Bloke round the corner from me regularly leaves stacks of old records outside his house, free for anybody to have a rummage through and take what they want.
It's usually a load of old crap but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I have been very pleased to retrieve many excellent if badly scratched 1980s compliation albums from the pile.
Plus such gems as:
Through The Past Darkly (Big Hits Vol.2) by The Rolling Stones with the sleeve corners mysteriously cut off to form an octagon;
Abacab by Genesis complete with Virgin Value sticker;
The 7" single of Take On Me by Aha (a welcome addition to my record collection now, but I hated it when it came out.)
It's too upsetting to think about the ones I left behind to "pick up on the way back" - from the park, from Sainsburys - and then forgot about.
#NP:
Da Da Da has a scratch in exactly the right place to create an eternal track, the jump so smooth you don't even notice it's stuck. Like the perfectly edited trampoline gif of your dreams. Sometimes I just leave it playing.
Love Is A Stranger and Starmaker's scratches turn them into Disintegration Loops.
I love records. Thanks Mr Record Man for all the freebies.
Felt cheerful all day, until I thought about going to work on Monday or knuckling down to any uni work. Then I felt shaky and tearful.
Music, Twitter, drawing and denial it is then.
Have done very little drawing since 2005 (long story) but today I thought I'd have a go. Started to copy a photo I found in Slovakia by Karel Plicka, a library book I never want to give back.
Ran out of steam after about half an hour, but hey, small steps.
Maybe going public with it will make me finish it off?
"We had no paper, we had no pens, but we had our bodies, traditional ink and tools to mark our skin. The body was used as a canvas, and that was one way for our ancestors to pass down knowledge. My malu therefore does not belong to me, but to my community."
"We sampled cheeses, ate delicious thin crust cheese pizza, and signed up for a cheese making session where we made mascarpone."
I miss holidays.
There was some Neurodiversity Twitter stuff I needed to see:
It's been quite the ride trying to get my head around the fact I'm suddenly "disabled" and what was always normal for me is not actually that normal according to normal people.
Today's photo: When It Rains And Shines, It's Just A State Of Mind
If I keep this up, in two days time I will have blogged something - anything - any old shit but who cares, it's an online scrapbook/diary for me not for you, Karen - every day for an entire month.
Toot toot!
Small steps to claw my way back to the land of the living after 10 impossible years.
Anyway, let's not celebrate til the 32nd January; there is always time to let a good habit slide.
Not a bad day today.
Spoke to my new student support person, Judith, who promised to help with the scatterbrain quagmire and gave me some homework to do for Monday.
Because it's small easy homework and not big impossible homework and it doesn't actually matter if I do it or not, there's a fair chance I'll actually get it done, if only to impress her (fight? flight? freeze? FAWN ✔).
There was an afternoon seminar on Teams where I became transfixed by the slightly bad painting of a dog on the wall behind the tutor's head.
(They probably discussed coursework, I dunno.)
And then - at last - at three minutes past five - I got the critical review back.
Apparently it's a common autistic thing: if you're waiting for some specific thing to happen, that's all you CAN do - wait.
Expecting a phone call at lunchtime? Out of action all morning while you anticipate that phone call. Upcoming appointment? All bets off for the rest of the day/week/month, you're in a state of suspended animation until the appointment is over. It's really good fun.
I've been waiting for the marks to come through since Wednesday, so that could explain why I've been feeling particularly stuck these last few days.
Anyway it was ok. I passed. 75%. This is my lowest (lowest!) grade so far.
WHY DO I WORRY SO MUCH??
I can start worrying about the essay that's due in next Friday now.
There is a stuffed frog museum in Split, Croatia, "comprised of 21 exhibits which show thematically arranged frogs."
I do like a nice thematically arranged frog so have added it to my list of places to visit (the dachshund museum and the Arnie museum are also on this list).
Book Twitter came up trumps with this excellent exposé of what those bookseller descriptions REALLY mean:
"5 tweets in and we have learned nothing. you are welcome."
"we'll say faded, or 'lightly browned' or 'a little tired' when what we mean is 'this book has grazed the abyss'"
"'sophisticated' literally means 'the book is a fake'.
'extra-illustrated' means 'someone cut up and pasted a bunch of images inside the book like the love child of picasso and edward scissorhands'"
I loved the attitude of this nature girl, "coming at [survival] from a place of relationship rather than brute strength and dominance."
Girl? She's in her 40s.
"“When we use the word ‘survival’,” she says, “it implies that the world
is somehow out to get us. That we have to grit our teeth and endure it,
to survive against all odds. That’s the polar opposite of my approach,
which involves a sense of belonging...”"
Thought that was great and needed to hear it. Living in Britain at the moment quite literally feels like a struggle to survive, but maybe a tweak of mindset could make it feel less grim.
