Nothing Comes Easy But A Broken Will

I am still here, I'm just a bit tired and preoccupied.

Work is going well, though it's more exhausting than I expected. It's been quite a few years since I had a job that requires me to report in every day at a certain hour. I was unemployed from January 2015 until September 2015 (and had been mostly on sick leave since September 2014), and before that I had a year or two where I taught a few classes a week and marked homework and spent several hours preparing debate topics and essay questions and classwork, but that still probably only took 20-25 hours a week, and hours were flexible. And before THAT, I ran the helpline four nights a week. Which, fair enough, was longish hours - 48 hours a week, split into four 12-hour shifts - but didn't seem like so much time, because I did it from my bed and could lie down and read.

I think the last time I had a 9-5 job was some time around 2008.

The funny thing is that it's not the work that wears me out, it's the idleness. At home, looking after mom and the house, there's always something to keep me occupied. When I'm working on a project (clearing the hoards from one room, or stripping the paint in the bathroom, or clearing out the garage, etc) I might work 8, 10, 12, even 14 hours at a time - and that's manual labour. And I can handle that. Yet going in to work and spending so much time sitting in a chair listening, thinking and talking, absolutely wears me out.

On a typical day, I get up at 6.45 (5.45 if I'm running, but I haven't been lately because of all the slugs on the paths), bathe and dress, leave the house at 8, get to work around 8.30, busily set up the classroom while eating breakfast, and we're ready for students at 9.30. Then I have very little to do from 9.30 until 2.30 - mostly I hand out papers, write stuff on the whiteboard during class discussions, and occasionally help with spelling and stuff. (I did more the first week, but got reprimanded - gently, but still reprimanded - for overstepping my bounds.) At 2.30, I clear up the classroom and do paperwork, which takes me until 3.30 or 4. Then I go home, take a bath and go to bed around 6pm, only getting up to use the bathroom, and sleep until 6.45 the next morning. I had strep throat two months ago, and while it wasn't a bad strep (not like the one that nearly killed me in 2010 or 2011), it's changed me from being someone who sleeps 3-4 hours a night comfortably to being someone who can sleep 12 hours every night and still wake up groggy and tired. If I don't obey the call of sleep when it comes on, I literally fall asleep in the middle of what I'm doing. My body keeps moving for a few minutes after my brain turns off, so if I'm walking my feet will keep moving until I face-plant into the floor, or if I'm typing my fingers will keep going, even if they're typing crap. I've found a few status updates of mine that start out totally fine and then descend into gibberish because I fell asleep halfway through writing them.

(I'm actually falling asleep while trying to edit this post. I just have fallen asleep five or six times in the last quarter hour. Please excuse any typos that have occurred from my hand dropping into the keyboard.)

It's sort of a strange job. It's a frantic rush at the beginning of the day - an hour isn't really enough time to set up, but the security guards won't let us in earlier - and fairly busy at the end, with a lot of idleness inbetween. Idleness tires me. It always has. It's why I could never handle going on a show like Big Brother.

I've started taking my Japanese textbook to work with me, and working on lessons whenever I'm not needed.

I don't mean to sound like I'm not enjoying it, or that I'm not grateful for it. I am grateful, so much so. Whether or not it leads to permanent employment, the company took a chance on me when nobody else would, and I can't even begin to say how much that means. Yet I do feel like I'm not being fully utilised; like I could be doing so much more, giving so much more back to them. I find myself volunteering for things like coffee-making duties, things that aren't really in my job description, just because I need something to do and because I want to take some of the work off my mentor. He has so much on his shoulders, so much that I can't help him with because I'm not qualified. All I can do is make coffee and set things out and make sure the paperwork is up to date. I feel - not useless, exactly, but a bit superfluous at times. I suppose this is something I'll get used to. Over my lifetime, I've gone from being the only competent adult at home (even when I was a child) to being one of two (at any given time) who took responsibility for a centre and 25+ teenagers, simply because there was nobody else around to do it. I've never sought out responsibility; rather I've had it thrust upon me over and over, and I've always shouldered it because if I don't, nobody will. I'm a bit of a control-freak. I've had to be. So it's hard to adjust to being not only part of a team of responsible, qualified, experienced adults who don't need me to look after them, but also the FNG, the one who has to learn from everyone else. It's disorienting. I'll adjust, in time, but for now it makes my head whirl and I have to keep catching myself whenever I try to take over.

Hard work is sort of a compulsion for me. I spent so many years feeling like a parasite because I was lying around, sick and disabled while my friends were going to school, and then sixth form, university, working. I understand intellectually that disabled people are not parasites, and I'd certainly never judge anyone else for being unable to work or support their family, so I don't really know why I judge myself so harshly. It might be something to do with the years of being told (by teachers, parents, doctors) that I'm not really sick; that fibro is not a legitimate condition. Nowadays we know enough to understand that it's an autoimmune disease and a neurological disease - though we still have a dearth of knowledge on it in general - but England is still far behind America in acceptance of the condition, and in the early 1990s it was almost unheard of to find a doctor, let alone a layman, who would accept that it is a legitimate illness. For years I was told that I was attention-seeking, and then that I had school phobia, and then that I had Munchausens. I often feel like I internalised all the things that people (even my mom!) said about me during my teen years, and even though my head understands that I'm not lazy or unmotivated or selfish, my gut doesn't really grok it.

 Since I've learned to manage the fibromyalgia in the last ten years or so - it's still a painful and exhausting illness, but I've learned the tricks for handling it and pushing through it - I've been forcing myself to work almost nonstop. Since the brain damage I've been almost compelled to work myself to the point of exhaustion. For ten years I've basically worked, slept and read. My social life and love life have suffered for the last decade, and in the last few years they've been almost nonexistent. I've neglected my bio father's side of the family. All because I have this need, this urge to...I don't know. Prove some point, I guess. Maybe to prove that I can be a functional member of society, rather than a parasite. Whether I'm trying to prove that to others or to myself is unclear.

I will not break, dammit.

I could take time off if I wanted. I don't have to go in that early, or go every day, if I don't want to. My mentor keeps telling me to take it easy, but I can't. My brain won't let me.

My mentor - who I shall hereafter refer to as EG, since he reminds me of an El Greco painting - is one of the nicest people I've ever met. I really struck gold with that one. He was my teacher before he was my mentor - I took courses with him last summer and this summer just past - and I adored him from day one, but my respect and admiration for him grows by the week. My only concern is that he's so nice, he finds it hard to criticise anyone, and frankly, I need criticism. I'm going to screw up in this job, probably a lot, and I'm worried that he isn't going to pull me up on things and give me a kick up the ass when / if necessary. He's so gentle with his criticism (and effusive with his praise) that I have to read between the lines to see what he's actually saying, quite s lot of the time. And I don't always do well with subtleties.

