twangypearl the elastic girl

first world problems

I'm in that dopey, la-la, mood, where I keep half-doing things and getting distracted and half-doing something else. I have loads to do, I am sure of it. But you know when you don't quite know what to do first, and you think: I know, I'll write a post? And then I'll feel better, having given myself the illusion that I have achieved something.

• My laptop gave up the ghost last week. When you try to turn it on, it starts patting its pockets and saying: Oh, ssshit. Now, where did I put my hard drive? Hang on, I am sure it's here somewhere. It must be... oh, how embarrassing, maybe it's... no...
  Then it makes some unreasonably loud electronic pings at you, while presumably it searches around its flat frantically, throwing stuff around, looking for its vital bits.
  Nothing, according to the young man in the laptop clinic, can be saved from it. It is officially banjaxed. I am trying to take this in cavalier fashion. After all, I did back up sometimes and what the hell, it's just a sort of forced de-clutter of all the detritus I collected over the years. Onward, and less encumbered by crappy freeware programmes!

• Likewise banjaxed is my car. Battery is defunct.

• Teaching is making me feel a bit lonely. I want to be on the other side of the desk, where you have friends to complain to - it's so much funner, more collegial. Boo. But, oh, fellow teachers! Oh! It's all (almost) worth it for that wondrous moment of squeeeee! freedom when you escape from the classroom until the next time! OH THAT BIT IS MARVELLOUS, isn't it?

• PKitty, though, now, the kitty, has been doing her best to cheer me up with little gifts. True, had I been in a position to choose, I might have preferred a pink Moleskine sketchbook, or perhaps some lavendar soap rather than - say - a half-dead fieldmouse, but, you know how it is, it's the thought that counts. So far I have not witnessed the delivery of the afore-mentioned rodents into the kitchen for bragging purposes but the JB has reported that she even went to the trouble of putting on a mini Christians and Lions type show for his entertainment. Mousey, mousey, I release you! Ha! No, I don't! Yes, I do! NO, don't be silly, OF COURSE I DON'T! CRUNCH.
  And so on. Anything to offer on this, anyone? I understand Nature is all red and rude, and so forth, but I feel sorry for the mice. She's so mean.

Here she is, the murderer herself:

I fear she is about that fat. She might have lost a few ounces recently. My human friend R, to the cat, when she came to visit:
Ooh, you're enoooormous!
BODY FASCISM, that is.

Anyway. How goes the mood with you?
T

 

learning

IS IT JUST ME, I WONDER

A couple of weekends ago:

TWANGY, seeing an opportunity to bond with DAZZLE, (the three-year-old niece) while the rest of the family are engaged in an interminable game of Capitalist Market Forces Monopoly, extends 'claws' and roars, experimentally:
Rrrrrar! I'm a tiger.

DAZZLE smiles indulgently.

TWANGY: What are you?

DAZZLE: I'm a people.

How deflating.

---

Further conversation, this time with a student:
ALEX(not real name!): So, in relation to.. I just want to understand. My head is wrecked here. When you copy a file, where is that?
TWANGY: Emmm. Well. What? It goes on to the clipboard.
ALEX :  But.. where is the clipboard?
TWANGY (not feeling terribly patient at this point): It's just out there, Alex. In virtual space.
In your computer's RAM or something, Alex.
ALEX: But. It's  just these notes don't talk about the clipboard. I think these notes are a bit...
TWANGY considers a rapid exit out of the window.

Speaking of the Hotel Tallafornia, and the "learning" that takes place therein with my unemployed would-be designers, it should come as no surprise that we are dealing, per usual, with the Usual Suspects. The same ould cast of characters. There's the one with the attitude, there are the moaners, there are the gigglers, there are those afflicted with shyness, those encumbered with laziness. The sickly, the smart, the motivated, the dense. 'Twas ever thus, was it not, teachers, educators, librarians? The moaners were moaning at me last week, and I had this lightbulb revelation: these people (whispered The Little Voice of Obviousness) are not my friends. In this relationship, here,  it's my job to hold the thing together, and be respected.

