Awake (pre-birthday edition)

Woke at 5:30 after around three and a half hours' sleep. Milk is cooking for hot chocolate, and I am hoping to get back to sleep after writing this note.

Had a good day yesterday at the racetrack in Baden-Baden with G and U and their kids, despite torrential rain on the way there and a dead car battery and nearly 90 minutes of delay in tailbacks on the autobahn on the return journey. I spent … well, I did actually write down my costs and winnings race by race but I can't see the programme and I am too lazy to get up and look for it. Say that I bet roughly thirty Euros on six races and won roughly five Euros. Still, an enjoyable day.

Work is in a strange phase at the moment. There's not much for us to do except manage the last weeks of thrashing panic on the building site. G is on site 2.5 days a week, so Whiner and I are working 2.5 days a week in the office. Eight weeks until the opening celebrations, and there remains a metric fuckton of work to be done. It's going to be an interesting time (in the sense of that famous Chinese curse).

I'm spending most of the resulting free time in Azeroth, to be honest, levelling my discipline priest characters. (Funny, just spent a few minutes with google, trying to find a website that would give a reasonable overview of what WoW is; failed. Here's the official home page.)

All right, back to bed. Wish me luck.

Awake

I'm sick. Only moderately, I believe and hope, but I've been sick off and on for nearly a month now. It started as a sinus infection, for which I had two different antibiotics and a week off work (for the first time in recent memory). The second antibiotic did the trick on my sinuses, mostly, but left a dry cough. Last night, for whatever reason, the cough "itched" so strongly that I've now hacked my way to a murderous sore throat. Guess I'll go see the doc again.

In other news it's Spring here. Tulips are up, lizards are sunning themselves on the windowsill (and getting into the office and running around in piles of paperwork for a half hour before being persuaded to leave again). Went for a walk at the Bärensee with G and U and the kids on the weekend, 20°C and sunny.

In other, other news I'm going mad. I've lost all sense of time: it seems that the kitchen always has a pile of three or four dirty cereal bowls to be washed, meaning that three or four days have gone past since I last looked in the kitchen. Clearly this isn't so, since I had to be there to eat the damned cereal, but … I don't know. Just between you and me, I think I'm arriving at the point where I am so lost, and so worried about being lost, that I can finally admit my "failure" and ask for help.

How does one go about finding a therapist? It was easy in London in the early 90s, I had a friend who happened to be deputy head of social services for a particular borough and asked him for a recommendation; he sent me to his own therapist. Perhaps I'd have the same luck if I just asked around here, but my impression is that German society is less tolerant/respectful of psychotherapy and mental unease than England was. We shall see. I'll ask the doctor, whom I like and trust, whether he can recommend somebody.

One of the topics that came up at the retreat in October was "letting yourself be seen." This is not something that I do, my natural inclination is to dissemble and conceal — despite my blogs and Twitter and Faecesbook and whatever all else. It occurred to me in conversation with a friend in SL that, were I to kill myself, there are only three or four people in the world who wouldn't say "But his life was perfect, he was so happy." (Don't worry, I am not planning to kill myself, not even thinking about it; that was an extreme way of saying that I hide what is going on in my life.)

I'm going to start telling much more of the truth here. I'm not going to say that I'll tell it all, and I'm certainly not going to promise that I'll write regularly or even more frequently, but I'll do my best not to reply with a shaky grin and a please-change-the-topic dismissive "Just fine" whenever somebody, even myself, asks how I am.

Wish me luck.

Awake

Hello world, it's been a while since we spoke. It is 6:30am as I'm writing, but I have been awake and drifting since around 5am (having previously woken at 2am but gone back to sleep) so I am calling this "night" and "insomnia." Hot chocolate is in the making, and I will head back to bed after drinking and posting.

We are approaching the deadline for a competition aka the chance to have some work to do after the summer. The project looks pretty good: the plan is clean and simple, room layouts are efficient, it should even be fairly economical to build and operate. Next weekend will be tough, probably 30 hours' work.

Other than that, work on the still-current project is proceeding in fits and staggerings. Things are going wrong, many of them our fault. (It's always our fault, in the end: the architect is responsible for the errors and omissions of all other trades, including those of the experts who advised us. The situation is reminiscent of Josef K: "He's guilty! Now, what's the charge against him?")

