself. No judgements that you can make about me will be harsher than my own.

I love my mother, and I know she loves me more than anything. She carried me for nine months, gave birth to me, nursed me as a child and then again as a sick adult, lived a life of poverty because of her beloved parasite daughter. I owe her. So I did what had to be done, and if I had to, I'd do it again. As a teenager - and sometimes an adult - I did it grudgingly, and I regret that more than I can say, and will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it.

Taylor Swift Is Kinda Awesome, Really

I'm not heavily into celebrities. There are a few that I've met and fallen madly in like with because they were so damn nice (Bon Jovi, Alexander McQueen, Rich Cronin from LFO, Eminem, Xzibit, Johan Djourou) and a handful that I'd be genuinely starstruck meeting (Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Prof Brian Cox, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of the Obamas, Anderson Cooper, George Takei, Example) as well as a few dozen that I quite like, based on interviews they've given.

There are also hundreds that barely enter my radar. I don't read tabloids. I rarely watch reality TV. The only magazine I buy regularly is New Scientist, and occasionally Scientific American.

But I do like to read about Taylor Swift.

I'm not a superfan - actually I'm sort of ambivalent on her music in general. I liked a handful of her songs and didn't care for others. I never bought any of her albums, though I got a few of the songs from iTunes. But I google her every few months because I'm always intrigued by her love affairs.

Most of the world seems to agree: when it comes to love, Taylor Swift is a car crash. Everything from her relationship with the four-years-younger Conor Kennedy (which brought a lot of the haters out, with cries of "cradle-snatcher" and even "pedophile") when she was 22, to her insta-love with Harry Styles, to the infamous lyrical blowouts with Joe Jonas and John Mayer, Taylor attracts a lot of attention for her rollercoaster of a love life, much of it negative.

But the thing that really gets me about her is that she keeps trying. I don't know the girl, so I don't know if  she's a Pollyanna or just a severely codependent chick who needs a man to feel validated. But I find her persistence weirdly inspiring.

No matter how bad the breakup - and there have been some bad ones - the kid keeps falling in love, keeps opening her heart. And it gets trampled on. And instead of getting bitter and jaded, she opens it up again for the next guy, just in case this time is different. She never stops hoping.

You could view this in a negative light, and say that she never learns from her mistakes; never gains any insight or maturity. You'd probably be right. But despite that, I can't help but admire someone who holds their heart out in front for everyone to see, and doesn't apologise for it.

I don't want to be Taylor Swift. I like my life to float along peacefully and evenly. If she were a friend of mine she'd probably drive me crazy. But as far as being open-hearted goes, I think I could learn a lot from her.

Christmas Wishes - Or Whinges

I am quite bereft today, since the universe has a sadistic sense of timing. My popularity - which waxes and wanes worse than the moon does - always seems to be at a high when I can't take advantage of it. Yesterday I had to turn down four invitations for company and socialising. FOUR. My brother and SIL wanted me to come down to Worthing along with mom, to see them, my SIL's mother and my utterly beloved nephews, one of whom made a surprise Christmas return from Australia, where he's been for the last year, following a year in Asia. All in all I haven't seen Jay for two and a half years and I'm gutted to be missing him right now. And Craig, who I am every bit as fond of as Jay, is probably missing my cakes - family occasions are the only times he breaks from a strict diet (he's studying sports sciences and is a bit of a health nut) and I'd promised applesauce cake and Swedish chokladbollar and maybe Moravian Sugar Cake.

Ugh.

My friend Sasha, who I haven't seen in a year and a half because she's been in Russia amongst other places, wanted to get together and talk about men - which, y'all will know, is something I'm always willing to do. Adam wanted to do movie night - we've been trying to set a date to watch the first and second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies for months now, and our schedules never seem to match, and on the few occasions they do we've ended up doing something else entirely. And Siji, my ex from Manchester, is in London visiting his family for Christmas and wanted to hang out. I haven't seen him for over a year either.

And I am stuck in bed with flu. I came down with it Christmas morning, and thought it was a cold, but now I've progressed to the aches and fever. I feel vile. Mom is down at my brother's - praise the Lord, two days where I don't have to look after anyone's needs but my own! - and I'm too sick to make the most of it. I had so many plans to beat the post-Christmas gloom. Nazia and I were going to go shopping at Stratford Westfield - I need to go to Victoria's Secret, and I wanted her opinion on the Phase Eight dress, since I finally have enough money to buy it but still feel awful spending £79 (the sale price!) on a dress so I need coaxing and telling that it looks perfect. And I had tickets for ice skating at Canary Wharf that I got from wowcher or groupon or one of those places - normally I can't afford the Christmas skating rinks - and was hoping to drag Siji along.

To put into perspective how awful it felt for me to turn down four invitations, the last social thing I did (ie not class - although we did bring food and drinks on the last lesson - or shopping) was Thanksgiving dinner with mom and Curt, my BFF. I think that was the 30th of November. The time before that was the first week of Nov, when Adam and I went to the fireworks display. The time before THAT was Chrissie's birthday party in July or August, before the surgeries.

