The End of An Era...

The capitalised title's back, people. D'you know what that means?! It means I have BIG NEWS (note the caps returning again there!).

Today (or should I say yesterday, Wednesday?) was a big day. It was officially the end of the last term of my final year. I have exams and a teaching placement coming up, as well as a research project and an essay - but I am mere months away from OBTAINING MY DEGREE. It seems incredible to think that this was my last day of teaching "ever" (apart from when I start my Master's, haha). Time is a wriggly caterpillar - sometimes it squiggles along, very speedy, and you follow with your eyes, conscious of the rapid movement; sometimes it basks wearily, slumping as if beaten down upon by the sun and at other times, it heaves the many compartments of itself efficiently over the leaf. Very often, we miss the latter because we bounce between extreme activity and then none at all. I think it's very handy when we do though, since it reminds that Time does not stop and start in blocks of 'routine' as we do, but is ever flowing.

Er... not too sure where that came from. Blame the fact that I'm delirious from a heady cocktail of sleeping late, waking early, reading a book on the Internet, and seeing TL. Seeing TL is a fine way to get drunk without the alcohol. I think that if I were with him in company and he held eye contact, my knees would bid me a speedy farewell. I'd like to remonstrate with them, but really, it just doesn't work. What chance does my brain have against someone who actually made my pulse race for a day and a half - yes, a day and a half! - after we first kissed?

It's not just the end of an era at university though. It's the end of a destructive era for me, I hope. I realised that I was running from dealing with family-based issues (which are probably the source of any depression I may have), because my previous relationship was very co-dependent and so if you like, my bad feelings about myself were inflicted upon me by a proxy - my ex. This time round though, I have a super-awesome libertarian, really great blog-readers and friends and I've realised that writing might help more than I've given it credit for previously. I made an appointment with the doctor for next week, and then jumped around shrieking happily. Ironic, much?

I also made an omelette yesterday. Yes. It wasn't bad at all, and next time, I'll remember to put the cheese into the beaten egg so that it's even better. :-D Resolutions have been taken - not promises made, because breaking promises brings on guilt, whereas you can't really break resolutions. I mean, you're resolving - you're essentially steeling yourself to try to do something, rather than committing. I think that's why they're called 'New Year's Resolutions,' so people don't have to feel bad if they fall off the wagon!

1) I will continue to write.
2) If I'm sinking, I will admit it - even if it's just to my blog. People ARE capable of love. The world is not a cartoon, and I will not be 'put down' for being stressed.
3) I'm going to the doctor, the lady doctor. I laughed when I realised that not even at the fucking doctor's was I safe from my family.

Anecdote time: my doctor is a Sikh man (so, like my family). A couple of years back, I was a bit chesty and over from abroad, so my dad took me to see him. On a previous occasion, I'd seen him with stomach trouble and just mentioned that I hadn't eaten much and hadn't been eating properly because of my stomach being weird. He said breezily, 'Well, you've gained weight.'

... So anyway, I asked him when it might clear up - politely as always - because it'd been around about 2 weeks, and I don't generally do illness. He essentially revealed in a hectoring way that he didn't know - that it could be up to a month or something. He and my dad were sort of sporadically making conversation at this point, I think. He said my nose had gotten sore (of which I was, unsurprisingly, aware), probably just from blowing it too hard. I asked if that was the only reason why it was so red, 'because,' I said, 'it does seem redder to me than previous times when I've had a cold.' I don't really get colds, and maybe I sound like an ignorant prat, but is that really such an awful thing to say?

He became exasperated. 'Well, you probably did before, but you just don't remember it. That's why you think it's worse now. We tend to remember significant events in our lives. Illness is hardly a significant event, is it?' Withering gaze. 'I mean, in conversation, we retain only 40% of what we're told.'

In the shallows of my mouth, the cry of Arrogant tosspot! died bitterly on my tongue. This was swiftly followed by the rejoinder 'Well, next time you want to show off to my father, you might as well just fellate him - and not in front of me either, PLEASE.' Still, my dad is slightly hard of hearing and rarely ever tuned in enough to other people's conversations to have realised what was going on. Even then, it's not like I can count on his - or any of my family's - support. I kept quiet, stunned. My suspicions about him wanting to show off were forthwith proven when he and my dad engaged in a sort of random and automated braggadicio-bout of what community work each had done. There was a strange sentiment to it, as though they were in reality striving for the same thing, but by nature falling into a wearied machismo routine of competing cockerels.

So yeah, that fucking charmer? Not testing me for depression! Although this may sound terrible, I really suspect that were I to see him and not absolutely insist on confidentiality, he might find a way to suggest something, if not bring it up, to my family upon encountering them.

4) I made an omelette yesterday. With mature Cheddar cheese and fresh parsley. I fried up some shredded ham, sliced fresh spring greens (originally misspelt as 'grins'! Oh dear), a plum tomato and one large-ish mushroom. This I piled on top of the omelette, with two pieces of wholemeal toast and a very fine dinner was had by all.
5) I will keep trying new things with The Libertarian. In the space of just two weeks, or so, he has gone from having no strong feelings about wholegrain strawberry Biopot yoghurt, to actively encouraging me to buy it at Tesco, because 'it's only 30 pence more.' This, here, is proof of the goodness of the world. My lover adores yoghurt as much as I do now. I was also absurdly proud of him when I made one of my makeshift desserts (rhubarb and vanilla Biopot poured over warm golden syrup cake - SWOON) and he rapidly cleared it. Were I not so busy thinking 'Crikey, this is moist,' I would've shed tears of joy, I tell you. TL is of a, er, limited palate to say the least, but his heart is large and so I have converted him to many a cuisine and the journey ain't stopping yet, ohhhhhhh no.