I'm spending a lot of time in SL and WoW. I have recreated my more successful characters on a different server in order to game with some SL buddies who are there, and have got my favourite — a holy paladin named Woglinde — up to level 32. The game gets easier and more enjoyable as one rises through the levels.

Time is behaving oddly. I can't believe that it hasn't yet been a month since I returned from holiday! This feels like mid-March at least. I don't know whether to be glad or worried that the calendar is lagging so far behind my perception.

Awake

Kitchen: still messy, but much cleaner.

Teeth: still hurting, but the appointment has been made.

Pile of letters: still high, but shrinking.

Work: still crazy, but at least interesting.

Hot chocolate: still cooking, but nearly done.

My soul: still shaky, but much better.


Writing that last post and pressing "Publish" gave me permission to do something about the state of my life. (Don't ask why I needed permission, or whose permission I had to ask, I don't know either. It's a metaphor that works for me.)

Having written all that and started talking about it (here, in SL, with G and the Lioness (and Sis, look for an answer very soon now)) two things started to happen. First, I woke out of the depression mindset of hopelessness and impossibility. Secondly, I discovered that feeling an emotional backlash after a positive experience is surprisingly common: nearly everyone I spoke to who had been on a retreat had felt something like this afterwards (to some degree or other). Knowing that helped put the feelings in perspective. I wish I'd known beforehand that this reaction was a possibility, it would have made a difference in the strength of the feeling. I've been talking about this in the meditation group and will try to ensure that there is some kind of "aftercare" at future retreats.

In short: it's getting better. If that's too passive: I am making things better. Thank you all for your support, in comments or phone calls or e-mail that I haven't yet replied to (sorry).

Weather is improving, the forecast is for warm rain all week (how sad that this feels like an improvement). The last frost of the winter should fall tonight, so any remaining scraps of snow should be gone by the weekend. Perhaps I can finally wear the new shoes I bought during the last thaw, two weeks ago.

Work is, as I said, still crazy. The Weasel lived up to his pseudonym by quitting with ten days' notice. We've hired an external site supervisor (a guy we've worked with before, from the village where G grew up though they never met as kids) and are interviewing people to join the in-house team, but in the meantime I'm doing his work as well as mine. Even so, I'm glad to see the back of the sneaky unreliable son-of-a-bitch.

Ah, the dawn chorus just started (at 6:46). This is the first time I've heard it this year. Perhaps Spring really is here.

Grim

I'm having a "Ballad of Lucy Jordan" moment.

I'm not quite sure whether what I am wallowing in is self-pity or self-hatred. (It's 6am and I was woken by toothache after four hours' sleep, this may play a part in both my condition and my inability to judge it.)

Toothache: in addition to the two broken upper molars that I wrote about last year, I've had an aching lower-left molar for a few days. I'm afraid that if I go to the dentist to fix these, that he will tell me why my teeth seem to be going soft and falling apart. I actually worked up the courage to send an e-mail to his office over Christmas, asking for an appointment in January and an invoice in advance of work for 1000 Euros as a token of my earnest intentions. Had they replied with a date and time, I'd have kept the appointment, but they didn't and so I have aching teeth and (presumably) another unpaid invoice somewhere in these mountains of unopened mail (think of the landscape of Wall-E).

My life is closing down around me, I'm unable to see farther than about a quarter-hour ahead and utterly unable to take any constructive action. Getting dressed and going to work in the mornings drains my supply of self-motivation. My kitchen table is piled high with unopened letters and empty cereal boxes, because in order to open the letters and throw away the boxes I would first have to empty my paper-recycling-box, already full to overflowing, and I can't do that because don't know whether there is room in the bins outside to put the paper into. That is the state of my soul: I am unable to organize myself sufficiently to go outside and look in a garbage bin. Dear gods.

I was in Malta on a meditation retreat last week. What a laugh. It seems like centuries ago and what happened there sounds like the absurdly exaggerated tales that travellers tell to gullible strangers in bars. It amazes me that I can sit in the meditation group in SL or in the office, and nobody sees that I am broken inside. It seems ludicrous that other people look to me for support and advice (which somehow I am still able to give, how odd is that) — and grossly unfair, too: who supports me? Perhaps maintaining this false front is what's consuming all my psychic energy.