I'm learning. Hopefully he's learning. I'm damn sure the students are learning. With luck, we'll adjust.

I have no idea how EG feels about me. With someone that nice, they could well hate you and just never show it. I like to think that he likes me, and that I make his job easier, but...time will tell.

Once More, Unto the Breach

I am starting a new job tomorrow.

This makes me nervous. I've had precisely one new job in the last thirteen years, which was organising and cataloging a private library. After doing that for a few months, drawing a fortnightly paycheck and wondering why my employers didn't provide me with the necessary equipment and told me to take the day off more often than not, I found out that the whole thing had been set up by an ex-boyfriend who was worried about my finances and living situation, but who knew I wouldn't take money from him. Several times over the course of our relationship, he proposed that we get married, more for the sake of mutual convenience than anything, and several times I turned him down because we weren't in love, so he found a new way to try to take care of me.

He meant well, and I can understand what he was doing - he's the type of guy who looks after his friends, and supports his girlfriends. But it crushed any belief I had in my own abilities. It was only the second job offer I'd had in my adult life. The first came from a man I did a great favour for a long time ago. On my thirtieth birthday, this man called and offered me the job of most writers' dreams - researching and writing articles for a magazine in Milan, with a generous salary and an excellent relocation package. Plus, y'know, Milan. But I knew it was to return the favour I did him rather than because he thought I could do the job, and I couldn't handle the thought of being the deadweight, the one unqualified employee who was hired out of nepotism and who everyone else had to work extra hard to compensate for. So after a few months of vacillating (because Milan!) I turned it down.

Plus, my brother's family had just moved away, and my father was dying, and I couldn't leave Mom.

So here I am, with only the third job offer in my adult life - because I'd been working at the youth centre since I was 17 - and all those feelings of inadequacy are flooding back.

I was recommended for this job by a former teacher of mine. I took an I.T. course this summer - offered for free through the Job Centre, to people who are out of work (including carers like me) - and I did so well on it that a few weeks ago, my teacher asked me to come back and be a TA for him when his coworker went on maternity leave. That wasn't supposed to be until November, but on Friday I got a call asking me to come for an interview with his boss today, and today they hired me, starting tomorrow.

Intellectually I understand that I got the job because I did well on the course. Not only did I manage to do three two-week modules during the two weeks I was there (so six weeks' worth of learning), I got 100% on both my exams. Yet there is always this little voice inside that says you can't do it, you're not qualified, you're biting off more than you can chew healthwise, you were only hired because he liked you and felt sorry for you. You're a fragile princess who can barely look after herself, and has no hope of ever being a functioning member of society.

People outside of my blog(s) rarely see my feelings of inadequacy. In person, I appear to be supremely confident, to the point that several bloggers here have been surprised - and a few have been quite put off - when they meet me. The cool, competent façade is almost always how I present in person. I wouldn't even call it a façade, truly, because it's something that I've worn for long enough that it's become a part of me. And the funny thing is, it's not a lie - when I'm in motion, I have every confidence in my abilities. I've always functioned best during a crisis, but any time that I'm actually acting, moving, I don't falter. I know that I'll get to work tomorrow, on time, well-organised, dressed appropriately, and do the job with no hesitations. I'll do it well, the way I do everything, from paid employment, to navigating a foreign country, to planning a funeral, to coping with the aftermath of an attack.

It's just when I stop that I get overwhelmed with the sense that I can't do it.

It's strange that I have these two sides to me, and that they're both so dominant. You'd think that the confidence and the inadequacy would neutralise each other, and I'd simply have an average amount of confidence with occasional bursts of anxiety. But no, I swing between the two extremes. As in just about every area of my life.

Sometimes I wonder if I am two people trapped in one body.

My tits and ass are certainly large enough for two. :)

Question - What do you think of Cara Delevingne's decision to quit modelling?

I definitely applaud her for realising that she wasn't happy, and taking steps to change that. So many of us stay stuck in things that make us miserable because we're scared of change.

I quite enjoyed modelling itself. I was at the plus-size end of the spectrum (though not in the way that Tess Holliday or Crystal Renn were - I wore a UK 14) so I didn't get quite the same amount of crud from people about staying skinny, which I think helped me to enjoy myself for longer. Plus, I liked the pretty clothes, and it paid my way through college, and it was a job where I could work and concentrate on working out chemistry equations in my head at the same time, which is why I got into it in the first place. *laughs*

But I didn't like the industry. I didn't like working for a machine that perpetuated what I felt was one of the biggest legal cons of all time. I started out working in art modelling, and when I moved into doing photography for one particular photographer, I insisted on one particular clause in my contract: no photoshop, no airbrushing. Naive, looking back, but at the time it seemed reasonable. This was late 90s / early 00s, and people weren't quite so obsessed with obtaining the unobtainable. The first photographer was fine with that. The second and third were fine with that. And then somewhere along the line, people weren't fine with it. They'd be fine when we signed a contract, and then they'd try to bully me into it, or "fix" pictures behind my back. And I found myself thinking - I've been in hair and makeup for four hours, I've dieted and exercised my way to a fairly decent (if curvy) body, my skin is radiant, my hair is glossy, and I have an excellent photographer. Why isn't this enough? If you want someone with a longer neck and thicker lips and less muscular calves and a smaller nose, why didn't you hire that girl instead of me?

A while after my personal dissatisfaction started, I started realising how much fakery there is in the fashion and beauty industries. It sounds so obvious now, but at the time I convinced myself that it was okay to lie to people, because we were presenting a fantasy. Turns out, it's a fine line between fantasy and fraud. Faking it digitally has become such a thing that we now have anti-wrinkle creams advertised by women who have all their wrinkles airbrushed out. We have whitening toothpaste where the white is digitally added to the adverts. And I'm just not okay with that. Nor am I okay with working to advertise clothes that are only wearable by a tiny percentage of the population. If any other industry produced a product that was marketed to everyone but was only usable by 1%, or 2%, or even 5%, you'd call that a flawed product. Yet the fashion industry has managed to create things that the majority of us a) can't afford and b) can't get into - and somehow convinced us all that it's US who are faulty rather than the products, and that we need to starve ourselves and spend insane amounts of money to prove that we're worthy of being part of it. That's what I mean when I call it the biggest con I've ever known. Machiavelli would have been proud.