(I apologise to anyone who is suddenly repulsed and morally outraged by my food-based burblings. I LOVE food and always have. Some people like to look at porn, or celebrity gossip late at night. I floss to cake recipes. Yes, that's right. Cake recipes. I actually emitted animal noises of wounded envy and desire when discovering that people, out there, have combined brownie and cheesecake).

Something I meant to do ages ago, but had neither the time nor energy to do - I think it's really high time that somebody either a) assassinated the Pope (why is it confined just to political leaders?!) or b) committed him. I'm sorry to sound so violent, but my patience wears ever thinner with this dangerous loon, who practises inefficiency, corruption and hypocrisy at Olympic levels and continually endangers public health/human rights/world improvement in the process.

This is old news, from the 18th. I just couldnae resist though:

The Roman Catholic Church believes marital fidelity and sexual abstinence are the best way to prevent the spread of HIV.

... On his way to Cameroon, the Pope said HIV/Aids was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem".

The solution lay, he said, in a "spiritual and human awakening" and "friendship for those who suffer".

SPIRITUAL AND HUMAN AWAKENING? FRIENDSHIP FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER? Oh, don't worry, woman-who-has-no-rights-thanks-to-our-religion-upholding-cultural-misogyny! If your husband cheats on you and then infects you with the virus, it's OK, there's nothing you can do about it - because it's YOUR FAULT in the first place! You clearly didn't work hard enough at putting him off sex in the first place and erecting the correct psychical walls of guilt and shame in his consciousness! You should have put him off sex, apart from procreation, and then none of this would have happened!

I mean, you've failed in your basic wifely duties and he may accuse you of cheating - for a betrayal has occurred, hasn't it? You've betrayed him, just like Eve betrayed Adam. He may as well cast you out. Don't even THINK about getting an abortion, you've got a baby to bear - and if you die, then that's just divine retribution, really. Don't worry about that latex thingy that could've stopped the transfer of bodily fluid that gave you HIV! God made it, he'll deal with it! *looks desperately heavenwards, then develops carefree glint in eye* And if he doesn't, well then, tough shit anyway. As long as the white Western world's safe, you darkies can go on dying en masse for all I care. I mean, sure, I can hold you up as an example of outstanding devotion when it suits me, but you lot don't have the money or influence to lobby international governments and 'do God's work,' do you? You're the foot soldiers.

"In the context of globalisation with which we are all familiar, the Church takes a particular interest in those who are most deprived," he said.

A particular interest in making sure that 2/3rds of global Aids victims continue to die in sub-Saharan Africa, sure.

He said it was the duty of Christians to help to build "a more just world where everyone can live with dignity"

... Just not the duty of Roman Catholics.

From a separate analysis:

The Pope said the "cruel epidemic" should be tackled through fidelity and abstinence rather than condoms, and that "the traditional teaching of the Church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids".

Bull-fucking-shit, Benny. Seriously, is your dress laced with psychotropics? Since when does 22 million infected Africans = 'the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids?' EPIC fail.

OK, 3.05 a.m. Face melting. Will release my pincer-like grip now, and thank you all so much for your kindness, I LOVE Y'ALL.

P.S.: BBC Two is going to start showing The Wire! The fuckin' Wire! If you have not ventured forth into its glorious, glorious fictive terrain, then you MUST. Even The Times has counselled readers to get a piece of the action. Let's put it this way: it's routinely referred to by fans (including myself, I am guilty) as 'the best show on television ever' which is, granted, a little on the sweeping side. Just a little though. If The Wire by some freakish miracle, of the ever-hypothetical nature, were to transform into a person, then I would marry it and have its children. WITHOUT FAIL. Even if it involved polyamory. That's how good it is!

For those of you scared for my sanity - I'm going now. Really. Byeee!

Identity, Culture and All Dat 'Ish

As any fule kno, the um, 'situation' with the Gaza Strip and Israel has provoked a lot of what I can only term sheer utter fucking lunacy everywhere. Pop along to Pickled Politics and scroll down a little to marvel at the sheer volume of articles on it; or if you're a rubbernecking connoisseur, wade into the brain-rotting depths of personal insults and virulent misunderstandings and misinterpretations that tend to make up the comment threads of such articles. Sheesh. I have heard several times how mental people go over I/P, but to see it in action is really something else. Some brave commenters, such as one douglas clark, ventured to say that British Jews should not be forced to shoulder the responsibility of Israel's actions and expected to 'make everything right' from a tiny island far away (I paraphrase). Now, that seems like common sense, don' it?

It got me thinking again on how so much of the danger that comes from having a religious identity (as far as I'm concerned) is in that symbolism. I'm far too timid to say anything like that the world should be rid of religion; I like to throw up my hands on these matters and say, I don't know, and if pressed, I could give you an answer, but not a simple one. I can't ever see myself becoming famous because I don't on the whole do snappy soundbites or 'big ideas' - but back to religious symbolism. It scares me because it allows, nay in many cases, demands the establishment of a connection of oneself with a much larger body of people. The way I see it, many people 'get into' religion for the community and stay for the God (forgive me if that sounds very cynical, and just to elaborate, I'm talking here about the things that keep people born within religion within it, but especially of those who leave and 'come back' or those who enter for the first time...).