I'm not the social butterfly type, particularly when I'm sick or recovering from illness, as I was all autumn. I occasionally joke that I'm more like a social moth - while you're all out there being gregarious and sipping nectar and looking pretty and making the world bright, I'll be off in a back room banging my head against the light and eating your clothes.

But I do occasionally feel the need to see people - even I get tired of work and school and reading - and it bums me out no end if on the few occasions people want to see me, I have to turn it down.

No point to this post, I'm just whinging.

That all said, being stuck in bed does make a girl appreciate the slinky-but-comfy nightdress from mom and the awesome books from various people and the totally banging slipper-boots from Chrissie (pics to follow) all the more. :)

Shards of Thought

Sometimes the things I have to research for this job depress the hell out of me.

And other times...other times, the logical scientist part of me, the part that's cut off from any emotional feelings I have about the stories I hear at work, the part that makes Dr Chris use terms like "depersonalization" and "derealization"...that part is nearly as intrigued by the effects of tragedy on human psyches as it is heartbroken that such things happen at all.

And I feel like there's something deeply wrong with me, that I'm almost as fascinated as I am appalled.

...yeah.

Yup, Another Thing To Sign Up For

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Doing What Needs To Be Done

WARNING: Contains graphic medical details which may disturb.

I'm publishing this from the Blogger iPhone app, since I'm just too damn tired to turn on the computer - which is why it's not formatted with the normal fonts and colours, unless I figure out a way to do that from here. Probably I'll have to do it next time I turn the computer on. Which will hopefully be soon - I have some Goodreads books that I've read recently that need to have the data input, and I'm still trying to keep that up to date with books I've recently read, even though the boxes full of books that I was working on inputting pre-reading are on hiatus temporarily.

You may not know what I'm referring to. It's ok, *I* know what I mean.

I'm tired. With fibromyalgia I'm usually tired, but it's unusually strong and pervasive tiredness right now. I had surgery in September - nothing serious, or at least it shouldn't have been. Just women's problems. But I didn't recover well. After the surgery I bled and cramped up every time I got out of bed for nearly two months. Not little cramps and spotting, either - worse pain than during my worst periods (and I have endometriosis and PCOS; my worst periods can be very bad indeed) that made me scream and weep, even with my reasonably high pain threshold. Rivers of blood - during the worst bit, I lost half a pint of blood every day for ten days, maybe two weeks. (No, that's not a guesstimate, either. Make of that what you will.) The doctors were talking about blood transfusions and D&Cs, which I mercifully managed to avoid.

Blood tends to restore most of itself within a few days, and a person my size can probably lose two pints comfortably and twice that without any major danger. (Now, that IS an estimate, I don't know exactly how much blood my body holds.) Half a pint a day certainly wouldn't kill me, but it made me feel like I'd been hit by a truck.

Iron, though - that takes time to build up again. In the UK, women are only allowed to donate blood once every sixteen weeks (other countries vary) because the iron levels take so long to come back to normal - and at a blood drive they only take a pint, usually. So I've been horribly anemic for the last few months. I've been eating spinach and broccoli near enough every day - dear God, am I sick of broccoli! - and red meat when I can, which probably isn't often enough, but my stomach won't tolerate beef more than occasionally, and I can't eat lamb or offal meats at all. And I have iron supplements. But I still feel like shit. Since the surgery I've gone from being someone who gets by most nights on five hours of sleep (sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less) to being someone who needs at least ten hours, preferably twelve or thirteen, just to function for the basics.

I'm having a hard time just getting to school one night a week. The time change particularly hit me this year - it feels like the clocks went back three or four hours, not one. I look at the clock on any given evening, thinking it's tennish, and it's usually 6pm, and I find myself falling asleep an hour into class. Paul coerced me into teaching this year, much to my disgust, but now I'm grateful for it since there's no way I can go back to the helpline and pull 4 12-hour shifts in a week. I had to do one shift last week when Cindy was sick, and just staying awake and manning the phone for twelve hours felt like running a marathon.

So I'm teaching a 90-minute or 2-hour class Mondays and Fridays, and setting (and marking) essays, as well as various paperwork. I barely work twenty hours a week, which isn't good for my bank account, but is better than nothing. I'm not teaching English as much as critical thinking, although we read quite a few stories and parts of books. This last week I've been lazy, though, and set essays from films instead.

School is okay, aside from the falling asleep, but it doesn't quite have the spark that it's had for the last few years. In an effort to make more money, the uni threw two classes together, so we started out with far too many people (although several have dropped out) and yet another new teacher. She's a fine teacher, but I do miss Takana, who I thought of as a friend as well as a sensei. I wouldn't be quite so annoyed about the blended class if they hadn't already put the tuition fees up - or more accurately, split the year into three semesters instead of two. The courses for the last four years have run for 14-15 weeks; now they run 10 weeks each - but they charge the same fees as they did for the 15-week course. Meaning that for a 30-week school year, we're paying an extra 50% on tuition. That's a MASSIVE leap in fees, and I feel that the uni should have been satisfied with that rather than sticking 30 of us, at all different learning levels, together in 1 class. 30 is far too many for a practical language class, even with the dropouts. We previously had 15-16 at our highest (and that was a few too many, when you all have to take turns to have conversations) and 8-10 at our lowest (which was a good number).

