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Back from sailing
I feel like I'm most myself at sea. It's probably 'invalid', since it's not reality, and blah blah blah, but there's a rawness, an unmediated, unprocessed feeling to the thing that makes me feel more alive than the daily bureacracy does.
There's something about windburn, about chafed hands, bruised shins, and the adrenaline that floods your body when you nearly fall off the bowspirit (sticky out bit at the front). There's no way to show off, since the better you are the less you will stand out. For someone like me, a break from showing off is invigorating. There are also lots of moments of staring out to sea, and it feels like ever wave, every splash or spray and sunbeam that slices between the mast and the mainsail is cleaning you out inside, corroding your history.
So I know it can't be the reality of everyday, and I know that "inset random Cambridge cynicism here", but still, I feel alive because of it!
Lucie and I have been doing some spring cleaning, and here is a photo we took:
I like this picture, because this is how I feel right now. Yesterday I had a click moment, and learned something about myself, and about how to move forward, so that's exciting! A whole new path suddenly appeared!
Shall I do the Tall Ships Race this year? Anyone else want to come? We could get a posse together!
Come on feet don't fail me now...
As my sister-in-law used to say.
Last night Matt and I climbed Castle Mound at 3 am to pray, barefoot in the rain. When the wind picked up it felt a bit primal, and like power was near at hand, as it were. We got back and wrote loads of stuff down, about what we felt was going on with the clubs, and church, and Saturday night and Sunday morning. So at some point I will try and write it up.
Yesterday felt, overall, like a bit of a punch-up with reality. It's all good, but scary. Apathy was whispering sweet nothings in my ear, escapism tugging at my sleeve.
At the moment I'm reading Ecclesiastes.
Dear world,
This morning, on my walk to work, I thought of lots of things I could say to impress you. But instead, I just want to say, God's really good. He looks after people. Not in some prosperity-gospel way, but something else. I can't describe it, and I certainly can't systematise it, but He's good at looking after people.
And so to the people who know me outside the blogosphere, another thing I would like to say is that I often only feel I'm allowed to talk if I'm going to tell a crazy story (probably exaggerated), impress you with intelligence (plagiarised sometimes), or make you pity me for the things that have happened to me beyond my control. I don't want to tell you the stories of my failures, and I especially don't want you to ever find out that there have been times when I've felt lonely, and ashamed. So I've hidden from you. I haven't trusted you with the truth. And I have no idea how to.
So this evening I nearly didn't try to throw a satsuma at a wall. And it was a highly significant moment. Oh yes. Bceuase the reason I stood there so long, clasping the orange but not letting go, was that I felt like I knew exactly what would happen. I was going to wind back my arm, start to throw, get to the top of the throw, then flibble out, giggle to hide my embarassment, and then my friends in the kitchen were going to laugh at my ineptitude. So what actually happened was that it was pretty lame, but not awful, and my friends laughed, but that was ok. But man, there were several seconds when it was a very real possibility that I wasn't even going to throw the poxy little satsuma. Paralysed by fear of failure, so sure I knew how the world was going to spin for the next few seconds. The truth is that I know very little about the world. I don't know whether a satsuma I throw will hit the city car park, and I don't know how my friends will react. I can handle not knowing what Blair will do next, or the way to combat global warming, or stuff about Foucault, but it's quite undermining to realise that I don't even know whether my own arm can throw something, where the only variable is me. So it's undermining, but also freeing. Wow - anything could happen. Next time, I could get an apple into orbit. My friends could surprise me with grace and love in any number of ways. And maybe Blair will become a socialist or something.
Uber-blog template, and then some actual thoughts that suddenly splurge out
- Tale from my journey to work, told in whimsical style.
- Moan about some aspect of 'modernity' or bureacracy, or anecdote about office life, likely to include a mention of the photocopier.
- Cryptic comment about someone I know.
- Account of my recent social activities, just in case the calendar in the corner wasn't enough to convince you I'm popular enough to be allowed to live.