Now that is all very edifying and so forth, but it becomes hugely problematic when you start to think about what this means. What it means, as I see it, is a declaration by the individual of surrender to a collective, over certain things and at certain times. In short, it's like hazing or any sort of unpleasant club membership, and even if you were BORN with those privileges, you never know when the tide of mass opinion might turn against you. Hence, though more shored-up than the new convert, you're still forever at risk of being undermined by the very fact of your 'membership', paradoxical as it sounds.

(Might I just say how painfully paradoxical this strikes me as? A significant part of the promise of religion to many is as an access of ready-made identity, culture, history, yadda yadda yadda... and instead it gets to the stage where you're always having to prove yourself. Well, I guess as the popular maxim goes, in life, nothing (but nothing) is free!).

Now, it must be averred that this risk of being undermined is not always greatly present. It tends to emerge handily with the arrival of an Other. I suppose the process works something like this: your 'identity' and 'culture' are threatened, hence you are threatened; by aggressively reasserting these, you refuse the attempt of the Other to undermine you completely. However, as we have already established, this shadowy Other (which may not be as much of a threat as imagined to be, who knows?) will then become projected unconsciously upon your fellow-believers for whom you must perform the rituals of belief. Isn't it ungracious? Isn't it undignified, how the best and brightest of us find ourselves bending the knee before those we know, know, in our hearts and minds to be stupid, ugly, and generally inferior... and yet whom the deranged reach of (oft-bigoted) zeal places on the podium, above us?

I commented disparagingly on a thread about a Sikh 'holocaust' museum, saying that I don't think the word should be bandied about quite so readily. Aye right, I fuckin' don't - the word means 'burnt sacrifice' and was applied to the full horror of the Nazi plan (need I really mention the gas chambers here...?) in light of the specificity of how this plan was implemented. I am a writer; I have the most enormous respect for words and it really annoys me when people don't use them properly, or use them out of context. Fuck you if you think that's precious - you wouldn't say the same of someone like Ben Goldacre seeking to debunk bad science now, would you? Miscommunication, apart from when it's deliberate, has a lot to do with making our lives harder than they ought to be, and the misuse of language is one of those things. Call the suffering of other minority communities 'genocide', call it 'mass murder' - but given how saturated this word has become with meaning - and that too after a prolonged effort by History not to let us forget such an awful happening - don't go bandying it about. Especially when the events in question are lacking in the same scale, type of mass-murder and specificity of evil intent.

(Rumbold helpfully intervened to explain what I was saying before I even could myself, so I have left no further comment 'pon that thread. Please head over to Charlie Brooker to see, fully and perfectly expressed, how I ultimately feel about Internet 'debates'. Ta for that Rumbold, true to form you put it rather clearer and more polite than I probably would've managed... comment threads often fill me with impotent rage, and then I feel dirty, as if I've just rubbed myself all over with The Daily Mail, and vow to do something REAL when my degree is over).

To return to the point - I can't help thinking that such things happening - such ridiculous abuses of language and over-aggressiveness - come, because with things like I/P, people's 'imagined' ancestry begins to come to the fore. Hello, trouble. The collective, baying for blood, seeks its recompense of the individual - now is the time to prove yourself, Sonny Jim! Now show your ideological colours! Lo, and so it comes to pass that people in Great Britain set about each other from the screens of their computers over something which is happening far, far away and to which they are not (short of having relatives in Gaza or Israel) directly connected. I mean, ffs, the link between Jews and Israel is imagined and symbolic, just as the link between Muslims and Muslims in Gaza is imagined and symbolic. Why do you suddenly feel the need to multiply yourself into a fucking representative of your whole religion? Because your people are being attacked here - your people, that's who! Jayzus.

I think here of all the times in the past that I have been forced to say things that I don't believe and agree with statements I find abominable in order to avoid attracting my family's negative attentions. I did it up to a certain age, and then I realised that I didn't have to any more. I could use the power of silence against them. They could infer what they wanted from it; I would not agree, and having got in serious grief on past occasions, I would not condemn either. If this was a coward's way out, I didn't care. My objective was to protect myself and to emerge intact.

My mother has made the observation in the past - very accurate, I feel - that it is only wealthy, middle-class people who have the time to dwell on these things. While this is not entirely true (I'm sure there have been some suicide bombers who weren't fairly financially stable too - or does that only fuel my mum's theory, in implying that poverty only added to ideological frenzy?), there is a LOT of truth to it. While discussing things is all very well and good, I often feel that if you are going to spit blood so, then why the heck don't you get off your arse and do something to help directly? Complain to the BBC, give money to the DEC, hell, fly out there and do something. Just spare me the bitching, and the soapbox-ing, which begin frankly to dive towards unsettling levels of moralisation and dogma, for me. A minority of disenfranchised people will, inevitably, react badly to the injustices that have befallen them - but since when was stooping to that level acceptable? What of all the other people who just want to fucking get by? Like me, they're more concerned with survival rather than ideology. Life is hard enough 'secular' as it is.

Religious fraternity and perspective is not enough when terrible things like this happen. People must remember that we are all ultimately human and that ultimately all the vitriol begets no solutions and no progress. Of course, there are always those who profit from such quarrels, but if people learn to practise a bit more forgiveness and a bit more forgetting, hopefully the planet can proceed on to the future.

Just to bore you senseless a little further, all this really churned about in my brain like clothes in the washing machine when my mum read to me a hilarious, and I fully believe, fictional account of a Sikh wedding (in two parts) from a Punjabi newspaper. Apparently in the duration of this story, some 'sensible observer' remarked how there were far too many women at weddings these days; if you went to the marriage palaces, all you would see was women, and that in the old days, women weren't even meant to be part of the baraat (the wedding procession, otherwise understood as the arrival of the groom and his party at the marriage venue). I immediately stiffened, my brain standing to attention like a guitar-string being pulled taut. My mater had not noticed this; nor did she notice the sudden, emergent incongruity of this remark peeking its ugly, goblin little head from the narrative.