Don't get me wrong, I still love clothes. I love pretty things in general. I don't mind spending a fair bit for beautiful things that are made to last. And things ARE getting better, in some respects. But I couldn't ever be part of the fashion industry again, not even behind the camera. It sucked the life out of me by the time I was 21.

People get so caught up in the "fashion" part that they forget the "industry" part. It's a money-making machine, at the heart of it. And that isn't going to change. It doesn't matter how many Sati Marie Frosts burn out and leave - or even how many Cara Delevingnes do. Because models are disposable, even the successful, famous ones. They get tired, they get pregnant, they get fat, and most of all they get OLD, and when that happens, the industry is all too happy to trade you in for the newer model. (Pun acknowledged.)

This post originally appeared as a comment on www.manrepeller.com .

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.

A Month of Blogs - The Thigh Gap

The Thigh Gap

Suggested by Anonymous.


As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)


Someone - I don't know who - suggested that I write about the space between a girl's thighs. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that they're not asking me to talk about vaginas.

Truth is, I'm sick to death of this topic. That isn't a dig at you, Anonymous - it's probably an interesting topic for those who don't hear about it from every young girl they talk to. (That's a lot, btw.) I'm sick of the topic because everywhere I turn I see girls - and women - cursing their perfectly nice bodies and feeling inadequate because they don't have the new (well, several years' old) fashion accessory that's taken the world by storm.

I first heard of "The Gap" when a male friend of mine liked a Facebook page, and it came up on my wall. I thought they were talking about the clothing store until I checked out the page, to find that it was a collection of photos paying homage to women whose thighs didn't touch. All sorts of women - tall, short, skinny, muscular, Black, White, Asian...the only thing they had in common was a space at the top of their legs.

I shrugged, thought to myself, I've seen weirder things, and closed the page. What I didn't expect was to see people talking about this EVERYWHERE.

Being someone who likes her research, I decided to find out how a girl goes about acquiring this gold-standard accessory. And do you know what I found? You can't. Not healthily, anyway. Of course anyone who gets super-thin will lose thigh fat and eventually muscle, but that doesn't happen for a long time, not until you're severely underweight. (And frankly, losing muscle mass isn't something you want to do. Trust me on that one - I've lost muscle through serious illness, and it makes you horribly weak, and takes forever to build back up. Not to mention the fact that generally less muscle = lower metabolic rate.)

So except in the case of unhealthy weight loss, you can't get a thigh gap. You either have one or you don't. It all depends on the angle of your pelvis and how your femurs - that's your thigh bones - sit in their sockets.

Of course, if you're overweight, when you lose weight you might find that you have one. I have no idea if I have or not; my legs have been heavy most of my life, even during those few slimmish college years.

So essentially, all these girls are making themselves feel inadequate, are killing themselves in the gym, to get something that cannot physically happen unless you already have the physiology. Imagine having a bunch of girls trying to diet and exercise their way into getting longer arms, or smaller feet. Sound silly to you? Yeah, me too. You can't change your skeleton.

(Actually, I remember back in 2000 or 2001, one of the - thankfully short-lived - fads amongst high-society women was to have surgery on their feet. Know what they did? They had their last tarsal and metatarsal removed so their feet looked more slimline and fit into designer shoes. Yes, they had their baby toes cut off. There were actually surgeons out there willing to cut off body parts so women could pander to fashion trends. Turns out you actually CAN change your skeleton sometimes...if you have enough money...and lack enough sense.)

I happen to like the look of thigh gaps, if they're on a woman who has one naturally. If you have one along with good health and good muscle tone, I think they look nice. I wouldn't mind having one. I might get one when I get closer to my goal weight, since I have quite wide hips. We'll see. But if I don't I certainly am not going to feel inferior to women who do. That's just ridiculous, and sad. The body you're meant to have is the one you've been given. Eat well, exercise well, look after it, and accept it the way it is.


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Velociraptor Mom

[Unfinished and only partly formed thoughts from a month ago, that I forgot to post. And I'm too tired of the subject to try and make a full post. Oh well.]

It's rare for me to get reprimanded at work, but when I do it almost always has to do with the way I relate to temporary co-workers. There aren't many of us permanent or even long-term employees - in addition to me there's Paul, my boss; Chris, the psychiatrist / counsellor who works two days a week pro bono (or whatever the social work equivalent is); Cindy, who does the same as me and who I rarely see as we never work the same shifts, and a handful of volunteers who've lasted a couple years. Summers are the busiest times of year at the center, so we get a bunch of temporary volunteers in from June through September.

I've been booted out of work for the next fortnight while Paul trains them, since last year I chased off two in the space of a week.

Good volunteers are rare. I know there are some out there, because I meet them from other centres and community programs, but somehow most of the ones we end up with are crap. The majority are students who've just finished A-levels (although we get some uni, and a few post-GCSE) who either want a summer job or a gap year adventure. Most of these are white, middle-class, and looking for an exciting couple of months that will look good on uni applications. They tend to run to two types: type 1 are the do-gooders, suburban PC brigade who - either as a way to impress on UCAS forms, or out of a genuine wish to contribute to those less fortunate - have decided to donate some of their time and energy to help the poor little ghetto kids. Sometimes type 1s last and become good youth workers, if they can learn to view the kids as individual humans rather than charity cases. Their earnest and naive ways do grate on me a bit - although that could be jealousy; it's been a long time since I felt that innocent and unspoiled - but I try to be patient. They mean well. Sometimes.

Type 2s are mostly in it for the adventure. They want exciting stories to relate their friends at future parties, where they feature as the intrepid hero who faced down bullets and gangs, and they drive me crazy.

Paul and I disagree heavily on the use of volunteers. We come at the problem from entirely different perspectives. Paul's job is to organise things, to maximise services on a shoestring budget, and that means relying a great deal on unpaid workers. There isn't any other option for him, except for giving up a lot of the activities we offer. From Paul's point of view, any volunteers are better than no volunteers.

From my perspective, volunteers who look down on the kids are worse than nothing. And they do. Frequently. Young people from the poorer areas of London - Dagenham, Tottenham, Peckham, Brixton, several other places - are totally marginalised by the majority of our society. Britain shunts my kids to the sidelines, looks upon them as lower forms of life simply because of the circumstances of their birth / childhood / migration to England, creates these ludicrous self-fulfilling prophecies that say they'll all end up unemployed, scrounging benefits, addicted to drugs and alcohol, committing crimes and having babies indiscriminately - and then wonders why the kids don't automatically know how to, or want to, abide by the rules of a society that's treated them like they don't belong.

