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 (New York edition)

I'm in the Big Apple, in a moderately lousy (but also moderately priced) hotel. I woke just before 5am local time, 11am my time, after getting to sleep around 6am my time. I'm unsure whether or not to call this "insomnia", but it is far earlier than I hoped to rise.

I have to give a kick in the head to the airport bus service (can't remember the name, will update this if I do) for lousy service. The driver put people down near, not at, the stated destinations, e.g. one block east of Grand Central Station. In the rain, mark you. For Penn Station the miserable son of a bitch actually dropped us at Times Square! I took a taxi the nine blocks south to the hotel, grumbling all the while. The driver was cool about the short fare, fortunately; he left the meter off and just charged me a fiver.

My parents are arriving today (with the rest of the opera tour group), I'll move to our common hotel and then go to the airport to meet them. The tour operator has apparently stopped providing transport between airport and hotel, which seems to me a pretty stupid decision given their customer profile (elderly and rich). The justification was that it was too difficult to arrange, but that sounds like horseshit to me: the world is full of bus companies. I suspect the company that does the actual grunt work is getting lazy and the coordinator/guiding light/überboss, himself elderly, has chosen not to spend his energy on disciplining them. So there are going to be two dozen elderly Canadians standing in the taxi queue for hours and hours, wrestling with their oversized luggage and foreign manners and diction. Meh. Anyway.

I flew over on an Airbus 380, for the first time. It really is huge, but one doesn't always notice this because its proportions are similar to a Boeing 727: it can look like a small plane if you don't notice the details, for example that the tailfin is in fact larger than a 727's wings, or that when you are seated and looking out the wing obscures the three-storey buildings beside the taxiway — and I was on the upper deck, so in theory I was looking down on the wing.

It's a fine plane, the ride is very smooth. But in the end it's just air travel. There is no fantasy or romance in the A380, flying to NY in one is like spending the day at a tedious conference in the meeting rooms of a pretentious-but-only-middle-range hotel. The seats are the same as on any other Lufthansa plane, the food is the same, the general discomfort and annoyance before and after the flight are surely the same. Actually, having said that: Boarding and disembarking were quick and easy, and I got my luggage within 15 minutes of the plane landing. I should give some credit there.

The coolest thing about the A380 is the live camera views on the entertainment system. There are three low-resolution videocameras built into the aircraft: in the nose pointing forward; in the belly pointing down, and at the top of the tail looking forward over the back and wings of the aircraft. The latter plays on the overhead monitors during the flight. The belly camera is pretty useless, to be honest, the low resolution and the air haze make the ground images close to worthless. Should have hired a photographer-consultant to tell them about polarizing filters. But the view from the tail was cool, and it was quite exciting to be able to watch the plane landing and taxiing to the gate from the nose cam POV.

I'm going to try to sleep a little more (no hot chocolate for me, alas; it's typical of the Hotel Pennsylvania that while there is a minibar, it's empty. There is an ironing board and iron in the closet, but no kettle. My recommendation is to avoid the hotel unless you are stuck for a place to stay. It is at least clean and central, but has nothing else going for it.

The view from here and now

I realized something this morning as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep.

My internettery is all about contact and community, about not feeling alone and lonely. I started blogging out of curiosity, but kept on because of the community of readers and commenters that developed. As I became ever more deeply immersed in SL, the "hotter" and more immediate community feeling there took up more and more of my time and attention. It also shifted my "day" later into the evening and night. I used to be a very early riser a few years ago, but I couldn't tell you when I last saw the sun rise, unless you count the time I played Dragon Age: Origins until after 5am. The reason I stopped blogging regularly is indeed, as somebody once asked in a comment, that I am spending in Second Life the time that was previously my blogging hour.

The reason I stopped reading blogs is different: as fear and unhappiness took the upper hand in my life, nearly two years ago now, the pressure that I felt to read — and to comment insightfully and with compassion and warmth — came to be too much for me emotionally. I simply didn't have enough emotional resources to spread around, or so it felt. And for what it's worth, I was retreating in SL at that time too: there were evenings when I'd just log in and literally stand around alone in a park, unable to gather the strength to find and talk to anyone.

My absence from your blogs is not a sign of disinterest, dear friends. On the contrary, it is in a perverse way the proof that they and you were valuable to me, because I did continue to read sites that I didn't give a damn about. That was OK because there was no emotional load in them. (That is also why I was able to follow you by reading your RSS feeds: there was no personal involvement in that, no pressure to reply.)

Most lately, of course, much of my compositional energy has gone into Twitter, the internet-literary equivalent of eating peanut M&M's while a fine meal lies on the table before you: superficially appealing but essentially worthless. And most lately, I've been writing about my "coming of age" in SL and the meditation group. I might be posting those here, but not for a while and certainly not in their current form; if anyone is interested to read them drop me an e-mail at the address in the left sidebar.