As I glanced idly at the sheet she was holding out before her, a dim sort of epiphany set in. I tilted my head, casually covering the sheet with my gaze - yup. I rolled back my memory to previous glimpses of this paper (I think it must have been the Punjabi section of The Sikh times) - yup. The overwhelming majority of the participants in this production were male, bearded, turbanned and for the most part, pretty old (late 30s onwards). There were women (or there was one I knew of definitely, anyway) in the English part of the paper, but the only columnist I could think of, Rupi Gohlar, was consigned unfussily to a slim, 6cm-wide column somewhere near the entertainment section, which, if I was not looking for it, I would have likely failed to notice (first couple of times, I did miss it).

(To any Private Eye Readers, I appeal to you to recall the E.J. Thribb column. Do you see it now, in your mind? Yes, that's very much what her column resembles, in its slender insignificance. I am struggling now to recall if there are actually any female stalwarts besides Rupi).

I continued to take in what was being read to me, almost laughing at the right moments, but inside I vibrated with epiphany spreading, like the opening of a curtain admits more sunshine. Had I not, upon viewing Channel Punjab, only ever viewed the blurry outlines of women stereotypically 'dancing in the fields' (or had I imagined that too?) and consigned to women-only programmes such as Trinjhan (as far as I know it, a women's talkshow where they had writers and so forth on)? Other than that, women abounded only in the horribly cheap Star-Plus knock-off soaps, where a stereotypical mother-in-law bitch-from-hell would try to undo her stereotypically butter-wouldn't-melt daughter-in-law. Things might be complicated by the arrival of, or transformation of the latter into, a stereotypically gold-digging Westernised 'un-woman'.

I cast about in desperation, but the awareness was glaring me in the face. This was simply not me! None of these were me, and a slow, snakelike rage bubbled luxuriously in my veins. To think that all my life I had been told - had it insisted upon to me - that this was the right and the true, the tradition in which I belonged! I had grown up thinking that Punjabi culture and Sikh culture were one and the same. As I delved into Sikh history, I became much more conscious of the guiding principles of that religion, and as I began to find out more about Punjabi culture - through talking to people other than my parents - cracks began to appear. I discovered that Punjabis had a reputation for being big drinkers and loving fried chicken (that'd explain our local high street then, I tell you...) and, above all else, I began to notice the almost obsessive and deranged sense of male privilege that underscored Punjabi society. I suspect this went something like this: Punjabi men, being among the tallest, strongest and fairest-skinned in India (remember how colour-conscious India is!) were not only superior to women as it is taken for granted that men always are in Indian culture, but also superior to other Indian men! Hence they had extra entitlement!

The fact that the Punjab abounded with rich landowners whose sense of self-worth was only further pumped by laying claim to the glories of Sikh military history won't have helped. And so it came to pass that I watched Long Da Lishkara (a cult Punjabi film made the year before I was born) with my family, I think around the age of 11 or 12. I had not understood the obsession, in some films, with showing women jumping into wells. My young brain established that this must be for them to kill themselves - but why were they killing themselves? The screen soon brought me the answer.

A turbanned, well-dressed man - a man with a neat beard and moustache, and a fair complexion, almost like my own father - was holding a tumbler of whisky. I knew not the name of it, but by the shape and design of the glass, and by the colour of the liquid it housed, could discern what it was. I was horrified. Here was, to all intents and purposes, a Sikh man taking alcohol. Did he not realise it was forbidden? I was to be more horrified still, however, as he advanced upon the servant tidying the room. He seemed delighted by her; she was terrified. He continued to advance on her, I think breaking the glass, if I remember correctly to further frighten her, with his wrath. He managed to trap her on the bed somehow, her horrified shrieks and pleas for mercy only irritating him. Though the next part was obviously absent and left unelaborated upon, my precocious mind made sense of it. He had raped her, and she killed herself for having borne an illegitimate daughter.

My brain struggled. So the stereotypes were true, then? Punjabis were capable not only of drink, but of roundly disregarding the respect for women and acknowledgement of their equal status that lay at the heart of Sikhi? My world was painfully jolted. A man attired, as I said, not unlike my father, had committed a grievous crime against a woman who was, both socially and physically (I was sensitive to the former fact too!) as his female servant (and an Indian woman, thus hardly practised in self-defence) at his, the rich male landowner's, mercy. He had refused her his mercy. He had used her, and then left her to dispose of the evidence of his crime by disposing of herself altogether. Meanwhile, his wife, who had found out about it, did not leave, or punish him. Nor did she adopt the poor little girl. If anything, she began to get angry and worried as, now adults, her son fell in love with she who was technically his half-sister (eww!).

As I looked at my mum reading to me, all this came back to me. My mind whirred with the cascading visions of tiny, rectangular 'mugshots' of old, bearded, turbanned, male faces. I looked upon the writer of this 'humorous' article. His fat, round face was just about visible in black-and-white. I wanted to spit on it. More than anything, the urge to slap my mother fizzed dangerously in my arms. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I wanted to cry. 'How dare you try and sacrifice me to these people who have never had a period, never worried about leaving their family, never feared their wedding night with awful dread? OF COURSE marriages are full of women now; we all know the awful suffering that many Indian marriages entail and women turn up in sympathy and commiseration! They too remember how it felt to pin your scant hopes to this one day of grandeur, wishing for its flashy charm to rub itself off on the union forever sealed afterwards!'