It makes me spit, it really does.

So we end up with a whole bunch volunteers who look down on my kids. Not all of them do, but most. At best it's a sort of benevolent condescension; at worst it's an overt sneering. And I don't tolerate that well, AT ALL. I don't respond well when I feel my children are threatened. When kids are beefing with other kids, I tend to let them get on with it unless I sense physical danger. Teenagers fight, and inner-city teenagers fight a lot - it's just a fact of life that I can't change. But when adults come in and patronise my children, when people who've been lucky enough to be born into affluence come and sneer at my kids because they think that the circumstances of their birth somehow make them better people, I see red. Although a generally kind, peaceful person by nature, I have a temper and a sharp tongue, and more than a few people over the years have sustained multiple cuts from it when I've turned into Velociraptor Mom.

There is some sense of poetic justice in the way that so many people come to my centre looking for excitement and danger, and the most frightening thing they end up facing is me.

I do feel bad about it, sometimes. I try to control my temper. I don't enjoy hurting people, even when it's to prevent then hurting my children. But for better or for worse, they are my kids, my heart and soul, and protect them I will. Even if that means turning into Velociraptor Mom and unleashing my fire breath on those who will stamp on them and put them down.

(Mixed metaphors, but you get the point.)

It's difficult to explain this to anyone who hasn't lived it. These kids face danger every day, from drugs, from gangs, from random crime, from their parents more often than you'd want to know. Why, you might ask, am I so worried about their self-esteem when they're facing a multitude of real physical dangers every day?

Well, because self-esteem is where it starts. All of those other dangers, they're all tied in with a person's feelings of self-worth, or lack of. I've said it a hundred times, and I'll probably say it another thousand in the years to come: happy people do not harm others. This is such a simple concept, and it seems to be so hard for so many people to grasp. With the exception of psychopaths and sociopaths - and true psychopathy is far rarer than the papers and TV shows would have you believe - people who beat up, shoot, stab, rape, burgle, mug, deal drugs, or any combination thereof, do so for a common reason: they're miserable.

I am not a bleeding-heart liberal who thinks that every bad choice should be forgiven because the perpetrator is a victim of society. I believe people should be held responsible for their actions, no matter the reasons behind them, and must always pay the debts they owe. My job is merely to prevent such actions from happening in the first place: not by locking up potential criminals - which is what my kids are viewed as by so much of society - but by helping to develop the qualities and values that allow them to become the best they can be.

Those qualities and values are not so much things like respect for law and order or a good work ethic or even respect for other people. Those come later. The basic building blocks that kids need, that so many of mine lack, are things like hope, and compassion, and self-forgiveness, and the ability to be honest with themselves (even when its not comfortable) and a sense that they're worth loving.

Self-worth is irreplaceable. If you don't have it, you have nothing. Without that, you can't develop any kind of real confidence, and then you go one of two ways: either you constantly doubt yourself and have no sense of self-esteem at all, or you develop a false bravado, a cockiness and arrogance that tells the world you think you're the bees' knees and that the whole world had damn well better respect you. After a while, you come to believe, at least on the top layers of your consciousness, that you're as great as you say you are, and then you end up treating others like shit - not because you're trying to make yourself feel better, but because you've become completely incapable of holding up a mirror to yourself and analysing your behaviour with any kind of moral lens.

Too many people - from all walks of society, but particularly those who have grown up poor - end up like this. I could have gone this way if fate hadn't intervened. Most high-level criminals have taken this route, and they can't be helped or rehabilitated, because they're incapable of seeing a problem with how they are. As I said, my job is to stop this before it happens.

We damage ourselves and each other so much with words, and the ways we say them. More than the drugs and the violence, I worry about the effects of derision, condescension, marginalization. My kids are smart. Most streetwise kids are, when it comes to human behaviour. They have reliable instincts. If someone looks down on them, they know. And they hurt. Even when they convince themselves they don't. People are like clay, in some ways, and the heat that my children have been under has been too hot, too fast, and instead of slowly toughening all the way through they've become hard but brittle, with shiny shells overlaying (mostly) invisible cracks. While some of them may keep those hard outer shells intact for their whole lives, the majority are not as tough as they think they are - nor even as tough as other people think they are.

I'm not sure that any teenagers are as tough as they think they are.

Brazil Nuts

Logic, Sati-style.

Some Guy: I want to come and see your work.

Sati: No.

SG: No?

Sati: No.

SG: Why not?

Sati: I like my privacy. My kids like their privacy.

SG: No you don't. You blog about everything.

Sati: Not anymore.

SG: I'm going to find out one day, you know. I have resources. Somewhere you'll have written some little detail that'll let me pin it down. Someone, somewhere, knows you.

Sati: If it's that important to you, have at it.

A week later...

SG: Shit.

Sati: Find out?

SG: You're like a ghost. [Space Ghoooost! Ahem.]

Sati: Thought not.

SG: I might hire a PI. What have you got to say about that?

Sati: If it makes you happy.

SG: Really?

Sati: If you find out, you find out.

The next day...

SG: I don't think you have a job at all.

Sati: Okay.

SG: Okay?

Sati: It's a valid theory.

SG: You probably sit home all day reading romance and watching Jeremy Kyle.

Sati: Now you're getting somewhere.

SG: What?

Sati: I do both those things.

SG: Why doesn't this bother you?

Sati: If you think I don't work, you're not going to go looking for it, are you?

SG: So you'd rather people think you've been lying for years about having a job than know where that job is.

Sati: Pretty much, yeah.

SG: ...

Sati: *raises eyebrows*

SG: You're weird.

Sati: Yes, I suppose so.

For The Moon Never Beams Without Bringing Me Dreams

In honor of this eclipse tomorrow that I would not have known about if not for Facebook - I shall tell you a story about my first job.

No, that's not a complete non sequitur. Keep reading.

When people ask me what my first job was, I know they're expecting to hear about babysitting, or dog walking, or waitressing. Truth is, I didn't actually do any of those things until I was 17 or 18, except for dog walking, and I didn't get paid for that. The story that I always tell people is about how Mom let me set up a little lemonade stand outside our front garden - which was more profitable than it sounds, because a) I live in England and virtually nobody knows what real lemonade is (our idea of lemonade is lemon soda made by Schweppes) so they were willing to pay a pretty penny for it; and b) I then moved onto selling home-made cookies, fudge, cake, flapjacks, pavlova, truffles, marzipan and anything else I could translate out of my Spanish kids' cookbooks (SO much better than English ones) as well as apples and plums and rhubarb and various vegetables from the garden. I won't say I made a packet, but I made what seemed like a packet to a kid. At least as long as Mom stayed inside. When she came out she always started giving people everything for free. *rolls eyes*

Even at six and seven I had a better head for business than my soft-hearted mom. I blame / thank Daddy for teaching me Monopoly as soon as I was able to talk.