This is stunningly self-evident, I do realise. Maybe it's the chronic informality of the Irish, but up to now, I have always assumed that friendliness, a general enthusiasm for the subject, respect for their efforts and a pretence at a flat hierarchy would see me through this teaching gig. Now, I realise that to act as if there is no difference between us, except that I just happen to be standing at the other side of the table is just not going to work. After all, I am in charge of time-keeping, and there is money involved in that, this being a state-sponsored training course. So, how to play it? Shall I become (gets carefully into American character) a 'hardass'? Would this be better for all concerned? Thoughts on this welcome. What is your style?

I've told you about the hotel as venue of higher education in this brave new world, haven't I?
We are in the one heated room on the fifth floor of a mostly empty office block, (itself mysteriously part of the hotel), surrounded by empty offices like this:



It's so fantastically creepy, like some weird art installation. The other morning, the previously abandoned and chilly reception area had leaflets scattered around and a big poster over it:
THE PENTECOSTALS
Presumably they checked-in-but-can-never-leave the night before? Yet no sign of them since.
And then, odder yet, and, to use  The Young People's favourite word, 'totally random':


Bridge tables sprang up overnight. Bridge tables. 

What next, friends? The Annual Trapeze Artists' Convention? The League of Capuchin Monkey Handlers? YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE.

Rest assured, I will keep you posted.

T

matching

Breaking news:

• My poor, forlorn, lonelyheart socks have progressed as far as a detention centre on the top of a bench, where they await their fate. Shall their One True Partner come and bail them out, miraculously? Shall they? Or shall they be imprisoned in a plastic bag in the middle of the spare room, to be thrown out into the actual bin, in as soon as - oh! - anytime in the next year or two.
  
  Edge-of-your-seat stuff, I am sure you'll agree.

• In other news, and speaking of The Spare Room: we did finally get our declaration from the Adoption Authority. It came on paper headed solemnly with the harp symbol that signifies officialdom in Ireland. (If it's got a harp on it, it's serious and may be even worth something. DON'TFECKINGLOSEITYOUBIGEEJIT, MammyIreland might be presumed to be telling us with it. ) Some people have described this as an empowering moment, akin to being pregnant, but I just thought: Oh, there you go when the JB opened it. Since then, though, there has been a general glow of satisfaction, interpersed with the odd chilly moment of GAAHJAYSTHISISREALLYREALLYREAL.


• Since that day, we have been up to our elbows in paperwork. EVERYTHING has to be negotiated for, awaited, copied, scanned, signed, notarised, apostilled. It's like the Bureaucracy Olympics. We are getting more and more friendly with our solicitor, a floppy-haired, good-hearted fusspot of a young fellow who hangs out in Dublin 1.
  
  
• I admit the JB has done A Large Part of This Mental Power-lifting/Bureaucratising. Good husband! He is coming up in the polls, as I regularly tell him.
  
  
• It does seem wrong that we are required to survive this long battle of wits, which seems more like the psychological equivalent of an IronMan competition, and less like anything remotely to do with parenting, and must surely mean less bloody-minded people - who none the less might be really good parents - fall by the wayside and give up?


• Life continues to be packed to bursting. Whywhywhy is that, tell me? Don't you remember the hours and hours in your youth, where there was nothing to do, only loll around and watch The Multicoloured Swapshop? And it was good? Why is life so franticfranticfrantic? I am that harrassed state of mind where you miss your stop on the Luas, and only raise your head when the name Fortunestown is called out. Fortunestown? You've never even heard of such a place. Or where you say to yourself: Ooh, look, if the knife slips now, it could easily (but keep cutting) - OW! Or narrowly avoid being run over by another bus not the one you really wanted to catch, or sundry other unforced errors, as they say in tennis. The poor kitty nearly got an iron in the head this morning. I could have killed the kitty! With a flying iron! That fell as I was foolishly moving the board without removing it first!