However, it wasn't really that strong - gone are the days when I came anywhere near doing that. This was the merest flicker, and it gave way, as always to sadness. My mother is a compromised woman, lost in the values of the time she grew up in. She still moves within the fug of '50s India, and all I can do is cast it off. It is not me, it is not my culture, and I feel elated that at last I can express myself with a concrete example. So you say that these white club-going 'goris' aren't me? Well, those old, sanctimonious bearded twats aren't either! Nor is that overweight, high-blood-pressure-suffering housewife, who dares not even suggest things to her husband any longer for fear of provoking dispute! I'm not the virtuous bahu! I'm not a gold-digger! I don't want my children, my sisters or any of my immediate female relatives to suffer, and that is why I keep trying to take them all under my wing! I may not know my American cousin too well yet, or the daughter of my mum's 'brother' (I think he's actually her cousin?!) whom everyone discusses in low, disapproving tones for having married an older, white man. I may be estranged from my eldest female cousin, Rani - but I'll fight for them, I'll fight for them all in any way I can, just like I did for my eldest sister pre-wedding, when her husband started shouting at her over her wanting speeches. I got in trouble, but I was proud - because that, that is who I am, and for a brief, shining minute, I was no longer leading a double life. That is who I am, my 'identity', my 'culture'; that is me.

If You're Not The Libertarian... Turn Away Now!

This is a sort of odd open letter to The Libertarian. I'm not too sure why. Maybe it was the fact that he spent at least 3 hours today trying to help me do my work.

Hello you. I quite like the thought of you coming across this and your eyes widening with surprise. Knowing you, you'll probably start laughing and then be overcome with appreciation. I can hear you now, sighing delightedly. I know it's not as good as a REAL letter - there's no illustrations! - but I'll do you another one of those at some point. Promise.

Out of respect to you, I have kept any major details about you off my blog, and will continue to do so. I'd just like to stop briefly, wipe the sweat of exertion from my brow and bemoan the fact that, well, it's hard, y'know. My cold, logical mind is obsessively delighted by the fact that it's such a goddarn healthy relationship - I mean, you call when you say you will, I am able to have my perpetual foot-in-mouth syndrome - and somehow, as you would say, we 'muddle through.'

As for my sentimental side? Hooo boy. This is a lot more interesting/convoluted. It tends to be a toss-up of fear and abject astonishment. I'm just a girl, and you're just a boy, but here we are making the sort of love that you read about in books. Not long after we became a couple proper, the awful consciousness that you were someone I absolutely had to hold on to began to burn a hole in my guts. I felt crazy, because although you were tremendously important to me, you were by no means the centre of the universe. I had objectives beyond you and I still do, reduced though I am to the level of such sycophantic acts as this - writing a 'public' love letter (Good Lord, what next? Am I going to turn emo and etch out 'heartfelt' expressions of sentiment in 'guyliner'?).

I don't want to spend every waking moment with you, nor do you with I. I might not even spend every night with you. Don't expect me to become 'conventional' at any point (I don't have the social awareness to perform such a feat :-D), even if I have your sprogs. Which I really rather would like to do, as you know (Bloody Hell, KJB! What's happened to you? You've gone 'straight' etc. etc... ;-D).

As I struggle through trying to look after my sister and not fail my final year of university, the help you give me is so very appreciated. Words can scarcely convey my gratitude as you prevent me (repeatedly) from unravelling like a double-snipped ball of yarn. So, I guess I'm making this officially official. Though I suppose I had already. Take my freedom, take my time - take my life, in short. If I had more money, I would give it to you, though you haven't asked and never would. Hence I will give you the things that really matter to me, because...

I love you. Those three poor little words, how they strain under the weight of near-inexpressible meaning! I have always wanted to love, but you have shown yourself to be worthy of love. I am damaged, it's true, but I will offer you all that my poor, bruised little cardiac clock can muster. Don't be fooled - like a luxury car, it's much roomier inside :-D. Would that your face were receptive, like Braille, to the secrets of my entreating fingers, but it seems that by and large, your eyes comprehend what mine transmit (Green eyes! Ringed with hazel! Fnnnnn *melts*).

I tried to fight it. Sometimes I still do. However, there's no denying it - this love is the stuff from which fictions are spun. It is like inspiration, heady and refreshing. It has its moments, but as Forster said, there is something 'stable and quiet' at the bottom. Head and body independent, but you are possessed of that other one that also happens to matter.

So... yay for us. Thank you again. For existing and also for being wonderful. I know there'll be no comments, but as I said... in a year and a bit's time, you may have to watch your back, matey ;-D. Just to reiterate... I love you. You rock my world *projectile vomiting*

Any fule who happened to read this in fascinated horror is now free to go, and my sincerest apologies. Love... you know how it is (or do you? *raises eyebrow*).

Time Of The Month

Me needs a rant. I have come back home, been received back into the warm, Internet-fuelled glow of home... and what do I find? Only that my sister is fucking sleeping in my bed. Why can't we just have ONE beautiful, unforgettable night together, the double-bed and I? The Libertarian was visiting me as usual yesterday, and I sleep marvellously in his arms (and generally better when he is present), but otherwise, my thoughts scrabble about like overexcitable rats in a maze to the potentially chart-busting sounds of my fridge whirring and making sudden loud popping noises, unexpected semi-explosive clanks of the radiator and idiots being themselves in all their glory outside my window. Let's not forget the joys of living in a student house - one person uses the water in any way whatsoever, and the plumbing broadcasts it to you like a delightfully primitive version of Twitter: 'L--- is washing her hands', 'J----- has just taken a piss,' 'L--- is preparing the veg for her usual 12 a.m. supper. Please insert fork violently and repeatedly into delicate brain matter as required'.