It's been a long dry season, my dears, but there are signs of change. Thank you all so much for bearing with me, for enduring my silence and neglect with such patience and forebearance. "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."

Meh.

There are days (today, for instance) when even apparently simple tasks (e.g. calling up to get a phone line reconnected) seem just too difficult to deal with. I don't know where to start.

There have been pleasant events recently, and there is big news to tell, but I'm just too far down to talk about that now.

It occurs to me that this is perhaps the start of the anticipated downturn following the retreat in Halifax last month (post-euphoric stress disorder, if you like), as happened this winter after the Malta retreat. As such, I should know from experience that it's nothing new and nothing to take too seriously. I will try to keep that in mind.

Sorry to be such a wet blanket.

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.

HNY

If I succumb to typhoid or pig flu during the next few days, my heirs should have a word with Air Canada about the guy who sat next to me, with an eye to suing his heirs.

Midnight came during the meal service, somewhere over eastern Quebec. The cabin crew paused and applauded, we all shouted cheery things at each other, life went on. The brevity and dullness of the celebration felt somehow appropriate.

Excellent inflight entertainment (even beyond the hacking cough of my neighbour) in the form of the film It might get loud, recommended to all fans of the electric guitar. It does indeed get quite satisfactorily loud; the interviews are interesting and the byplay between the musicians is a treat to watch; the minute-long opening scene of Jack White building a functional electric guitar from a scrap of wood, a length of wire, four nails, an empty Coke bottle and a single pick-up should be compulsory viewing for all music-geeky 12-year-olds. "There, who said you need to buy a guitar?" But why oh why is there no soundtrack CD? [Answer: because they want to sell the DVD. Duh.]

Had breakfast in FFM, walked around a little and had a coffee, realized that I was rapidly approaching the point of falling-down exhaustion, threw away my ticket, bought a train ticket and was home in 80 minutes. Slept a half-hour on the train, then was in bed within half an hour of opening the door.

Migraine today, perhaps from stress and exhaustion. Went shopping nonetheless, found myself quite unable to make change.

I hope your New Years began well, my dears.

Booked

I booked flights to (and indeed from) Tel Aviv today, for a long week in three weeks' time. Tooth be damned. I'm feeling very brave and adventurous, and also tired as hell having just got home from work at 00:48.

On the wing

God and terrrorists willing, my next post will be from the bosom (or is that "bowels"?) of my family in Canada. Merry Christmas / Chanukkah / Festivus / Yule / seasonalities to you all, my dears.

[Updated after 19.5 hours under way, of which 11 hours actually in transit. Waiting in Calgary airport for the third and thank gods last connection of the day. Nearly home, which is just as well as I am fading fast. Arsehole neighbours held an open-windows party last night until 3 a.m. Now in desperate need of a shower and a bed, only about 3 hours away.]

Disorganized

Sneaking under the wire again. I have to organize things a bit better around here. Woke far too early, tossed and turned for nearly two hours, then slept again far too late, and the day never really got back on course.

That is all.

Eight down, twenty-two to go.

It's that time of year again

Sneaking under the wire to post the first of this year's NaBloPoMo entries. This might be something of a lost cause as I will be in Munich for two or three days next week and may therefore fail to meet the target. We shall see.

One down, twenty-nine to go.

Finished

At last, and just barely on time too.

Alone in the office now, winding down to Moby and frankincense.

Shabbat shalom, my friends. Know that you are very dear to me, even if I often seem to ignore you.

Struggling

We still haven't managed to produce a convincing project for the competition that has to go to the printers on Friday morning. Damn and blast.

Heard from the organizers of the first competition: thrown out in the second discussion round. Ah well. I care more that our run of six at-least-an-honourable-mention's in a row has been broken, than that we didn't win this particular competition.

Strange dreams: last night I was walking around a silted-up Victorian-inner-city harbour, Manchester or the like, with a friend. She jumped into the murky, frond-infested waters and simply disappeared. Two others who were with us jumped in after her, but I couldn't swim so stayed on the quayside. She later IM'ed me (incorporating Second Life abilities into a dream based in real-life) to say that she had knocked out her front teeth and was ashamed to be seen like that, so had climbed out elsewhere.

Weather continues warmish (14°C or so) but rainy.

Despite all that, I am mostly calm and peaceful. I'll have more to say about this after I spend the entire weekend asleep.

That is all.

On finding another way to become tired

Just back from an evening with Princess, a pleasant dinner on her balcony with a gentle French rosé wine and the cries of the circling swifts, followed by a half-hour of badminton under the streetlights. It's quite an amusing sport if taken lightly, but also a surprisingly good work-out. I haven't played badminton in about 35 years, not since summer evening games in our back yard as a child, and I must say that I enjoyed it greatly. I might even be inclined to do this again sometime.