I need to take a sabbatical from my own life. How about you? Tell me the secret of calmness. Kittalo will thank you for it.

T

 
I WILL. I'LL THANK YOU.

Guess where I've been

Clue: I met up with my by now lovely friend of some years (!), Valery for a hot chocolate, (thank you, inventor of the internet, for my internet friends) and made the bonus meeting of her DP, who was very kind to us. It was excellent fun. I walked around the town with my mother, and went to see the Rembrandts and the markets, and drank mint tea in hotel foyers.

The morning we had to leave, Valery's DP made us a very good coffee, on which I got a bit drunk, we ate chocolate sprinkles and biscuits in their lovely kitchen, and then we walked through the charming streets to Centraal Station and we were back in Dublin and the resumption of normal life just. like. that.

I would be afflicted with anti-climax, but it happened so fast, it all seems like a series of brightly lit snapshots in my head. City breaks, folks. Love the compressed quality thereof.

Normal life resumes, as it does. I did some sock-sorting last night, for instance, and I almost managed to throw away the single ones who have been waiting for their partners to show up lo these many months. Tune in soon for more of this thrill-a-minute stuff.

T

stream of semi-consciousness

Wobbly travel drawing from commute

[The following is copied and pasted from a document I typed up while at the place of employment, in a state of giddy boredomus extremis. Not entirely sure if enough oxygen was getting through to my brain at the time, so consider yourself forewarned.)

Well! How are you? A good moving on to 2012 was had by all, I hope? Twenty twelve, folks. Do you remember how spaceshippy that sounded when we were teenagers? And yet, still no beaming-up! I don't know.

Here I am in Hotel Recession on the hinterlands of Dublin, teaching my class. They are working away busily and I am terribly, terribly bored. Every so often I circle the room, and lurk behind them, hoping for a answerable, not too challenging question to come my way. And it's only 11.16. We've already had our morning break. Hysterical shriek of disbelief! I can't get the internet on my laptop, AND my fancy Christmas present phone is banjaxed for reasons known only to itself, proving once more that technology is worse than useless when it breaks because it creates the expectation that yes! we are contactable at all times! Aren't we modern and fantastic? Except when NOT, and we feel silly and cheated. I have a crick in my neck - it's all creak-ouch-yikes and I feel sort of vaguely broken, because it's January and the other morning, I woke up and smelled the January air of loss. It's like there's a seasonal alarm clock in my cells, waiting for this time of of the year.

Sitting here, all abandoned by modern technology, a person's thoughts are apt to turn all random and profound. I've been thinking a bit about the parenting I received, and how it's affected me. I have been thinking  what it was to have an absent, workaholic father, half-suffocating, half-neglecting. Like DramaBoy. Not much like the JB, who is relatively sane and present, all things considered. I've been doing a lot of reading on mental health, (research for the show I am in) and it's hard not to point and say, ooh! Borderline Personality Disorder! Bi-polar disorder! That's my da! And it's suddenly clear to me that I have chosen to be loved by people who confirm my own bias about myself. And I have been trying to fix my relationship with my father through my romantic relationships. What did I think, that if I could make them love me, like I want them to, that I'll feel better, somehow?

I did think that. Or I acted as if I did, which is the same thing. Thank God for the JB. If I'd married Dramaboy, ooh. I dread to think.

In another hour and a bit, (ARG. THAT IS LONG) we'll all convene in the kitchen where we'll boil water in the white plastic kettles, one of which leaks and the other emits a ferocious smell of burning rubber, which can't be particularly good, can it? My co-teacher on this course says huddling in the kitchen for lunch with the 20 strong class makes her feel that she should leave so they can complain about her. But there is only half an hour in which to eat, (a terrible state of affairs!) so I stick it out.

So! Some resolutions, for the season that is in it:

• Draw every day, one a day.
  
• Make a cartoon every month.
• Get therapy.
• Go/keep running.
• Be bold. Don't get the willies. Or don't act on them, anyway. And then:
  
• Hope that it's true that fortune favours the bold.