Anyway, I digress. I tell the lemonade-stand story, because - well, it is technically correct. My first job working for someone else, however, was much less profitable and much more odd. At the age of fifteen, through a series of seemingly-incomprehensible events, I found myself working at the local university - University of Hertfordshire - under the grand title of Research Assistant. Although I didn't actually assist in research much at all - mostly I carried things, and copied down data, and helped develop a computer program for collating findings from labs around the world. I'm fairly sure the important title was just to make a geeky teenage girl feel important. Whatever. I ran with it.

What department did I supposedly assist in research for? Astronomy and Astrophysics, of course.

My love affair with the skies started when I was four or five. We lived in Spain when I was a kid, and somewhere between my fourth and fifth birthdays - at least that's when I think it was - we moved in with John, a boyfriend of my mom's. John worked in the yachting business, I believe designing yachts, but he was also a retired sailor who'd sailed around the world, and he taught me a whole wealth of things, including how to navigate by the constellations. Perhaps your average four or five-year-old couldn't memorise star charts for the Northern Hemisphere, or keep track of the phases of the moon and the tides, but you have to remember that I was born with an off-the-charts IQ and a thirst for knowledge. By the time I started school I could easily recognise Orion or Cepheus or Cassiopeia or Hercules or any of fifteen or twenty others. Moving back to England was hard for so many reasons, but the skies were one of the things I really missed. Even in a town the size of St Albans, where at least you can still SEE the stars (unlike parts of London), the light pollution makes it a vastly different experience from viewing them from a small island in the Mediterranean where the biggest town was a couple thousand people, and the air was dry.

I guess I kind of forgot how much I loved everything night-sky-related, until I met Julian when I was 12 or 13. Julian was a creature of the night, and he rekindled my love for it. In summers we would drive out to the country and stare through binoculars for hours. He built me a telescope for looking at the moon. He bought me books. One day he brought a huge package of those tiny glow-in-the-dark stars and we spent an entire weekend sketching out a map (an inaccurate one! LOL) on my bedroom ceiling, some of which still remains to this day. My parents didn't know about Julian, but they approved of me showing an interest in something that wasn't medicine, so they bought me more books. And I read, and started educating myself on the technical side of things, and learned, and loved.

And then Sir Patrick Moore came to town to give a lecture at the Alban Arena, and I knew I had to go. So Mom got us tickets. I must have been fourteen, maybe fifteen. And he's signing programmes in the hall afterwards, and Mom goes and chats to him, and is her natural charming, slightly flirty self - charming people comes as naturally to my mother as breathing, always has done - and hands him a letter, which is about me, and how much I love astronomy, and want to work in the field when I'm older. Plus all those other things like how smart and amazing I am - the stuff most moms like to tell anyone who'll listen. *grins*

And a couple of weeks later, I pick up the phone at home, and this very dry, very proper voice says to me, "Am I speaking with Miss Sandy Frost? This is Patrick Moore."

Oh. My. Gosh.

The long and short of it was that he found me a work placement. He talked to an old friend of his at the University of Herts, who I believe was the head of the Astro Dept - Professor Kitchen? - and they offered me a placement. Just because I wanted one, and they thought I was smart.

It never fails to amaze me how nice people can be.

So I went to work. Year 10s in this country have to do a two-week work study placement anyway, and usually the school arranges places with shops and nursery schools and offices that the students have to bid on, but they were happy that I'd arranged my own. (Or that fate and a gentleman's kindness had done it for me.) I went to work at the uni for two weeks to start. Professor Kitchen placed me with Dr Collett, and Dr Collett passed me onto Dr Tanvir, and Dr Tanvir liked me and decided to keep me. I can't even remember the amount of projects I worked on that summer. They taught me how to write computer code, and set me to work developing a program that linked to all the observatories around the world. They had me assisting post-grad students with their projects. The one I remember the best was with an astrogeologist who was investigating the volcanoes on Io (one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter; the fiery one) in the hopes of discovering whether Io or Europa (icy crust with probable ocean beneath) could be potential harbors for extraterrestrial bacteria. They taught me physics, and how to use a mass spectrometer to read age and distance, and they took me to the building site of the new university observatory. They encouraged me to study different specialties, and I knew within a couple of weeks that I wanted to study the formation of nebulae.

We had a total solar eclipse that summer, the first visible in the UK since the 1920s, and I got to watch it with some of the best scientific minds in the field.

It was the most glorious summer. I felt like I'd found a niche for myself, like I'd discovered that missing piece of my life. I even managed to wrangle myself an invitation to go to the Teide National Park in Tenerife - a place I'd been a couple years before, and fallen in love with - which is considered the closest thing on Earth to the surface of Mars, and is where all kinds of experiments are run. (Don't ask me what kind. I never got there.)

I wished that I could have stayed on staff there forever, because I was SO ready to be done with high school. But I had another year to go. And then Julian died. And I shoved myself into earthly things and never went back to studying the universe. Julian WAS the nighttime; he was the moon and the stars and all the secrets to life, and without him I didn't want to care about any of it. After a while I just kind of forgot. It was easier.

Will I ever go back? Will I ever study again, go to uni, perhaps do a degree? Probably not. Even if I wanted to, I'm not sure that I CAN. Since the brain damage, I don't learn easily - not only am I no longer a child genius, I'm not even sure that I'm smart enough to grasp the basic physics that I would need to know. And most of the time I can live with that. But just occasionally, just once in a blue moon - or perhaps less often - I feel them calling my name, calling, calling, calling me home, and underneath that siren song is the promise of knowledge, of all the secrets of the universe being open to me.

[True story or smoke and mirrors? You'll never know. :)

In any case, I hope you enjoyed my tale. Now go enjoy your eclipse, and spare a thought for this girl who wishes she was there with you.]

Affirmation

"What did you do today, Sati?"

"I made five people feel loved."

The family can bitch. Let them. What I do, at work and at home, matters.

Getting Older :D

You know you're getting older when you can no longer keep up to date on street slang. Even though I look like your typical suburban princess, I always sort of automatically knew what things meant. More and more these days, though, I find myself thinking WTF when I hear a new word.

Which brings me to today's funny story.