In addition, I haven't managed to really bond with anyone in the class, although I know Andrew and Nuala from last year, and a guy named Chris from my first class with Magdalena, and there's a nice girl (I think named Suzanne?) who I ride the bus with and chat to. I don't know if it's me being withdrawn because I don't feel well, or the fact that most of the class knew each other before, or if it's just the people in it, but I don't feel close to anyone. I've never had that - in my previous classes, we either had a really friendly group (as with the groups Takana ran) or I formed a deep, abiding friendship (as with K, who was in Magdalena's class. I don't remember the rest of the people from Magdalena's class very well, because K and I seemed to stick together most of the time, and that was just fine).

It's a little disorienting, because I can only remember one time in my life before that I found it difficult to make friends. That was in Sue's biology class, in 2002 - I was retaking the class after I had to drop out of Jon's bio class the previous year when I got sick and didn't finish my coursework, and on the first lesson she made it quite clear that she had tremendous contempt for me for having to retake. She told me flat-out that she didn't want me in the class, that I didn't deserve to be there - yes, a teacher actually said that to a disabled 18-year-old girl - and every time I made a mistake (which I didn't do often, I was a straight-A student in biology) she'd mock me to the class. ("Look, Miss Frost isn't perfect after all! Careful, or you might end up failing and having to repeat a year like she did!") They followed her lead, and I didn't make any friends there, although I still had friends in my other classes, including Curt and Sanjit in second-year chem, so I didn't feel the loss that much. Although I didn't stay in the class more than a few months, and made a formal complaint about her to the college when I left. Frankly I wish I'd given some sort of walking-out speech to her in front of the rest of the students rather than just not showing up one day; maybe they'd have learned something about being sheeple. Although I can't really blame them - a teacher should be someone you CAN follow the lead on.

That situation is far removed from this one - my new teacher is nice, and the students aren't hostile - they're just quiet. The lack of friendship so far may well be my doing, anyway - I haven't been at my most charming, since I'm barely awake by the time I get there. But it IS disorienting, nonetheless, to not walk into a room of strangers and make friends within a half hour. I've always made friends so easily. I have trouble *keeping* them, mind you, but I make them easily.

Throw on top of all that the fact that I no longer have my carer's free bus pass - Mom still hasn't gotten onto the council, and I can't be the one to do it, it has to be her who applies - and I'm now spending a tenner a day on getting to school and back, and you can see why the whole thing is feeling more like a chore than the pleasure it's been for the last four years.

I'm okay in myself, it's just things getting on top of me a little. I'm not depressed (although my moods have been up and down with the female problems - hormones are crazy things) but I'm just so tired. The tiredness increases the muscle pains - although that could also be related to the iron levels - and makes it hard to remember to eat and breathe, putting me at risk for chest infections. I realise the ridiculousness of that sentence - you're probably thinking, "FFS, who forgets to breathe?" but I do, when I'm this tired. I'm also on a 1200-calorie diet, created by Teeny Crazy Lady Dietician, which probably doesn't help with the tiredness, but that's another post altogether.

Mom had spinal surgery yesterday. She seems to have cone through it well - she's in good spirits, and feeling less pain, so touch wood that the relief she's getting continues. I'm glad she's doing okay, but it means that there's a whole lot more work to do and I have to do it all alone, because Tony's family are in the process of moving down to their new house in Brighton. I make a competent nursemaid, and I'll do whatever needs to be done, because she's my mother and she would do - and has done - it for me. But despite being competent, nursing is not something I enjoy, and I feel bad that whatever needs to be done for her I do with a generous but not quite cheerful heart.

Probably some of this guilt is due to my ex's girlfriend being a nurse, but that too is best left for another post. Or not. I don't especially want to rehash all those feelings.

But hey ho, it could always be worse. I could be doing all these things while (almost) dying of Scarlet Fever, the way I was during her last spinal operation a few autumns ago. It's easy to forget to be grateful for how much easier things are this time around.

And really, things aren't so bad. I have books. I have a Pokémon game (sadly not X or Y, since I don't yet have a 3DS). I have Christmas coming up, and am trying to decide whether to get into the shopping spirit, or chuck it in and spend what I would have spent on presents on a trip to Barbados. I have friends who do nice things like take me to fireworks displays and watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with me and offer me sheets when the washing machine eats mine. :) People are nice.

And it's been about 10 weeks since the surgery, so as long as I remember to take my supplements (gah) and eat lots of broccoli and spinach (double gah!), in the next six weeks I should start feeling a lot better.

Although if I don't develop super Popeye-strength, I want my money back.