Music shall not be made (the music of I, yes, that is ME, SLEEPING FOR ONCE and also occasionally breaking wind) between the sheets, because MY FUCKING SISTER IS THERE.

One of my best friends, quizzically: 'Isn't your sister married?!'

Well, exactly. So here is a poem from 2004 to keep me going. Thank you to all ye who commented on the passing (now official) of my laptop. I ONLY BOUGHT THE FUCKER IN 2007, IT HAS EMERGED! FUCK YOU, Fujitsu Siemens. Fuck you *shakes head*. I just keep hearing 'Buy a Mac, they never get viruses.'

Yes, and live on water and whatever has fallen onto the carpet until I graduate. Instead, here I am, back at home just so I can apply for a Master's and write an essay. :-(


Time Of The Month
I hate it here. Everyone’s cheese to my grater
I want to shred them and rip them up like
Balls of scrunched scrap paper. Get AWAY from me!
I’m offering no leniency. If you plan to get
What you want, then leave, annoying me, like
Spilled water drops on an oil-coated surface,
Dream on. The burn marks will stay with me
Scars of trying to keep my anger on a steady simmer
When it longs to boil over; the lid rattles
The pot that is my face strains; copper glows
Becoming brick-red. How much more should I take?

Don’t piss me off. The temptation to pluck you
Between finger and thumb, then toss you away
Like so many unwashed clothes comes. But you’re
A waste of space; hell with it, I’d rather flick you
Or kick you. You sit smugly in my place with
A look of challenge. Do you want me to rip
It off, and use it to clean my shoe? I’ll wring
Tears aplenty from you, like blood between my thighs.

Put you through a mangle; I’ll bend you to my will
Like Yuri and his spoon, only smoother, pernicious.
Tell me; how do you like your humiliation?
Ritual, indelible, or just well done? You answer
The question, I question your answer, since like
A used-car salesman, I’m master of my craft.
I deliver. Retribution. I know how to pull a spin,
Constant is my aim to kill. Manipulative and
Mendacious incubus. I am as a little fire-cracker,
Tailed as a tadpole, smashing brightly on the pavement.

I’ll dabble in wordplay, teasing out my tongue
Supple and thin; all the better to lash you with.
My gut seems to contract and squeeze, burping
Out more crunching aches. This discordant rhythm
Is echoed in the auto-ignition of my fury at
The slightest frisson of friction. Frustrated and
Irritated, because I always feel unclean!
Take care that you never dare cross a girl
Of sixteen when she’s menstruating.

P.S.: The best agony uncle ever is back! Bow down, bow down! REEEEESPECT!

And FOR ALL YE COMIC FANS (the Watchmen movie is out this year! Hyperventilate, hyperventilate).

Disastrous Combination...

Being in love and having writer's block. Good God, why don't you just club me over the head and/or chloroform me up, right now?

I feel like the Modernist agenda made flesh. I AM the failure of language. My ideas drift, well-fed and complacent in my head, like a blundering lot of sheep. No sheepdog of logical structural framework will surface in order to corral them into sense, into expression.

As if to ram home the insult - to thoroughly augment my distress - a multitude of memories keeps throwing itself against the straining walls of my mind. It wants out. It will not abate until I find myself, sprawled in my blanket, eyes unfocussed and mind in flight towards HIM again.

I thought that healthy love would make me feel like one of those battery-powered flashing pens; frivolous but paradoxically justified by the very fact of my frivolity. In a world of ruthless linearity would come a dancing rupture. In the cynical Eden of progression - studyworkhouseholdtaskscareerADULTHOOD! - would arrive a snake offering me the most ironically important knowledge of all. The knowledge of an event beyond my control, beyond my understanding and most thoroughly beyond my rationalisation.

Yet in my feeblest moments - I find myself naked! Robbed of my critical capacities, endowed with an art that leads me back, always to HIM. Him, him, HIM! I find myself divided into an unholy Trinity: the Admonisher, the Sufferer and the Artist. The Artist seeks to further the capital of distraction, banking as she does on the antagonism of Admonisher and Sufferer. I see the Admonisher stood over the Sufferer, curled at her feet. Here we have the classic mother-daughter dynamic in play. The elder warns the younger that great things are stake. The younger, attempting to direct her trembling lips through reluctant weeping, concedes - accepts the remark - but her heart is rebellious. It whispers its fears that the elder is perhaps not as experienced as she might like to say, that perhaps there is a certain wisdom in the foolhardy courage of inexperience that well-travelled cynicism lacks.

Schizophrenic is the experience! Surrounded on all sides by the doors of obfuscation, I knock like a game-show contestant: tentative, beating regular like a tiny, desperate heart. My own desperate intelligence is paralysed by a Freudian crisis, meeting such phrases as 'self-reflexive text', 'settled cultural authority,' 'fissiparous': to kiss or to kill? All the while, the hounds of love pursue me, waiting their chance to drag me into somnolence, overcome as Cerberus by Orpheus.

During the the day, he held me to his chest; during the nights, he pursued me like a gender-bent Actaeon - should not I be Artemis? - claiming me again, again and again. 'Enough!' I tried to scream. 'I love you!' The words refused to come in my state of animal panic. If I could, I would have supplicated him: 'O beloved, come as my handsome prince! Deliver me from the state of sleep and inexpression whence I suffer!'