Someone tweeted the Vic and Bob George Michael 'Stars in Your Eyes' clip:
I was in the audience for the filming of this. It's been cut down for TV, but in the studio the George Michael dancing went on for ever and got funnier the longer it went on - the Kristen Schaal is a Horse effect - and I laughed so much I genuinely feared for my life because there was delirium and I couldn't breathe (the Kung Fu Kapers effect).
Good times. I miss those days.
And obviously I've not been able to listen to Faith since without it making me grin.
(Spoiler: "numbers 1 to 599 are for your everyday day routes; school day services
are numbered 600 to 699; 700 to 899 are for regional and national coach
services.")
The paper aeroplane guy reminded me of the year I lived with a friend and during that year I picked up every interesting thing I found discarded on the pavement and stuck it to my bedroom door:
The friend called it a testament to my insanity but I called it art.
The Roman road map made me want to get out exploring long distance again. How I miss my road trip adventures.
In 2017 I drove on a whim to Shrewsbury after reading John Higgs' book about Watling Street and in 2019 I poked my snoot into Milton Keynes while en route to somewhere else, for the same reason.
I grew up on Watling Street (the Medway Towns part) so feel a connection to this ancient byway and was curious to see other bits of it. I hadn't realised before I read the book it went all the way to Wales.
This is what Watling Street looks like at Wroxeter, in case you're interested:
John Higgs also wrote the most amazing book about the KLF which you should probably read immediately. The burning the million pounds thing sort of ties in with the Break Down thing I mentioned yesterday - I'm totally impressed by these deliberate acts of destruction and secretly wish I had the balls to do that with all my shit.
While we're on the subject of the KLF I might as well link to this Twitter thread that brought me exceptional joy today. And they say you should never meet your heroes.
I think the reason I might be struggling with university is that my ADHD brain is entirely cut out for browsing on an endless conveyor belt of interesting tidbits (i.e. Twitter), and not at all cut out for massively long lectures on subjects I'm not that interested in.
I've had a week of various random, maskless men invading my cramped, poorly ventilated work space.
The one who was crashing around this morning taking photos and ignoring me when I asked him twice to put a mask on turned out to be a manager doing a Covid risk assessment.
At which point I lost it. Trying not to cry/flappy hands in front of the boss kind of thing.
For my sanity I'm staying at home for the rest of the week.
Maybe next week too. Fuck that place. Fuck everything.
Drove (in tears) from work to Lidl where I stocked up on food for seven days and bought myself a bunch of cheerful flowers because they were lovely, because I needed them, and because I am fortunate enough to be able to do so.
Then went home to sit dazed for a while.
A tweet stopped me in my tracks:
I love this writer's precision. Their tweets always make me pause.
This one caught my eye because I write every day too, just to stop the thoughts clogging up in my head. Longhand in the mornings, this blog at night. It's the only routine I can to stick to.
But then I saw that "moving as much as I can against the lockdown thought-gravity."
Wow.
Those words hit home. I let them sink in a while.
They were exactly right.
So what's working for you, Twitter person who is able to express with such perfect brevity how life feels right now? I clicked on that Worldwide FM link. Very unlike me but I browsed until I found something I could live with then let it play quietly in the background all day. It's been good. It's been reaffirming. Voices, music, to remind me of life. It's normally dismally silent in here.
After that I went to bed and slept deeply; and woke refreshed, for the first time in centuries.
Thanks once again, Twitter, for getting me through a bad day.
'Like witnessing my own funeral': Michael Landy on Break Down (Break Down is something I think about a lot, being engaged in my own eternal battle with 'stuff', so it was good to suddenly find an article on it. I will never not wonder what it might feel like to do what Landy did)
It was Holocaust Memorial Day today. I thought about my 2019 visit to Bergen-Belsen, and all the stumble-stones I've come across while travelling in Europe. This is another thing I think about a lot.
The latter's Unofficial ADHD Test for Adults is genuinely hilarious as well as educational and it was quite the emotional rollercoaster too:
Scored about a million points (lost count obvs) and actually screamed when he mentioned having to walk with a group of slow-moving people, omg omg, FLASHBACKS.
I'm writing this early - afternoon rather than last thing at night - because I just want to close the laptop and not stare at any more screens today. I'm sure all this screentime is what's doing my head in. I feel ok when I go work for my two hours per day and hang out with actual human beings.
And birds. My post-walk strolls down to the river paid dividends this morning. Armed with birdseed, I've been gradually winning the trust of my robin pal. Today he flew straight onto my hand and stayed there for ages.
Went to the park this morning straight after work, where I found a bit of a bird bonanza.
All the usual suspects, but also someone unexpected:
This guy was being hassled by jays, and then some crows came along to give him a hard time too.
He finally found refuge in this tree where he sat for a while pondering where his life had gone wrong.