- Politics snippet - establishing my left-wing intellectual credentials, while trying to keep a tone of irony so you don't think I'm just passionately red, or anything.
- Desperate attempt at reality, usually hampered by a tendency to care too much about the onomatopoeia.
- Carefully chosen picture.
The thing is, we have to craft what we output, don't we? It surely can't just be raw, unmediated? So here's the thing - words are linear, thoughts are not. Around 6 months ago, Matt and I talked about how we think. And though I didn't realise it at the time, it was kind of a significant conversation, at least it has to have been, because I still remember it. I remember realising then that the way I think is in a starburst, almost like a spider diagram instantly sprawling across my neurons, some of the conections already present. Processing a thought is, for me, drawing more connections, or perhaps painting in more detail. The people who teach me things are the ones who add a whole new bubble to the diagram, or maybe cross one off, or cancel out a connection.
So this is why I can't possibly be expected to be 'real' in words, because words have an order, and my thoughts don't.
And now on the spider diagram in my head, we have the following:
Thoughts are non-linear, but stories can be put on a line, because they happen in time. Also, static things can be communicated, as points on the line.
In a Cambridge moment, on a line of tension between two extremes, "we are the line".
Or in the words of Lucie's friend Damien, "Y'all talk about nothing, but it's <i>so</i> deep!"
Given that I went to a girls' school...
Why did they never teach us how to examine our breasts?
Maybe this is a question best discussed with my housemates!
Lucky fing
I just realised that I currently have the best daily journey of my life thus far, and onesignificantly better than the majority of the workforce in the UK will ever have. Every day I either walk or cycle across a park, along a couple of nice residential backstreets, and past a cute school. I walk under the arch of a windmill, and I'm at work, all this in 15 minutes. When I lived in London, my journey to school was 4 hours a day in year 7, and then 2 hours per day until the end of 6th form. The journey to lectures while a student doesn't count since I... errr... scarcely went to any, or at least certainly not daily. But my current journey is lovely. It makes me arrive at work all springy and alive. I should be finding out soon if my new job will also be absed in this office, and I very much hope it is!
Can I just also say, that in certain lights, East Anglia, and Ely in particular, is 'nice'. If Ely was a girl I'd let one of my brothers marry her. However the downside of our lovely drive to Ely for a legal structures seminar is that the journey home was too soporific. If it weren't for the tea, I'd have been napping in the boardroom this afternoon!
Only one more working day and then 10 days off!
Ouch
In 'The Whole Woman', Germaine Greer says that in a mammogram, "each
breast is squashed between polished steel plates to the thickess of an
Englsh ham sandwich, i.e. about three-quarters of an inch, and exposed
to soft-tssue X-ray, as the owner, in unspeakable discomfort, holds her
breath"(p. 65).
Furthermore, "for a young woman with dense breasts the mammogram is exquisite torture" (p. 67).
But
the real killer is that if a lesion is detected they give you a bloody
ultrasound anyway. A friend of mine had her breasts cut open to remove
some 'pre-cancerous cells, even though she has no family history of
breast cancer, was 18 at the time, and on the pill. Breast cancer in
the pre-menopausal is more aggressive that post-menopause, but it's not
surprising that young women don't feel able to go the their doctors
about it. We're never taught how to self-examine, body-fascism makes us
terrified of what could happen if we were ill, so we close our minds to
the possibility and stay away from the GP. My friend who had the
surgery - her biggest worry was that the fast before the anaesthesia
would make her stomach rumble, "embarassing" her before the surgeons.
No-one educated her about the real risks involved, the risks common to
any general anaesthetic. And no-one explained to her what the fuck is
meant by 'pre-cancerous cells'. They just slit her open, scraped out
some cells, sewed her up and told her not to wash for a week. The whole
story, start to finish, typifies so much of what feminism still has to
fight. But boys, if you're feeling excluded (if indeed you've read this
far), don't worry - men can be feminists too.
(the picture is "mammogram", by Debora Donelson, 2004)