Then, I recalled, Sleeping Beauty was no feminist. The spell broke, I fell back; into an affliction of the most Modernist inarticulation; my prince looming in the shadows with my fleeing last shreds of inspiration - and the tears welled in me for want of confidence.

Reader, I... Met His Parents

So. Given that my life has been nothing short of terrifying recently (chronically miscalculated my student loan and thought I was going to die, penniless and half-eaten by an Alsatian as combined work and poverty pressures induced my heart to burst like a tomato in the microwave)... I thought I would go for the best form of catharsis there is available: 'publicly' embarrassing myself on my public blog. See now, this wouldn't be real humiliation, I told myself, since virtually no-one reads this anyway. The 3 people who happen to follow probably know enough about me to divine that I am a huge embarrassing mess of a laydee anyway. Well, as huge as you can be at almost 5'4'' (almost! almost! Talk about being cut to the quick! 'So that I may calculate your BMI, please tell me: are you 5'4''? You look like a 5'4''' *shamefacedly* 'No, I am afraid I am 5'.37''...').

You - people who have read any recent posts - will know that I am in love with a man (scandale! you cry derisively. As if we thought you were in fact in love with an oversized cucumber!). Not just any man, however. He has sort of a 'web presence' like myself, and so I threatened to very slightly roll back the sunroof of anonymity last time. However, I got an email about it, so he will now be referred to as 'The Libertarian.' He jokingly referred to himself as 'im upstairs' once, I believe, but I know that I for one may confuse this with God, so for now he is, very simply, The Libertarian or TL if I'm feeling very slovenly.

Anyway, The Libertarian is very, very good to me. He is, in fact, so good to me that I was terrified he was actually a hologram for the first month of our relationship and I occasionally woke up afraid that he would have disappeared from my side like a hallucination (usually to be greeted by the halcyon view of his back while he slept peacefully...). He brought me a rose on our second 'real date' - which he carried intact from effectively one side of the city to another for about 2 hours or something. He took me to a formal dinner at his alma mater and introduced me to one of his best friends. While this was occurring, he got slightly tipsy and preceded to grin at everyone around him, especially me, squeezing me close to him affectionately and rubbing my arm. The next day, he showed me around the town there, refusing as always to let me carry my own bag and insisting on taking a picture of me, be-shawled, because I looked 'so cute.'

I could see, very early on, that I was going to fall in love with him. I could see it coming like Michael Jackson can see facial collapse coming. I reacted badly when I realised I loved him, managing to scare him in the process. Romance-novel-esque as it is, it became clear to me that I'm really not used to being treated well, and I don't trust it, tragic as that sounds. He is determined to make being treated well the norm for me, and I thought I might almost be getting there, but today came a warning.

I went to his house to help him ice Christmas cookies with his mum, and had a very good time doing so, because I tend towards the artistic and got carried away doing elaborate decorations, like a randomly-shaped cookie which I turned into a little Christmas scene with two tiny carollers, two giant musical notes, a bell and some snow. I received many compliments from the pair of them, and then his mum went out to get some things. A fair few hours later, as I was preparing to leave, she said she had a present for me (!!) and it turned out to be a cookie-icing book, with all sorts of elaborate designs and suggestions.

Now that threw me off balance enough as it was, but then she joked about how it would help me when I 'start my business' and said that 'you have a real talent there.' TL agreed with her and smiled at me while holding my hand. We flipped through the book together, commenting on the various designs. They kept being very encouraging and kind, and I felt like I had just swallowed a brick, all wibbly and sure that my face or voice would soon slip out of my control.

Soon afterwards I left - and made it back home without bawling my eyes out. However, the whole episode made me wonder when I am ever going to get used to this whole 'people being genuinely nice to me' business. I just can't get my head around it. Compliments are not compliments to me - they are spiked apples, which I scan for concealed razors. Kindness is a Venus flytrap, waiting for me to hover over it so that it can snatch me into the black depths of its jaws and rip me to shreds.

In short, I love him but I'm just so goddarn AFRAID to have faith that it might be OK. That I might NOT end up eroded and cynical again. I didn't even get dumped last time round - it was me who left - but that didn't stop it from being a thoroughly painful experience which made me get the way I am now. TL and I have fought once, and we made up within an hour, but the feeling I got was so strong that I will never forget it. In the brief stretch of time when I believed we were 'over,' I had a terrible pain in my chest and I felt sort of numb inside my head. I was travelling to Waterloo and when I got there, I burst into tears. What worried me was that I didn't feel surprised. I felt resigned. Something was always going to go wrong, and now it had. Oh, well done me, I had vindicated myself.

I need to lose that feeling. Not so that every hint of friction comes as a huge, unsettling shock, but just so that I am not looking to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'You want to be careful that in worrying about not being too clingy, you don't drive him away,' my wise friend told me. Indeed, and I don't want to feel that my unfortunate childhood has laid some inescapable curse on me.

Yet, the free, relaxed, equal nature of TL's interaction with his family hurt me. I would say, 'for want of a better word,' if it were true, but - it did. It hurt me. I have been unable to shake off the feeling, despite my horror of marriage and lack of sentimentality about love, that this is the 'One.' I don't believe in 'the One' because there are many compatible people out there, but I do believe there's probably likely to be a 'One' you're more able to marry than the others, and oh boy are the warning klaxons sounding about TL. He has the same feelings about me, he says, but I am his first love, so... eh.

Looking at his family does not make me jealous, but it does make me feel aware of how inadequate my own relationship with my family is, even though there's not a lot I can do about that. It makes me want to be part of his future even more, to be part of that small but intimate family circle. Yet I have stop thinking as if it were certain with him... I need to CHILLTHEFUCKOUT and for some reason I just can't. It is what I have always wanted, being dangled cruelly in front of me. This is where, if I were certain of 'im upstairs', I might raise my two fingers skywards and cry 'Feck you.'