It's midnight and the temperature outside is still 25°C, so I guess that this is officially, really, truly summer. I have showered and shampooed and am now off to bed, where I shall probably sleep like a log and wake like a pile of rusty iron junk, creaking and groaning.

Busy doing nothing

Somehow a week has flashed past since I last blogged, though it hardly seems possible. I've been running fast just to stand still, it seems, going flat-out to little visible effect.

I am surprised by how little I have been eating since returning from Canada. My mother fed us four or five times a day, some of those were snacks but there were always at least two multi-course meals. Well, I get through the day on a small breakfast, a moderate lunch and a few cookies with tea in the evening, and cannot say that I feel hungry or deprived. On the contrary, I still feel that I am eating slightly too much of slightly the wrong things.

The Münsters presented a contract for my fulltime employment, which had a few oddities. The pay, for one: 23% more than I am currently getting, for 100% more hours per week (though that would include health insurance, pension and unemployment insurance). For a second, the statement that "up to 5 hours unpaid overtime per week" may be required—without limit in frequency or total. Well, I've been there before, and that means that every week would be 45 hours long, i.e. that I would get 23% more money for 125% more hours: quite unacceptable. So I made a counterproposal, which they are considering.

G and U went through the phases of denial and unreasoning rage and are now trying to negotiate. They presented a suggestion whereby they would pay me half of what the Münsters are offering, for not-quite-half-time permanent work in their office (based on the presumption that the office will soon have work). This is kind and flattering and very sweet, but leaves me exactly where I was last year when I advertised my services and ended up at the Münsters: I would still need to find some other work to fill those hours here, because I cannot live on that half-time job. It would be grand if the Münsters would agree to keeping me on part-time for the remaining hours, even at a lower rate of pay, but given the Münstermeister's expressed desire to have my colleague and I in his physical offices I very much doubt that they would agree to it.

On top of that, it's almost summer here. I ate a salad for lunch at an extremely un-chic restaurant with outdoor terrace by the Feuersee, and found that quite wonderfully refreshing. I have decided to do that once a week for the rest of my time here, or the rest of the summer, whichever ends first.

I am also spending too much time, too late at night, in Second Life. Much of that is doing good deeds: helping friends set up a shop, writing scripts and advising them on merchandise, but the rest has been just faffing about, talk and dancing and timewastery.

That's all for now, the weather is breaking and I am tired. Shabbat shalom, my dears.

London scorecard

Birthday parties attended: 1
Combined age of attendees, in years (estimated): 1118
Average age of attendees, in years (estimated): 46.6
Number of attendees who were the same age as the host/guest of honour: 9
Languages that I heard spoken at the party: 7
Languages that I spoke at the party: 2 (French 70%, English 30%)
Hours away from home: 98
Hours spent in transit: 16
    of which actually in flight: 3.3
Hours in London: 82
Hours spent waiting for taxis, busses and Tube trains: 1.25
Hours spent walking in Richmond Park: 3
Minutes spent attempting to get online via Post Office DSL: 45
Minutes spent online: 0
Indian meals consumed: 3
    of which vegetarian: 1
Italian meals consumed: 1
Greek meals consumed: 1
English breakfasts consumed: 2
Pints of Guinness consumed: 1
Pints of Cobra beer consumed: 2.5
Pints of other beer consumed: 3
Glasses of Jameson's Irish Whisky consumed: 1
Glasses of Remy Martin VSOP consumed: 1
Glasses of Italian red wine consumed: 5
Books carried with me from Germany, to read on the way: 1
Pages of said book that were read on the way: 0
Locally-available books read: 1
Books bought: 10
Music CDs bought: 1
Music CDs "ripped" i.e. stolen: 1
Strangers flirted with in the Tube: 1
Strangers flirted with in bookshops: 1
Art exhibitions viewed: 1
Sightings of St. Paul's Cathedral: 2
Visits to St. Paul's Cathedral: 0
Sightings of Sir Norman Foster's Thames Bridge: 1
Crossings of Sir Norman Foster's Thames Bridge: 0
Blogging buddies met in RL: 1
SecondLife buddies met in RL: 0
Persons I met who had heard of either blogging or SecondLife: 0

Drifting

... through the day. Vague achey residual tiredness, strained voice, mild proto-headache which refuses to either go away or become a real, i.e. treatable, headache. Rose late after nine hours' train travel yesterday, walked downtown for cappuccino, then to the Dead White Male Poet cafe for lunch, then a little burst of translation; now a pause for tea and cookies before settling back to work on the wiki.

