pissed off

i am pissed off

i have the bitching mother of all colds, i am sad, i have exams in three weeks today, i am broke, i am tired and i had a fucking panic attack on the bloody train

excuse my language, but frankly, i am fed bloody up

no smoke without fire..

so over the last three days i have -happily for you- not blogged through my cold but sat around and watched rubbish television with my duvet and felt generally sorry for myself.
i have been genuinely ill, and still am, although i am at work. this is a bad idea, not only for me because my head is throbbing and is verging on that sinus -ouch- thing where you want to shout at your head and tell it to fuck off for being so full of almost literal shit. it is also bad because i work surrounded by people who are poor and therefore probably of the low immune system variety, homeless people not often caught eating fruit, asylum seekers living on food vouchers probably not prioritising tubes of effervescent vitamin c in their £39 a week budget.
so i feel i am probably doing them a disservice.
but am here nonetheless
thing is, what has struck me over the last few days, is how badly i cope with pain on unhealth of any kind. we've always known i was a complete child when it comes to discomfort, but it strikes me that as someone who smokes, i am inviting pain upon myself.
this is obscenely stupid
as a somewhat flighty person (less so, as the years pass, i like to think..), i find it hard to think -in thirty years' time, i may well have a stroke- and take what possible precautions i may now while i have the chance. i have seen what strokes do to people, and it is vastly unpleasant. i saw my aunt, my godmother, mary, reduced for some time to the physical capacity of a baby and the mental understanding of a child, after that one horrible day. and even now she cannot do the crossword, or read books.....formerly two of her favourite pass times.
she smoked in the age when smoking wasn't really known to be all that bad for you. and then stopped. but even now she has what my mum insists on referring to as -a sedentary lifestyle-, which is precisely what you ought not to have if you wish to avoid a (second..) stroke.
i watched my grandmother collapse on Christmas morning last year. it turned out to be an angina attack, but at the time even the nurses among the haywards present thought it was much worse than that. her breathing over the last year has been reduced to puffs of air that look like a monumental effort to take it or let out. again, she smoked at a time when no photo was complete without cigarettes, shift dresses, gin somewhere and beautiful shoes.
i know what it does. they didn't, not really.

that's because you go to bed too late..

when i was a kid living at home, whatever was wrong with me, headache, spots, period pain, you know, my mother would say -that's because you go to bed too late-...
mouth ulcer, sprined ankle, split ends, you name it, it was because we didn't go to bed early enough...
and now, finally i believe...
i do, i believe it
i want to publicly acknowledge the wisdom and general wonder that is my mother, and salute you lucy, you were right all these years
i have the Winter Sickness already, you see, and I know now,t hat it is in large part due to my self-neglect, mainly concerning lateness to bed.
i did the right thing this morning, and came to work. but i am going home soon i think. i feel like crap and i can't think straight
over and out my loves, and remember, listen to those older and shorter than you, its a winning combination on the wisdom front
and eat your greens

on being loved..

in cahoots at the kitchen table with da costa the other day, i realised that i have never really had a time of not knowing i am loved. this is perhaps a strange thing to try and talk about, but you know, i'd kind of like to try,....

we were in one of those days of talking and listening where certain things end up with you getting to the bottom of them, and going huh...who knew.....for me it was the age-old and ninety-five-percent dealt with problems of being unattractive, or my own perceptions of that....its not something i really think or worry about these days, as i mentioned before, its ninety-five percent gone....and i love being free of it....thanks jesus...anywho.....the deal was that i figured out that unlike a lot of people who feel worried or sad that they might never 'meet someone', they fear that they are wholly unloveable, or just unworthy of love...yadda ya....not me, i know i'm loved.....my dad is my greatest fan, he loves and helps me be loved, he compliments without reserve and is the only person i know who makes sure he gets enough hugs in a day, from whoever is nearest. he's always been him, since i was me.....and partly because of him, i don't doubt that i am loved.....my sister too, loves me in her laugh, and in her calling me nana, and in her telling me off...my brother calls me darlin only when he is drunk, and still picks me up sometimes, just because he can....and because i hate it....he lets me ask him questions about him and who he wants to be...i don't think he lets anyone else,....his hugs are magnificent, like being hugged by treebeard himself, only not.....see, even in those first two years of high school, when no-one knows who their friends are, no-one likes themself very much, and certainly feeling loved by friends isn't all that common...i still had these people there all the time....when real and good friends did come along, it was kind of a bonus....and now my real and good friends are as much family to me as those in the shire.........

the five percent that remains is about boys, and me...me and boys....as a few of you know, i've been thinking about guys more in the last six months than never, really...and not in a oh god just let me be married.....way. i hope.....but in a...huh, being in love...interesting....kind of a way...its god's five percent to deal with, but he seems pretty sure that it won't go until the single status is changed....but he's readying me for it to be changed...its hard to feel this stuff without feeling the dread of the five percent.....the dread of being told no, the dread of being laughed at.....the dread of being picked last...of it, in the end, just being true that you really are unattractive.....but do you know, i'm having this thing with god right now where the last few weeks, during which my heart has felt rather full and sometimes horribly heavy, there is a balancing thing happening, where i'm checking in with god every day, and can honestly say, 'te quiero mas hoy que ayer....which kind of means i love you more today than yesterday.....so really, even if all comes crashing down and i get wounded or as the kid in love actually says, i get the shit kicked of me by love, my heart will have grown, and grown towards god.....