Oh. My. God.

I'm sorry. This is just a quick blog post to express my sheer fucking amazement at my parents. I am currently trying to plan my Proust commentary, and my mum started talking to me about my cousin, who was/is apparently back home as well. I told her that I had rung her and received no reply. She asked whether she was/is (back home) or not. I replied that I didn't know because I had rung her and received no reply.

My mother then went on to say how my cousin's parents must be very worried about her and that they are 'overprotective' of her. 'How so?' I asked, sceptical, seeing as how I am actually in my cousin's confidence and have some real idea of her relationship with her parents. My mother went blithely on to say how her parents driving down to see her and give her food - like my parents do with my brother - was 'overprotectiveness.'

Nice to see that she's missed the irony there. What would you call what you do for my brother, then, Mater? And why is it 'overprotectiveness'? Might that be because she's a girl and 'can cook for herself' and she doesn't 'need' it like my brother does? Is it 'common sense' when my parents do it for my brother? Mater attempted to rope me in to her cooking up something for my brother yesterday, while my dad simultaneously seemed to be packing up the whole week's worth of shopping, toiletries and all, to drive to him. I asked why on earth she was making Vegemince for him (and getting into a flap) when, last time I asked, she said that the people my brother lives with were 'really nice. And they are all cooking together.'

'I thought they were cooking together?' I asked, bemused.
'No...,' in an increasingly panicked tone as she mediated the addition of the stock to the Vegemince mix, 'he heats up his pizza... and they have their pizza... They just have freezer food, waffles and things, you know how he is!'
My dad came in. 'I found the thing he was asking for... Got his Right Guard... and he needs the waffles he forgot last time.'

My mum asked me for mushrooms, and in a fit of confusion, I dived into the freezer which I had just got the Vegemince from. 'You seem to have a lot of pizza.'
'Yes... Some of it's for G------...'


Hmmm! To get back to the anecdote at hand, my mum, after hypocritically labelling my cousin's family's behaviour as 'overprotectiveness,' then went on to say that they were more like that since the death of my little cousin last year (of course...).
'Well, P----'s death has brought them closer together as a family,' I remarked, suspicious.

Then, Mater followed up her one-two combo with the 'lucky strike.' Note that this is what she said, put in a perhaps slightly shortened form, but the sense of it has been preserved firmly:
'It's no wonder that P------- never learned to cross the road properly then, is it? Because they were overprotective, she never learned to cross the road properly.'
'Mum - I'm sure she learned to cross the road properly,' I said - almost in reflex. Perhaps it was the sheer, farcical disbelief. I always seem to end up in this position where I'm 'testing' what she says, not quite able to believe my ears.
'She wasn't street-wise. She wasn't aware of when to cross the road. See, we scolded and checked you lot, and so you got a bit smarter than that.'

Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God.

I'm sorry, but when my bezzi said the other day that my mother is Satan, and 'I'm sorry, --, but you are the spawn of Satan!' I laughingly agreed with her. Now, I'm thinking agreement but without the laughing.

What kind of person manages, a year after somebody's death in a tragic accident, to blame them for it by saying they weren't 'streetwise' all while assigning secondary blame to their family for 'overprotectiveness'? Not to mention taking the whole sorry incident as a way of fucking GIVING YOURSELF UNDESERVED PARENTING KUDOS?

I don't know whether to cry or scream. On the plus side, I found my photo album from when I was a baby today, and it was a huge relief. It would have been too much for me if I had lost it. It would have felt as though besides being the 'disposable' one of the children, my past - a time when I was cute and carefree and everyone loved me because they had to - had ceased to exist altogether.

But no, I found it. I was so thankful. I hugged it to my chest and I ran into my room with it, lifting it to my lips. I flipped through rapidly, and came to a picture of me on the swing, my lower lip protruding, skirt of my little dress billowing. I was about maybe 1-3, and inches from crying. I kissed my picture-self (protected by the plastic covering) and said 'I love you, even if no-one else does.'

I was, in effect, making a promise to that angry, little curly-haired girl. I will be there for her if nobody else is. At times when I feel like I can't give myself the love and respect I deserve, I will have to reach out to others for help, but I'm in the equation now. I have entered the arena of the battle for my soul. My family will make me cry and doubt myself, and try to rein me in with their insidious game-playing and guilt-based headfucking. Yet I can see it now. I am standing in for myself. There will be no more proxies - it used to be my ex and my parents locked in battle for me. Passivity no more - my current guy is a wonderful person who will be there for me, and keep me centred, but I have me now.

And even if I'm alone in my family, at least I know there are two of my cousins in my extended family who understand. My best friend. A sort-of cousin who I've recently adopted. The whole network of 'less-close' friends, acquaintances etc., who will play their parts. Y'see, I took a lesson from the death of my cousin too. And it was this: People are stupid fucks who will turn even the defining events of human existence into a soapbox for their prejudices and posturing. Someone's always missing the point. (I will probably write more on my cousin's funeral at some point, provided it doesn't freak anyone out).

Life is short. I loved her. I should've spent more time with her. We should've cooked together. Now that she's gone, I have a renewed need to hold onto those that are 'still here.' It's not always easy to maintain regular contact with those you love, but so what? Good things always take some work. I love you, P----, I promise I will never use your death as a way to shore up my own fucking prejudices and I'll never forget you. Thank you for everything. I'm trying to let your sister know I love her all the time. And finally, fuck the haters!