The demo went well, but they probably won't buy: what they think they need doesn't fully overlap with the database's feature set. It would have been a single client/server system in any case, without even any data-import consultancy to sweeten the pot: they claim to have no electronic data at all! Hard to believe, but I am certain that they weren't lying: only a fool would willingly set herself the task of manually re-typing paper records, if there were electronic records that could be imported in no time at all at a twentieth of the cost. We shall see.

I bought a copy of the current "Foreign Affairs" to read on the train, as I do once or twice a year (it's published bimonthly). FA is a strange beast, fascinating and infuriating at once, I cannot think that either the left or the right among American readers would be more than half-pleased by any issue—which is a sign that the commissioning editors have done their job fairly. Non-American readers would find the general tone to be very pro-American, every subject is discussed in terms of its impact on America and how it might be leveraged to further increase the wonderfulness of American life and society. "America has made mistakes, but America is not actually wrong" is as close as the magazine comes to criticism.

The stand-out articles this time around are Hillary Clinton on undoing the damage of the Dubyah years, Philip Gordon on whether the war on terrorism can be won, Colin Kahl on the Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (fascinating, download the manual itself here), and a justly damning review of "The Israel Lobby" by Walter Russell Mead.

Yesterday's xkcd cartoon was quite enjoyably nasty.

Dooce has written well on depression and how to deal with it:

I think many people are afraid that if they take medication or even agree to see a therapist that they are in some way admitting failure or defeat. Or they have been told by their boyfriend or their mother or their best friend that they should buck up and get over it, and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Well then, let me be weak. Let me be a failure. Because being over here on this side, where I see and think clearly, where I'm happy to greet my child in the morning, where I can logically maneuver my way over tiny obstacles that would have previously been the end of the world, over here being a failure is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than the constant misery of suffering alone.

Quite right. Go read. [Updated on Saturday: 1026 comments, almost all saying "thank god for therapy and/or [medication of choice]".]

Today's Friday Favourite is one of the best songs on an album that I wrote about earlier this week. Enjoy.

Finished, part two

At least, I hope we are. I left them waiting to hear whether G would manage to get everything printed before the courier comes. Another hard fight, but the results are good. We shall see.

Big sigh of relief. I shall treat myself to a half-day off tomorrow (still need to produce the Münstermeister's daily fix).

And now, a cup of tea and a few cookies before settling down to an evening with the Münsters and their translation. The fun just never ends.

Twenty-seven down, three to go.

Busier than something that's really, really busy

Started work on the competition at 9:30, straightening out the plans for the final cut. I have recommended several times that someone should count off the rooms against the programme to be certain that we have included them all; this advice is politely rejected because we wouldn't have made a mistake like that, oh no no no. Foolishness abounds. Given that the team is divided geographically between Stuttgart and LittleHillsideTownInWürttemburg, with roughly half of the rooms are being laid out in a new building by Flunky No. 1 here and the rest in an existing building (part of the competition) by Flunky No. 2 there, it seems to me blindingly obvious that at least one room will be duplicated, or worse: left out. You may hold your breath for the shock horror when it is discovered that we haven't included everything and how could I screw up that badly?

Then home at 3pm for four hours' work on the translation to placate the Münsters who are breathing down my neck (telephonically but none the less distressingly) about deadlines and contracts and penalty clauses.

Now blogging and sniffing about in the Internets before heading back to the office (!!) for a few more hours' work on the competition. Haven't been to bed before 2am since Tuesday of last week; only twice because of fun and games. I must be mad.

This competition too will be judged and reported on before Christmas.

[Updated at 3:44 a.m.] Back from the office after an 18-hour working day. It's looking pretty good, coming together well. But the rooms still haven't been counted and I guess that at this stage doing so would only bring us news that we don't want to hear. So to hell with it.

Twenty-six down, four to go.

Late

Home from G's fiftieth birthday party, just sneaking under the wire to get something posted on the 22nd. Half-drunk, fully tired. To bed as soon as the hot chocolate is ready.

Had another late night yesterday in Second Life: the leader of Sunday's seminar asked to interview me about my identity in SL and how I experience my avatars. The interview was booked for 75-90 minutes but the conversation was so fascinating that it turned into a four-and-a-half hour marathon. Great fun, but it left me running on empty all day today, as tonight's party will do tomorrow. Ah well.

G'night all.

Twenty-two down, eight to go.

Blah, Saturday edition

Back from a 50th birthday party, the second in my immediate circle of friends; G's fiftieth is next week, there are two more before Easter, and mine will be in June. Odd how it happens that we are all getting older at roughly the same rate.

Slept very badly last night, went to bed with a headache that developed into a mild migraine: every time I moved my head in my sleep, a rush of pain and nausea woke me up. Bah. I believe it's related to stress and bad posture (caused by stress) from the meeting on Friday. Must find a way to deal with this. Another team meeting tomorrow, I am curious to see whether my "savage outburst" actually had any effects.

Good night, my dears.

Seventeen down, thirteen to go.