How about you? Have you resolved?

Whatever your resolutions  might be, and wherever you find yourselves, I wish you all such a happy new year.

x
T

Season's greetings

I offer you this cartoon of mine in a spirit of bonhomie and festive cheer, and I wish you all tremendously good times, my friends, for the season and 2012.
xx

T

PS. Oooh! Star-spotting: Colm Me@ney was in the local pub last night, all apparently nice and dead normal. Irish people like to be all cool with stars in their midst. It's funny: No big deal, man! Hollywood, pfft. I choose not to be a celebrity, myself.

Seen anyone, recently? I know London and NYC are positively littered with stars. You're falling over them, aren't you?

eergh

I have been finding myself very silly.

The first occasion of embarrassment happened like this: I applied for a show, sort of a voluntary community-ish affair, that has as its theme mental well-being and is to run in a few weeks. Time passed, the show approached, and no response was received from the curator.

Grr, I said, earlier this week, bloody curators! They don't even let you know that you haven't been selected! And it's for mental health! The irony of making people depressed by denying their application to a mental health awareness event! THE IRONY.

 All fired up and dangerously intoxicated by my own pique, feeling I was striking a blow for all artists everywhere and anyone in the world who hasn't Been Got Back To In Timely Fashion, I flamed off an email to the curator:

Dear whosit,

I didn't get an email saying my work wasn't chosen for Your Festival - I wonder did it go missing or something, as I am sure you wanted to acknowledge all entries, and the work that went into them?

Blah blah, good luck with the show anyway, etc.

And she replied immediately: The reason you have not yet received an email is because your work has been shortlisted. As an artist I completely understand the time and consideration each proposal takes...

Oh! CRINGE. And:

Our festival is run by six volunteers, we organise all events in our spare time, we appreciate your patience.

I DIED on the spot, even as I was leaping to the ground off my high horse and apologising profusely for the jumping of the gun. And then, when I met her, (of course) she turned out to be a) terribly nice and b) friends with loads of my art world friends.
I RE-DIE.

The second thing: something seemed different about the front of the house on Monday morning. Like something.. lacking.
I told the JB: My bike! It's just like.. gone. It's not there, I tell you! Someone must have taken it!

Two or three days flew by. Then Sister 1 texted me: Your bike is outside the wine shop. Which made me so happy! And yet, annoyed! Because what kind of hooligan does that? A drunk one? But no, (you'll be amazed to hear) the penny didn't drop. I texted Sister 1 back: The cheeky beggers! Is the lock broken? and she: No, it's securely locked, by you? And I, (finally twigging it): OH. Oh! O-oh.

I do remember leaving it outside the shop, though, it must be said that I also remember leaving it outside the house. But what with the physical evidence to the contrary, I have to accept the reality of the situation. Which is that I am a twit.

Your ridiculous,
T

ps. Have a good weekend.

adhoc

Love my magnets! LOVE. HFF sent me these, you know.

Well, my darlings! I'm in that awkward state of mind for which there should be a long composite German word - I have left it so long, that I don't know where to start, and the longer I leave it, the more I feel I have omitted Vital Stuff, and go into a further state of avoidance. And yet, I sincerely love my long-cherished blog-comrades and miss the interaction I find through this blog. I feel like the lovely Belgian Waffle, whose first paragraph here says it so much better than I could. That happens to me a lot. People expressing my thoughts better than I can. Thank Gawd for 'em.

Let's barge ahead, here. Nothing else for it:

• I've been singing, in the choir. Every night this goes on, for the season, including one bizzarro combo performance with Another Choir, composed of undergraduates, this time. On one occasion, I was late. I disapprove greatly of myself for this, not least because I had missed by minutes the meeting at the gate, where we were to be ushered to the appropriate room in the college to rehearse, and had a frantic Indiana Jones-like run-and-search down long lino-ed corridors, under arches, through courtyards, trying doors and stopping to listen intently for choir sounds. I needn't have worried, when I finally burst in to the room, there was a kindly Robert Hardy-look-a-like banging away at the piano, and the room was filled with The Young People all whispering, giggling, and singing, just a little. Robert Hardy looked at me over his glasses and said "Welcome" and the whole thing was like a three way cross between a seminary musical, a boarding school and a Harry Potter book, all set in the 1960's.