I spend a lot of time in Second Life, actually, until after 1am every night; being there lets me feel that I am still functioning normally. Who knows, perhaps it's even true. I don't know what I'd be doing with my time if I weren't there. Reading more than I do anyway, perhaps, or drinking beer in front of the TV that doesn't actually work. Meh.

I understand the appeal of going mad — really mad, rubber sheets and no-sharp-objects mad; of abandoning all responsibility for oneself and letting somebody else take all decisions and instigate all actions. Psych wards have to be awful places staffed by sadistic scum, simply to prevent themselves being overrun by would-be inmates. Take it as a sign of my state of mind that surrendering and letting myself be locked away seems like a good idea. I'm not going to do it, but it sure as hell appeals.

There. I dare you to post this.

Don't worry, I'm fine, really; at least for certain values of "fine." I am not about to jump in front of a train, nor to have myself committed, nor even to bash out my aching teeth with a hammer. I just needed to get this shit out of my head.

Awake, part damn and blast

There is an especial poignancy to being awake at 3:30 on a day when I need to rise at 5:00.

One of these years I will learn to go to bed eight hours before I need to get out of bed, on days when I will be travelling. Not that this would help me now, of course, but it might generally be a useful thing to do.

As I mentioned last time, I am indeed about to fly to Malta for a short week (until Saturday) for a real-life meeting of Susan's Second Life meditation group. But I'm too damned tired to tell you about that. I must somehow get back to sleep.

[Updated nine hours later] I did manage to sleep another hour, rose at 5am, was at the airport at 6:22, and went to the gate to wait for my flight. And waited and waited and waited. And waited some more. Until finally at 9:15, two hours and ten minutes after it should have departed, the flight was cancelled. Stood in line for nearly two hours to rebook my tickets, got an evening flight on Air Malta. Now briefly home for breakfast and gathering a few things I forgot, before my sure-to-be-delightful six hour layover in FFM. Bah bloody humbug. Two inches of snow and the country grinds to a halt.

Awake, part two

This time the cause was digestive, if the taste in my mouth and general intestinal unease can be believed, and I do think they can. Drank hot chocolate, did some banking, washed the dishes.

Now (6:38 am) considering whether it's worth going back to bed, given that I have to be at the office in less than 2.5 hours to drive up to Whoville for the ground-breaking ceremony.

Awake

Woke at around 6am from dreams of being peripherally involved in an inter-family Mafia scam; blogging briefly while the hot chocolate cooks. The clock says it's late enough that I could declare this to be early morning rather than insomnia, but that is not how it feels. I definitely need more sleep.

What's new? Not a lot. Working long hours on the project; the official "breaking of the sod" ceremony is on Saturday, so construction will start very soon indeed. It feels like we are desperately far behind in producing the drawings, but nobody is much worried. I am still the only person actually drawing on this project, and since the weasel-like prime helper is going to be doing the site supervision (touch wood, better him than me) he's not going to be drawing much in future either.

Winter continues, the length and severity of this one are practically unprecedented. Still, I walked home last night through slush and the drip and trickle of meltwater rather than the soft rustle of snowfall, so perhaps there is hope. We shall see. [Later: Froze overnight and currently snowing again. Ah well.]

Reading three books at once: "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy, in the new-ish translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (and how smug am I that I got those names right without looking them up?), "The ascent of money" by Niall Ferguson, and "The folklore of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. No prize for guessing which is the most fun.

I'm going to Malta at the end of the month, for a real-life meeting of the SL meditation group that Susan joined. I flew so much and so far in the last two years that I was able to get the flight for free. More about that as the time approaches, though in fact it is less than two weeks away. My gods, where does the time go?

Awake

Woke at 5:15 from a strange dream, waiting now for hot chocolate to cook. I left my working glasses in the office last night, so forgive the typoes.