in oswald today, he was right for the first time in months, in saying....our reach must always exceed our grasp.....ie, ask for more of god than you already have....it sounds kind of elementary, but its actually a huge push for me, because i want that to keep on being true, i want to keep being able to say te quiero mas hoy que ayer....

this is, as anticipated, a very strange post....i'm not sorry..i think i've become less honest on here so far this year, and for that i'm sorry....this jumble doesn't exactly make up for it, but here it is...

forays..

I have had my five portions of fruit and vegetables today for sure.
I love days when that happens.
Started my day with a kiwi, a banana and apple.
Smug smug smug.
So I went to work and didn’t enjoy most of the day at all as there are now three of us doing the work and its all complex and I am not competitive enough to snatch it as it comes in, so I ended up with pretty much nothing all day. Bizarre woman who has taken over the office must go.
Or I must go, find gainful employment elsewhere. Talking to john last night made me glad again to realise that being overwhelmed by potential ideas for work and hopes and stuff isn’t something I have the monopoly on. Its such a confusing thing to see so many things around you that you would love to see change, and to have no idea where you play your part in it. I should probably also add into that whole scene, the things that I just would love to do, that aren’t at all to do with changing the world but are small wee dreams that I keep in my pocket, like being a make-up artist and a hairdresser. I thought tonight though, what a wonderful thing, to be not tied, not set on a course, yet to have ideas, however castle-in-the-air-like they may seem. Living here, where potential and possibility are two fairly contraband substances, it feels oddly defiant to maintain the pipe dreams, update and review them, and let god in on them. I get in such a pickle when I try and pin down one idea of what to do, it must make him laugh I think, but I know he is building in me one thing at a time, all working towards work that will be in turn working towards the working out of me and him. And the ultimate working out of his own pipe dreams…what a thought heh..the very pipe dreams of god.
Wonderous.
Tim came round this evening, I think he had heard about the bake-off yesterday and wanted to see what remained. His inquisition brought him the last and biggest share of coffee cake and lots of tea. It brought me his tales from the temple, which as I kept asking him to describe it, I got such a picture of it in my head I could almost smell the place. See I know he loves jesus, and I’m glad, but I can kind of see why his field trips to these strange and unknown places are making him wonder..we talked about how other ways of living and expressing faith seem to have a way better concept of and respect for the scared, the holy, the mighty aspects of god. We in living rooms and without much regard for rules have, I’ve been thinking lately, perhaps taken the buddy jesus thing a bit too far and lost the fear somewhat. Maybe just me. Weird though heh..tim told me a book I should read. I love it when conversations with tim end at the point when he’s succeeded in recommending a you a book on the subject in question, and therefore feels he can do no more for you.

notes from camp..

so i'm living in a field for a week. still have no idea how god did it, but i totally give him credit for getting everyone at work to agree to my fleeing the office for all these lovely days off....i figure its gotta be for a reason, right? as in, (jaded mind-speak) he got me space, but there's gotta be a catch.

or, child-like-mind-speak, hes taken me out into a spacious place - has rescued me because he delighted in me

that bit of that psalm, man, i lived by that for like two years....my whole life, after flicking my god-switch, was like one ma-hoo-sive spacious place. and i knew he delighted in me.
now....i don't know or belive either of those things. now hear me, i don't want sympathy. or even prayer, i feel like this should be hard. something needs to be re-worked. i feel like i've taken something for granted. or like i've made something good into the inverse of what it was, without really knowing what it was supposed to be in the first place.
ok, clearer.....i didn't know until i got the physical spacious place on monday evening, that my spirit, above all things, was cramped and in need of space. those of you who have been paying attention lately may have noticed that i have become entirely void of any decision-making-ability, peace-maintaining-capacity, dream-hatching-inspiration, love-that-knows-netiher-condition-nor-bound, and kindness-driven-intuition.

i'm pretty sure what's happened is this - i began to make plans - for my life, you know......but god vetoed every single one of them. from this, i now believe, my sub-sub-soncious deduced, over time, that god hated me.

i've been hated before. by people. then? i rebelled. in the original sense of the word. i allowed myself to believe i was more than them. better. smarter. kinder. stronger. more beautiful
so, true to the only form i've ever adopted through being hated, my body began to react in that way towards god.
but what i knew, as soon as space was granted me on monday evening, was this.
i will never be more beautiful than god
can you believe it...can you believe i had to learn that?
shit
i used to know that i belonged in a spacious place. where i used to be happy to sit and wait. often with phil. for understanding. for wisdom. for strength. for love. for gifts. for change. for progress. for movement.
i got bored of waiting, god. i stopped waiting for you.
shit
oh whoever's reading this, please forgive me
and i lied before, i do need you to pray