• I've teaching unemployed people with the State Training Body. This happens, weirdly, in a hotel in a peripheral suburb of west Dublin. It's all very Sign of the Times. I sit for an hour on a tram to be launched into this alternative reality, where you must travel on lifts and know codes and finally be delivered into an abandoned office building, where we occupy the one heated room on the fifth floor, to light a fire under the unemployed people, or at least offer them some hope, or so I hope. They are, so far, a dream to teach, getting on with their work, and only stopping to ask me intelligent questions.


• Also, steady money! Hurray.


• Which reminds me, I made a wonderful discovery out there yesterday. Near the hotel, there is a large 1990's style shopping centre, through which one can take a shortcut on the way back to the tram. There was a line of unlikely looking wooden huts in a line at the back of the centre, full of Christmas gift "ideas", personalised mouse pads and slippers, each presided over by a frozen but hopeful retail hutter, the type you feel sorry for. But then! A hut of The Most Beautiful Etchings, like a gleaming jewel amongst the dross. Like this! My eyes nearly fell out of my head:
  
  
  
  As thus it was that the problem of five Christmas gifts was solved on the spot. Well, I thought to myself, Suchandsuch should like this, and frankly, if he/she doesn't, I have no truck with him/her!
  (This is the artist/hut retailer: Jan Goede.)


• Ermmmm.
  
  
• Oh. Yes. Many applications for Art Stuff have been made, including a frightening one, which (life being like that) I might get. The application process is itself an art, I am realising. If I get that one, it'll be shown for an entire month in a public place on a huge wall. No pressure then. Gulp.
  
  
• I have been making art with a group of Other Young People, this time ones affected to varying degrees by cerebral palsy. They are great fun. I have discovered exactly how bad I am (appallingly) at boccia with them, and made some stop-motion animation with them as actors. It's cool.


• Kittaloo, who has been living here for what seems like a century, continues to hold us in her thrall, stroll inconveniently on my keyboard and hog the nearest source of heat. She is exactly as clever as she needs to be, the little maggot. When she feels slightly peckish/bored/cold, her latest thing is to sit beside me and put her heavy paw coercively on my arm, as if to whisper, threateningly: I will not allow you to forget me. Feline mafia tactics! Chilling.
  
  
• The spa was salutary, mostly because of the redemptive presence of my dear friend R, with whom I had a long debriefing session on the subject of the JB. She recommended counselling, and is going to get me the name of Someone. At least I can go, and the JB may feel encouraged to go at a later stage if I break the ice, so to speak.
  Other than that, the spa was as if conceived by the people who made those Philadelphia ads set in Heaven, all muted colours and nice candles - deliberately unstimulating and cocoon-like. Which was lovely for a day. After that, it started to feel a tiny bit like a psychiatric hospital, what with everyone being reduced to a white uniform and floating about. Just a bit edgeless and suffocating. However, no doubt this is me, and my Methodist background, again, making me uncomfortable with .. er.. comfort.
  
  

I've gone on, haven't I? Better stop now, before you lose the will to live entirely.

I have missed this.

Back soon.

xx
T

big picture

Dear all,

Oh my. Busy again, I was.

Thank you for your comments on my last post. You need never worry about giving me what they call "assvice". You are too kind and experienced to be judgemental or miss the point. If any advice did not seem relevant, I would just put it aside for another situation which it might fit. So that is all good. 