I was in SL, talking about unhappiness with Beta (from the wedding party). I decided to visit them at their RL home, which was not suburban Milwaukee but a cottage rear the river Thames in the village where AH lived. Beta was in the garden, sitting under trees at the end of an ancient, crumbling red-brick wall (not sure where Noctis was in the logic of the dream). We talked for a while there, then the scene changed and we were walking down curving streets of north London, near Highgate Cemetery, talking about a book that zie had written; then we were back indoors and zie showed me hir latest rejection letter: a YouTube-type video by e-mail from a school principal. I replied that it was wonderful that zie had written a book at all, and not to be worried about rejections. I told Beta about my father and the realities of the publishing business, and somehow the dream changed to farming! I was a self-aware cow, walking around a farm talking to other animals and looking at the new barn being built to replace one that had blown down in a storm. The place where it had stood was occupied by the house my favourite cousin grew up in, which was now painted yellow and in use as a Portuguese restaurant (yes, in the midst of the farm); by this point I was in my human body again. The owner was possibly a disguised AH since there was a dog that held my hand tightly and pulled on it to get me to play, and the other people (guests?) reminded me of his friends after Pat died.

Speaking of books, I am 200 pages into my second reading of Infinite Jest, and am both appalled and amused to realize how much I missed the first time. IJ really does need to be read twice, at least, to understand it. The thing is full of clues and hints about what is going on, but these can only be recognized as such by someone who already knows the story. Fascinating. I'm enjoying it even more this time around. Highly recommended to patient readers with a lot of time on their hands.

Broken

I broke a molar two days ago, while eating a carraway seed roll. A piece of tooth the size of a small pea broke off, and is now lying on my kitchen windowsill. I'm not quite sure why I put it there, I do know that it can't just be glued back in place, but throwing it out felt wrong. (As far as I can reconstruct the events, a seed got wedged between teeth and acted as a tiny crowbar when I bit down.) It doesn't hurt, which makes me vaguely uneasy even as I am thankful.

At this point, I have to interrupt myself to give some backstory. We have two more weeks to get the tender documents written and published, and are working insanely long and hard at it. Last week set a kind of sad record: 67.5 hours at work. That amount of concentrated effort doesn't just wash off during the twelve-minute walk home downhill, not even when I see an urban fox trotting down the empty street before me at 1 a.m. as has happened twice now. Even at 2 a.m. it takes me at least an hour of tea and/or yoghurt and/or reading, to relax enough to be able to go to bed. I haven't been in Second Life in a week, I find that too strenuous after working so long and hard.

I had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep that night, between worry about the tooth and residual stress from overwork. I lay in bed half-awake, my mind whirling in a strange paranoiac-critical state that I would not hesitate to describe as delusional if it had happened while I was awake and functional*. I found myself in conversation with the dentist, in affect not "imagining" the meeting so much as remembering something that hadn't happened yet. She said that the tooth was irreparable and must be removed, and suggested an implant.

I asked her whether it was worth all that bother and expense, "given that I am not going to be alive much longer."

Well.

That shook me awake, really awake. I was so disturbed that I considered getting up again and going online to talk to some friends who I knew (hoped) would be there. I talked myself down from the horror, telling myself it was just a moment of madness caused by overwork and exhaustion (true enough), and managed to go to sleep after a half-hour of reading.

Where the hell did that idea come from? On the one hand, I never thought that I would ever live to be as old as I am now (not that I expected to die, I just didn't think I would age), and I have certainly always lived as though life and youthful strength would be infinitely available; on the other hand, I was told by a reputedly infallible reader of tea-leaves in Boston that I would live to be 88. (She also said that I would be successful and happy but not rich, which so far is running 100%.)

And now, the punchline. Once this set of documents is finished, we'll have a few weeks' off. I was thinking about a trip to Israel, and had got as far as mailing some friends to pick dates and places. Right now, it looks like I will be giving my holiday fund to the dentist instead. Damn.


* Ignoring for the moment that one definition of being awake and functional is not being in a delusional state.

Awake

Listening to a single bird somewhere up the street (out in the street itself, surprisingly; not in the back garden where the trees are) and the occasional cars. I woke from a bad dream: riding the subway through a maze of half-underground sidings, a cross between the railway cuttings near Liverpool Street and the cut-and-cover "tunnels" of the Toronto TTC, then the scene changed to a new subdivision being built at the edge of town, walking with L through scraps of wheatfields between the half-built houses, being menaced by a pair of hyenas/wild dogs/lynxes and my utter inability to fend them off or defend us. Meh.