One word that's been circulating at work for a couple months (maybe more, but I noticed it only recently) is "peng". Apparently this means attractive. The first time one of my boys said this to me, I thought he said "ping", and I said, unthinkingly, "Oh, like the duck".

Of course, my boys are in their teens, and none of them ever read the Ping the Duck books when they were kids. So THEY thought that *I* was saying that "duck" was also a word for physically attractive. :D

And just a couple days ago, I heard a guy at the center say, "That girl is duck, brah."

*cracks up laughing*

Well, I always wanted to leave a legacy.

News - Week Starting 26th Oct

(This uninspiring titling of my notes is starting to become a habit. Sorry.)

It's been a strange week. A bit up and down - and no, pervs, not in *that* way. My hormones are all over the place, and I've spent much of my time lying in the bath, or lying in bed, or lying across the kitchen table, because my kidneys hurt and flat is the most comfortable position for me. Of course, there are times when I have to sit up straight - I went to class yesterday, and I had to sit in a straight-backed chair for two hours, and then wait for forty minutes at the bus stop on a slanted seat that I kept falling off - remind me never to wear a velvet jacket or skirt to class again; I slip off the seats too much - and that was pretty agonizing.

The other main downfall of the hormone surges, of course, is that I've eaten half the Halloween candy, and as soon as I finish here I have to go to Tesco and buy some more.

Class was good, though. I brought lollipops for everyone to eat, which was fun, and I'm really warming up to our teacher, as well as the other people in the class. About a third of the original class seems to have dropped out - either that or they've been ill for several weeks - and we're now down to about 15 of us, so we sit on two big tables and are very loud (and probably slightly obnoxious, but nobody seems to mind, although Magdalena - our teacher - doesn't always seem to get our humour). All in all, it's a great class. It seems wrong somehow that you should have so much fun LEARNING. Part of me wonders if I'm going to walk away from the class knowing anything at all, since half the time we seem to chat and laugh, but then at the same time I do feel like I'm learning quite a lot. It's a challenge, and I like that; it's been too long since I did something that used the learning part of my brain.

It's always a long night - class is only two hours, from 7-9pm, but with all the buses I usually leave the house at 5.40 and get home about 10.15 - IF the buses come. I'm supposed to take the 9.28 from Hatfield to Alby, and then the 9.56 from Alby town to home, but not once in four weeks has the 9.28 arrived. Which means I end up on the 9.45 (which is usually a few minutes early), panicking the whole time about whether I'll make the 9.56, or if I'll have to wait another hour - because the S3 (or is it S2?) only comes once an hour at that time of night - or take a cab, or walk. None of which are particularly nice options, because either way it means I don't get there before the Chinese takeaway closes.

Luckily, though, I've always managed to make the 9.56, although a couple of times that's only because I took my shoes off and ran for it. So my Tuesday nights have so far always had the same routine - class, buses home, pick up some chicken chow mein and a can of Lilt, go home, say hi to Mom, take a bath, and eat my noodles in bed while I read a good book. Wonderful.

Monday I went to Homebase and bought paint. I'm painting my bedroom pale pink. It hurts to paint it, a little - the peppermint green has seen me through a lot of good and bad times, and when the colour changes and I put away some of the decorations, and buy a bed, the whole character of the room is changed. And you all know how I hate change. I last painted the room back in summer of 2002, when we moved back into the house after living in Spain, and I've been holding off redecorating for several years because of all the memories.

When you keep things looking the same, you can remember better, and there's a lot of things that happened in that room that are worth remembering. Not all of them are particularly happy things, but all of them are events that helped to shape the person that I am today. Part of me is scared that when everything looks different, then I'll be different too, and I'll start to forget all the people I've known and loved in the last seven years. If they were all still part of my life, it would be easier, but some of those people are long gone. I suppose the issue isn't really the room at all, it's the fact that I miss them. I miss Richard, and Curt, and Sanjit, and everyone else who's no longer a big part of my life.

No matter how much I tell myself that change is healthy, change is a vital part of life, I still hate it, and probably will until I die. But I do it anyway, because it needs to be done. :)

So the green is going. And the mattress on the floor, where I've been sleeping since Richard was sharing the room with me that summer, is going too. My cardiologist said that I have to have a bed, so I'm getting a bed. After much deliberation between a couple of very different beds, I decided to go with the one that I wouldn't normally pick. Usually I go for natural woods that are simple and low to the ground, and admittedly those are the ones that I automatically gravitated towards this time. In fact, I had one all picked out, until I realised that it was an almost carbon copy of Curt's bed - or at least the one he had when I last saw it, a few years ago - which freaked me out a little.

So I pushed the changes, and now the one that I've picked is very different. It's metal, ivory-coloured with brass bedknobs, and very Victorian-looking, but not ugly. Perhaps if it were a dark colour it might look weird and gothic, but the ivory-colour makes it quite pretty and elegant. It'll go well in a pink room, and Mom bought me a new door handle - pale blue, with a crystal effect to it - and I'm going to buy some matching knobs to put on my furniture. And I've been saving pretty things for years, that I've got as Christmas and birthday presents and have never been able to put out because they didn't go with the decor before. I have an antique-effect oval mirror with enamel dragonflies at the top and bottom, and a butterfly jewellery box, and an incense burner with crystal beads, and at least fifty beautiful candles. I have photo frames with silk and beadwork, and crystal prisms to hang in my window, and silk pillowcases with lace. I have beautiful white Egyptian cotton bed linen with a broderie trim that makes me feel like a Victorian bride, and beige-and-raspberry silk bed linen with Japanese cherry blossom on that Mom gave me last birthday. I intend to paint the frame of my boring wood-effect long mirror in a pretty sky-blue colour, and possibly to paint the melamine dressing table and nightstand, which I've had since I was seven years old, to match.

It's been many years since I had a girly bedroom, and it's never been *this* girly. I had flowered wallpaper when I was seven or eight, but since I started choosing my own decorations when I was about ten, I've gone for things that are more androgynous. My room at the moment is a nice room, but if you didn't know who lived there you might not know whether it was a girl or a boy's room, aside from the clothes and jewellery and stuff. I have bright colours, splashy pillows, African and Native American masks on my walls. For a few years, though, I've been yearning for lace and ribbons, and my fear of losing my memories has held me back.

(Quite ironic, if you think about it.)

But I'm doing it. I'm making the leap. And it's going to look beautiful. I just hope that any friends I have staying over - guys, really - don't feel like they're going to break things. Guys always seemed to like the unisex look that I went for, and I'm a little bit worried about how my male friends will react to the change. It should be OK, though - they seem to have reacted positively to the changes in my person over the last few years (or at least most of them have). And even if they react badly...hell, it isn't really their business, anyway. It's *my* room. I don't know why I even worry about this stuff.