While it is true that I suffer at times from what my lovely American flatmate used to call Big Picture Disease (taking the long view to the point where it becomes hard to have an appropriate response in the moment), a marriage is a long, awful, beautiful stream of experience, where you run into all kinds of unexpected limitations - many of which you have to recognise as your own. You know how it is. So, as you can imagine, the JB and I have had every kind of conversation about our future, from the tearful to the comic. Our style is fairly frank when we argue, but that is only a tiny percent of the time. The rest is really good and the last week or two have been in that mode. We're fine, at least for the moment.

ANYWAY. This was just to let you know I am aok, and not living in a damp bedsit in Mountjoy Sq with an angry cat pissing on my single bed. In fact, I am off to a spa tonight, no less. Oh yes, it's a high-octane, devil-may-care life I lead, you know!

Talk soon.
xx
T

let it unfold

Thank you very much for the ear sympathy. Fascinating/disgusting report: it's quite a bit better, has deflated to a more normal dimension and I can almost hear through a minor static interference. An improvement. I am sporting an impressive Augmentin pallor, however, the kind you otherwise get from being a consumptive, or doing a long stretch inside.

Some of you have kindly enquired as to the progress of our declaration, and so, let us indeed marvel at the smoky and clogged engine that is the relevant Authority, the cogs of which do turn extraordinarily slowly.  Our paperwork is all complete, and now lacks only a stamp of approval from the Authority before we are cleared for take-off and it will all be sent on to India. Mysteriously, however, the Authority cannot seem to stamp the documents in good time, and oh dear! They are so backed-up! And lifting the stamp is so tiring! You'd be wrecked doing it!

Uffa, as Italians have it. UFFA.

As it happens, India itself is closed to new applications until January, while it reconfigures its own system. So if one wanted to be one of those perky, positive people, one could say that at least the two delays are coinciding. But, I don't know, maybe in my youth I read too many moralistic children's stories, wherein the poor blighters wore saggy, wool swimming trunks and were always getting their comeuppance but all this is taking on the aspect of a very heavy-handed karmic lesson. Festina fecking lente, etc. Embrace the crap life you are living. Live in the fecking moment. Seize the saucepan and brain your spouse the day. GOT THE MESSAGE, Universe.

Let it unfold.

That's the hardest, isn't it. The JB and I had a most weird conversation the other night. I know this is going to sound rather bleak, but let's not panic here, it's really okay. It's not as dire as all that. In fact, it's almost as if talking about these things make them more manageable. In a way.

Imagine the following being all conducted in the most lack-lustre tones, like we are discussing our rubbish collection, and whether the green bin alternates with the black every two weeks, or not:

JB, comes in after work, flops on sofa: Sorry about this morning. (He stamped off earlier in the day, in a snit over my response to the delays as above.) I just feel like throwing in the towel, sometimes. It feels to me like our wheels are spinning.

T: What do you mean, throwing in the towel?

JB: You know, giving up, leaving.

T, still with zero inflection: Ah. Breaking up?

JB: Yes.

T: Oh. Well, if that's what you want to do.

I simply had no response anymore, felt calm, in a "Ah well, 'tis the tapestry of life." way, and just lolled there like a badly stuffed doll. I can't continue to keep the show on the road. He is simply going to have to decide for himself. Every suggestion I make - counselling, research, bereavement groups, reading the helpful, straightforward The Portable Therapist - he won't do any of it. He doesn't recognise that the feelings aren't the problem, it's the defeatist behaviour that is. Of course I know that he doesn't mean what he says, he's not going to leave, he loves me, and blah, blah, blah, but those words still undermine my faith in us. My brain starts whirring. The genie is out of the bottle, and I am thinking with half my brain, the part May beautifully describes as sitting there eating popcorn through it all: Blimey. What would that be like? Where would I live? Huh.

The human brain, if mine is anything to go by, anyway, abhors a vacuum. It - I - want to know where my next meal is coming from, at the most basic level. I find it so hard to keep the vision of the alternative lives beside each other in my head, and not preempt whatever will be, and not throw myself on my sword.

Of course there was much apologising and forgiving later. But what has been said cannot be unsaid.



She makes herself comfortable.