Awake, and sick

Woke with sniffles and a cough at 5:15, after going to sleep around 1:30; writing now while the hot chocolate cooks. G damned a colleague earlier for coming in to work while sick and infecting us all, but when he was sick last week he came to work every day and coughed all over us. This is the result.

In other news, the competition that ran over Christmas and into January has been judged: our entry was dismissed in the second round (i.e. far too early, no money and no fame). Ah well. The winners used a planning principle that we considered and abandoned in the first week, so in theory every minute we spent after that decision was wasted time. (shrugs)

Awake

There seems to be a correlation between consuming sugar (chocolates and/or biscuits) before bedtime, and waking after two or three hours of sleep. At this point in time the evidence is anecdotal and circumstantial, but there does seem to be an awful lot of it when I think back.

Just looked out the kitchen window, the blue moonlight on the snow is quite lovely. Life is grand, even at 4 in the morning.

Again

More 5 a.m. wakefulness, more blogging while the chocolate heats. And once more, I have no idea whether I slept or not. I can't imagine that I lay awake in bed for three hours before getting up, surely I would have experienced some of that time as it passed, but it does not feel as though I fell asleep and then woke either. How strange.

There was fortunately no meeting yesterday, postponed until Wednesday as today is a holiday (Heilige Drei Könige for the facts (if that is the right word), or Tom's version if you'd prefer a little more emotion. I blogged about the latter here).

It snowed yesterday, I woke to the sound of shovelling and was quite confused at first as to where I was. It's -6°C right now and set to get much colder, since that is also forecast to be tomorrow's high.

Not sleeping

I believe that I slept about three hours, but somehow I can't be sure. Usually one can tell whether one slept or merely lay in bed, at least I usually can, but I have no idea whether I slept or not. Damn, I knew that I should have got up at 9 a.m. when the alarm rang, rather than rolling over for "another ten minutes" and sleeping four more hours.

Taken a Baldrian, waiting for the hot chocolate to cook. I am hoping that our first project meeting in Rose Street will be this afternoon rather than at say 9 a.m., i.e. that G will not call in 2.5 hours to wake me.

That is all.

[Updated: I slept nine hours after posting that. Unfortunately, they were the hours between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. Not quite right.]

Awake

… since more than an hour now, I'd been drifting in and out of sleep for a while. It's too early and I am too tired to stay up, though: this is not yet morning. Hot chocolate is brewing.

Feeling an odd blah-ness physically, which I put down to my late cheese-and-garlic-heavy dinner last night and the half-litre of beer that accompanied it. Another good reason to go back to bed.

I've been hearing an intermittent electromechanical peeping sound for about a week now, but only at night. You'd think it would be easy enough to locate something that peeps every 35 seconds, but I cannot even state with confidence which room it's coming from. I thought that it was a low-battery warning, but have checked everything which I know uses 9-volt batteries: all fine. It's a mystery.

In other news, winter has finally arrived. It snowed overnight, the rooftops and cars are covered finger-deep (visual estimate, I didn't go outside to check).

In musical news, let me share with you a delight: the second joint-project album between David Byrne and Brian Eno, "Everything that happens will happen today," thirty years after their previous collaboration. Byrne described it as folk electronic gospel, which is a strange niche but a pretty good fit. Enjoy.

Awake

I'm not sure if this counts as insomnia given that the clocks went back to winter-time on Sunday, so what you see as "5:04 a.m." is six in the morning to my bodyclock; nonetheless, I am awake earlier than I intended. The time change is doubly annoying this year because North America switches a week later (perhaps it is like this every year but I never noticed it before). Why the time change cannot be coordinated (or done away with) is beyond my comprehension. Bah.

Strange dreams: I was hired as photographer for a celebration involving some buddies from the Great Big Computer Company, but when I got there it turned out to be a fashion shoot involving some SL friends instead of the GBCC guys, which turned out to be a cover for a shoplifting scam on a grand scale organized by the Russian mafia. I woke up while trying to figure out how to tip off the store security without getting us all killed.

More later.

Awake

Rain falling against my window woke me from a pastoral dream which had turned to dystopian violence. What I feel in such dreams is equal parts fear and humiliation at my helplessness in the face of unreason, my inability to do anything about the situation.