OK, what else? Class, room...hmm. I'm not sure what else there is to report for the last week. I came into town today to use the library and pick up work, and found that my last paycheck didn't go through, which was a pain in the ass. (Yes, Paul, that was a direct dig at you.) So I'm overdrawn at the bank again. Unfortunately I didn't find this out until AFTER I bought a couple of things, because I was relying on the paycheck being there. So now I have to go home, sort through bank statements, borrow money from the savings to put in the bank to cover the overdraft so I only get charged once, and then come back tomorrow or Friday to put the money in. I'm really pissed, because there should have been enough money to go to CeX and buy some games for my DS, and now there isn't. Bleh. I wanted to do some more Christmas shopping, too. And I wanted some more songs from iTunes.

Yesterday I finally caved into pressure from Kell, and agreed to model for him. We did a Halloween theme, so it was actually a lot of fun, and while my costume was skimpier than I'm used to wearing, I didn't have to do any nudes. (Thank God - I'm not comfortable enough with my body yet to get back to doing that. Although I probably will have to force myself to be, because I need the money.)

Unfortunately we finished late, so I didn't have a chance to change before I went to class, although I did manage to put on a slightly longer skirt and a cami under the jacket I was wearing. So I turned up to class in an ankle-length black velvet jacket, cut low to show plenty of cleavage, and held together at the bust by only two buttons, then flowing down to show the skirt underneath, along with smoky grey and black eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara and blood-red lipstick, with red flowers in my hair and on my handbag. God only knows what the people in class must have thought - I tend to be pretty conservative in my clothing, and as for makeup I rarely wear more than face base and eyeshadow, with a little blush if I'm looking peaky that day. Certainly lipstick and mascara are things I wear maybe twice a year, and eyeliner not much more often.

Despite the embarrassment, it was actually quite fun, and I looked kind of neat. So I'll probably repeat it again on Saturday for the trick-or-treaters.

Ah yes. Candy. Don't forget to buy candy. Damn, I'd better check and see how much change I've got in my purse.

I've been reading a lot of Poe for the last week, and I'm nearly finished with the book I bought last Wednesday, so today I bought the matching book - "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque". I've never read most of the stories in it, so I'm really looking forward to it. Although I may have to take a break for a little while; some of the stories in "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" really unsettled me. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was very haunting, and "The Masque of the Red Death" and "MS Found in a Bottle" gave me intense flashbacks to nightmares that I've had for my whole life. By far the worst for me, though, was "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", which makes me shiver every time I think of it.

Interestingly, I mentioned the fact that a lot of my nightmares seem to have come out of Poe stories that I'd never read - I'd previously only read a few of his that I know of - and she told me that she thought she might have read him to me when I was a little girl. Certainly she said she remembered reading some of the poetry to me when I was learning to read. Which is something I never ever knew before, and brings up the question, WTF? Who on earth reads Poe to a two-and-three-year-old?

Well, apparently my mother does.

...I don't want to give you the impression that she's a bad mother or anything, she's just...I don't know. She has a lot more faith in me than I deserve. She's always had this assumption that I'm so much more mature and intelligent and capable than I actually am, and I've never wanted to disabuse her of that notion, so whenever she did something with me as a kid that probably wasn't age-appropriate - like buying me "Pretty Woman" for my sixth birthday, to teach me the facts of life - I just sort of sat and got on with it. Truly, I probably didn't realise until I was nine or ten that not everyone grew up the same way that I did. I always thought that the kids loved coming to my house because they liked me, but in hindsight I realise that probably a lot of it was due to the fact that they'd get an education that they never got at home. That said, my Mom was always overprotective when it came to letting me do things alone, and she was much more involved in my life than any of my friends' parents. She certainly wasn't neglectful or anything; in fact she was quite the opposite. But some of her ideas of what kids should and shouldn't be exposed to are...well, liberal, to say the least.

Which I suppose I should celebrate, since my upbringing has made me into a person who's generally happy, generally confident, and can cope with just about anything, despite the nightmares. Very little surprises me, even less shocks and horrifies me, and there are very few things in the world that I can't deal with. And if the price for that is a slight aloofness, a slight sense of distance from the rest of the world, and occasional accusations of being unemotional and too cerebral...well, it's not a high price at all.

It's not like I don't CARE, after all. I care. I'm just not controlled by my emotions.

Although that said, I had a pretty freak-out moment today. I found a child. I was in Wilkinson, buying masking tape and potato chips, and I came across a little boy sitting in one of the seldom-used aisles at the back of the shop, playing wiith the displays and eating a packet of custard creams. He couldn't have been more than three, and I'm guessing it was more like one-and-a-half or two. And I had no idea what the heck to do. He didn't seem to belong to anyone, and I searched up and down a couple of the aisles on either side, looking to see if his parent might have left him there while he / she was getting something one aisle over, but nobody was there. I couldn't walk away to find the security guard, because he was right at the other end of the (fairly big) shop, and the kid might have moved by then, or got snatched or something. If he'd been crying or seemed upset in any way, I'd have picked him up and taken him to security, but he was just sitting there happily, eating his cookies and playing by himself, and I thought that if I picked him up I might upset him. So I just stood there for ten minutes or so, waiting to see if a parent would appear, and none did. So I sat down next to him, and asked him if he knew where his Mummy or Daddy was, and at first he didn't want to talk, but then he said he didn't know. I asked if he was here with Mum, and he didn't know. And I asked if he was here with Dad, and he said no. And I asked if he was lost, and he said he didn't know. And I just kept thinking, what if I take him to information, and while I'm doing that his parent comes back to find him and thinks I'm trying to steal him?

I should mention here that I have NO idea of how to relate to children. I'm not a kiddie person. I like them well enough, and I can feed them and change a diaper and stuff, but aside from the physical needs I really don't know anything about how to take care of them. I especially don't know how to talk to them, and tend to treat them as very small adults. So I didn't know what else to ask, so I just sat there and played with him for a little longer.

I suppose if many more minutes had passed, I'd have had to take him to the information desk and see if he knew his name, and have them put out an announcement. Luckily a frantic mother showed up a couple of minutes later. Turned out that she'd turned around to pick something up, and in that half a minute the kid had toddled off, and she'd been searching the entire store for him for the last twenty minutes. God knows how he'd gotten all the way to the back corner by himself. And I felt kind of bad about that, because if I'd taken him in as soon as I found him then she'd have got him back sooner, but hell, I did the only thing I knew how to do. The whole episode scared the crap out of me much more effectively than anything Poe's written.

So yeah, it was a strange day. Strange week. I don't know what else is going on with Ryan's situation; Lauren isn't talking about it much. She and Chris have both had bad colds this week, and she's working so hard, and I think she's just lost the energy to fight. But she needs to fight, because the last thing that Social Services said was that if he was living with her, they weren't going to pay to support him. So basically they're saying that they're refusing to support a homeless minor. And I told her, you have to push them, and when that doesn't work, push harder. We do not live in a country where we let children go without home and food. You hear the liberals talking about all the starving homeless kids here, but most of it is bunk. The government isn't perfect - hell, it isn't even good - but they don't let kids live on the streets if their parents kick them out. They either go into the care of a family member, or they go into foster care, and either way the carer gets a government subsidy. And yet that's what they're saying to Lauren, apparently. "Either you support your brother, or he can go be homeless." So I can only assume that there's been some kind of misunderstanding, on either end. I'm not entirely sure what to do about it, to be honest. I haven't been invited to do anything about it, and on the one hand it's not really my business. Yes, this is what I do for a living, but Lori and Ryan aren't part of my work life, they're friends. And until she asks me to help, there isn't really much I can do. She's not even getting any support from her Dad - apparently he's been told that until the maintenance situation is sorted out in court, he's not allowed to give her any money, which is the biggest load of balls I've ever heard. If a parent wants to give money to a child to help them out with something, it's not anybody's business but theirs.

Then on the other hand, I worry.

*sigh*

This note has been overly long, I'm sure, and Tesco closes in a little under an hour, so I'd better leave you guys there. I don't want y'all to think that things are bad right now - they're really not. Aside from worrying about Lauren and worrying about Ryan and worrying about Mom and worrying about money, things are going pretty well. Class is great, the autumn is great, and hopefully tonight we'll get out the Halloween decorations. Normally we'd have had them up weeks ago, but we've all been busy and tired. I need to go to the gym tomorrow, and hopefully that'll give me a bit more energy. :)

I also need a date. It's been a while since I had one of those, and Chris - Chris Kennedy - has ordered me to take some time for fun.

Enjoy your Halloween! And give out treats - it's only once a year, after all. :)

Yet Another Sunrise...

So I'm lying here on my bed, it's 5.52 am and as usual, I haven't slept yet. These sleepless nights are driving me crazy, because it means I then sleep the day away. And what's REALLY bad, is that I like it that way. I like working and reading all night and sleeping all day, only getting up to lie in the sun for a while. I like being awake when nobody else is, so nobody can make immediate demands on me unless they wake me up or send me an email. I like being a bit of a recluse whenever I can afford to take time out from life.

Of course, I can't always afford to do it. Even though most of my work is from home and can be done at any time of day, my other job (i.e. the one that doesn't pay all that well, but gives me emotional satisfaction most of the time) requires that I leave the house and travel to London when I'm needed, which could be a couple times a month or a couple times a week, depending on what's going on.

This week it was a couple times a week, because there was a bit of a crisis the other day, which has contributed to my week from hell - and consequently the need to sequester myself with a good book (or six) and a large amount of junk food and headache tablets.

I work with teenagers in a youth center in London. It's a pretty varied job - I'm big sister, general counsellor, sometimes cook, sometimes laundry maid, sometimes drugs counsellor, sometimes sex ed teacher. The main part is the big sister role: I talk with and listen to teens, sometimes about problems they're having, sometimes about things that they want an opinion on, sometimes just as a friend to hang out with. But I do plenty of other things too. I help keep the place clean. I give talks on contraception and staying safe from STDs. I help find accomodation for kids who need to move out of their parents' home for whatever reason. I bake a lot of cakes and cookies, since most of them don't get home-baked stuff at home - sounds silly, but it's amazing how much a plate of cookies can spread cheer and goodwill when you don't get stuff like that often. *laughs* I also act as a medical advisor about drugs, eating disorders, things like that. I'm neither a doctor nor a trained therapist, but I'm there to give out frank, unbiased information about what will happen to their bodies if they do X or Y. Sometimes teenagers take things like that better from someone who's nearer their age.

Occasionally, like this week, I get harder jobs. This week one of my kids (not literally my kids, but that's what I think of them as) got into a fight, hit the other guy wrong, and knocked him right into a coma. So much of my week was spent with visits to the jail and eventually raising bail money to get him out.

I don't know what to feel about the whole situation, really. I'm horrified, but at the same time my loyalty is to my kids, the ones I work with and see often. In my head I understand that teens fight, teenage boys fight often, and for teenage boys who are raised in an urban environment, usually in poverty, fighting someone who does something to piss you off is a way of life. I understand that intellectually, but it still upsets me. But this is my job, so I just have to suck it up and do what needs to be done.

My kid is 17, and the other guy is 21, plus he has a prior record while my kid is clean, so it's unlikely that he'll do hard time. Most likely he'll get parole, community service, maybe anger-management classes. I guess that's a plus, since in my gut I feel that he didn't mean to seriously hurt the other guy. He seemed pretty scared when I saw him. It's a very weird feeling, though, to know that a person you know (and quite like) put someone in intensive care, and despite that you're hoping that he'll get off lightly. Previously, I couldn't have stuck by him, job or not. I've never had much loyalty to anything other than my own morals, but through this job I'm learning loyalty to people, even when they do things that you don't agree with.

In addition to this, turning my already hard week into a hellish one, my mother - who I love to pieces, but has an unfortunate habit of doing things without paying attention sometimes - made a cake and managed to put 4 tablespoons (instead of 4 teaspoons) of baking powder into it. And didn't tell me until I'd eaten a quarter of the cake. So both she and I ended up with sodium poisoning, and although we didn't have to go to hospital, my kidneys have been killing me for the last few days, and I'm drinking so much water to flush my system, I feel like I'm going to burst. And now, to top it all off, I have PMS.

So staying in the house and reading and eating sandwiches for the next few days sounds pretty damn good. And that is the plan for today. I'm going to make a sandwich now, wash my feet (they get really cold for some reason) and then nap for a couple of hours, then read and eat another sandwich, lie in the sun for a while, pick up some groceries (just basic stuff) at Budgens, maybe buy a burger from KFC, and take another nap late this afternoon. This sounds like a perfect day to me.

Hope that you can excuse the long, rambling post - it IS now 6.25 am, after all - and that you have as good a day as I plan to.