It's been two weeks since I posted. What have I been up to, you ask? 'Tis a fair question, for which I have no particularly pleasing answer. I might well say that I have been on a sort of internal holiday, since I have also done very little work during this time. I have spent a lot of time, entire working days, in Second Life; though again even there I would be hard pressed to tell you what I did in SL too. Mostly talking and listening and a fair amount of worrying, about two friends who are going through rough patches in their real lives. I don't feel that I can say much about this, because they aren't my stories to tell. I am slightly uneasy at the amount of time I spend in SL, and the increasing proportion of my emotional life that takes place there.

Working slightly less than half-time with G and U on the two competitions due this summer, with moderate comfort. Working very semi-occasionally for the Münsters, I've hardly lifted a finger since delivering the last batch of changes.

Reading quite a lot: the King James Version Apocrypha, Terry Pratchett's "Making money" which I found quite good despite the Lioness's poor opinion of it, Michel Houellebecq's "Plateforme" (in German, a Christmas present; very disturbing, quite a good read), "The black swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (expect the unexpected), and currently both Charles Frazier's "Thirteen moons" (coming of age in the Appalachians during the Indian Wars) and a collection of essays on reading "the classics" by various German authors. The disappointment of the summer has been re-reading T.S. Eliot after more than a dozen years, sparked by my remembering "Prufrock" recently: much of it is unreadable. Many poems come across as badly dated, as fusty as the Victorian stuff that the Modernists opposed. I still have a soft spot for Prufrock and "Ash Wednesday" and the "Four Quartets", but the rest is superfluous. Sorry, Tom. And let me draw to your attention a book review in a New Yorker from this Spring, about economics and choice and what utter fools we mortals be: fascinating stuff, well worth reading even for non-economists.

Hot chocolate is ready, so I shall sign off and take it back to bed to read myself to sleep. Shabbat shalom, my dears, may you all be happy and healthy this weekend.

Awake

And mightily annoyed about it. Just felt the collar of my t-shirt (which I had slept in) and discovered that it is quite wet with sweat. No wonder I'm feeling dehydrated.

The sky is clear and quite bright, red in the east; the narrow crescent moon is already about 45° high. The streetcars are running, the first cars are on the road (few, at long intervals). But where are the birds? there's not a twitter of a dawn chorus to be heard. Perhaps they too are on holiday? ("Too" because the city is empty, school holidays began last week.)

[Later] I stood on the balcony for a while, enjoying the cool, moist morning air, thinking about having stood on the balcony some six hours earlier enjoying the cool, moist night air, and decided to stay up. This isn't insomnia, it's just getting up early. I shall walk downtown to that nameless square and have a cappuccino at the Café Eberhard, then do some work on my database.

Awake

... and blogging while the milk cooks for hot chocolate. Damn, but this is getting old. (4:39, the first streetcar of the day just went past.)

I'd been dreaming of rivers and of the long, flat, narrow boats that ply the inland waterways of Europe, before the scene changed to Stuttgart where I was leading a team searching for sites for new mineral-water wells. Strange, and strangely peaceful. The river scene was from imagined paintings in the style of Monet, all glittering reflections and dappled shadows and sunlight falling through weeping-willows. I am embarrassed at my dreaming self's taste for kitsch.

The Mauersegler (not swallows) may have left, I haven't seen or heard them in two days. This would be about the right time for their migration, consistent with the last few years. [Update: they're still here, but possibly in reduced numbers.]

To keep you up to date, the lump is diminishing daily to my great contentment. I mentioned having blood taken for a test. The results are unusual and inconclusive: everything is normal except GPT (liver) values which are well off the high end of the scale. A re-test looking for hepatitis was negative, and my liver is said to feel normal. We decided that the high values are perhaps a temporary "spike" related to the leg or the heparin, and will run the tests again in four weeks when the doc comes back from his summer vacation.

I'm walking more than after the business started (up to an hour a day, in instalments of 20 to 30 minutes each) but still much less in total than say a year ago at this time.

On the workfront, I spent four days figuring out how the do-it-yourself reporting system in the Münsters' database works, and a day and a half implementing this for the first time in a new area of the database. Putting it into the remaining areas will probably take only two hours per area. I find this amusing, and fairly typical of programming work: figuring out what to do is much harder than the actual doing.