Somebody said he was a harris hawk - an American import, so escaped from somewhere. He's been knocking around Cardiff since October. A woman showed me a photo on her phone of him in her mum's back garden eating a pigeon.
What an exciting morning.
Sadly, I lost all momentum after getting home.
Couldn't do a thing except curl up and cry.
Some days lockdown's more or less tolerable, and other days it's beyond hard. I had nothing today: nothing to fight these horror-times with. I couldn't bear it.
Was tempted to have another day like yesterday after seeing this Sunday flowchart on Twitter:
But my brain seemed to be functioning, so instead I spent the day catching up on the lectures I skipped last week because I was working on the essay, and even managed a bit of admin.
Consequently there's not much to report other than stuff I learned about mummies.
Read a really good interview - Alistair Campbell and Sadiq Khan discussing mental health but mostly bitching about Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. Good stuff.
On the subject of mental health, someone's uploaded a load of free books onto Google Docs. The link came via Twitter but I can't remember who posted it now.
It was a nice day but I didn't go out, just watched the world from my window.
There was a smattering of snow but the playing field was still mostly green. Optimists out there with sledges nonetheless. I liked how the big puddle on the footpath attracted dogs and small children.
Saturday! Plenty of self-indulgence, not much housework.
Read loads. This was great because it's my favourite thing to do.
Offline reading: a handful of pages of a feminist critique of the works of Sylvia Plath. Soon cast aside for 231 pages of a 339 page book about the Zodiac Killer (which will probably be finished tonight).
Perused the very entertaining timeline of Twitter maestro Ian Martin and turned up this beauty:
This perfectly elucidates why I am reluctant to leave my flat, living as I do on the edge of a popular park. I'm not a state pensioner but I do value my life and indeed these meaty, gasping, brick-faced arseholes always do come far too close.
Tell us a joke (my favourite: A vicar, a priest and a rabbit walk into a blood bank. The rabbit says “I think I might be a type O”.)
And the Saturday column of Tim Dowling, for whom Saturdays were invented.
Also ended up watching The Day Britain Stopped:
Can't remember how I came across it now.
(Best guess: Twitter?)
It was quite grim. And there was an awful lot of acting in it. I hate it when you can tell people are acting - trying so hard to be natural it looks totally fake. Or is that just an Aspie thing? Whatever: it's why I find it hard to watch much TV drama.
Anyway, acting aside, I enjoyed it.
(You could also tell it was fake because the politician in it expressed normal human emotions.)
Had to scrape the inside of the windscreen this morning:
I have absolutely nothing else to report.
After finishing work I went and mooched by the river again, to say hi to my robin pal and to soak up some sunshine, and then I went home and finished my essay.
Handed it in five hours ahead of deadline; felt very smug that I could've handed it in eight hours ahead of deadline; spent the rest of the evening having the horrors about all the things I failed to include and feeling certain I got the completely wrong end of the stick so the whole thing is a disaster zone and I'll be laughed out of town.
Ah well.
Twitter was mostly Brexit/Covid rage and Bernie's mittens memes today, but I did find another thread about ADHD that seemed to be addressed to me personally. When you grew up being told ADHD was a made-up thing for rowdy little boys it is both a comfort and a shock to discover it actually explains every single aspect of your entire omnishambles of a life.
The river, the robin, the sunshine, were good: calming and happy-making. I'm lucky to work so close to such a beautiful spot.
Today I have mostly spent 12 hours writing a 2000-word critical review of some poor woman's shonky academic paper.
The beast is more or less done. Just final tweaks and a reference list, then I submit (deadline 23:59 tomorrow), then I enjoy a lazy, guilt-free weekend of pure indulgence.
Saturday activities I am already excited about: reading a book for pleasure; hoovering; doing some laundry. Woohoo!
Sunday: it's not possible to think that far ahead.
In my tea-breaks today, I found these amazing things:
And Hantu the Undiagnosable has made me feel better about myself YET AGAIN with their magnificent tweets:
I have gained so much from Twitter thanks to autistic and ADHD people sharing their stuff on there. I doubt if I'd have realised I was ASD/ADHD without it.
Internet connection: £20 a month.
Recognising in internet strangers your own experience: priceless.
Nipped down to the river again after work and with the aid of some bird seed, got the inquisitive robin I met last week to PERCH ON MY HAND!!!! There is a strong possibility that even with 11 and a bit more months to go, this could remain the best thing that happens to me all year.
Walking to my car this morning, it started to hail.
5. This handy finch identification chart (c/o Yolo Birder):
Plus a tiny bit of studying, but not that much :(
I'm learning that I can't maintain my attention for an entire three-hour lecture.
About halfway through, unless it's particularly riveting, I will lose the will to live.
This manifests as irritation and fidgeting, which morphs into anger, and then my eyelids start drooping.
Towards the end today, I woke myself up snoring.
I'm so wiped out by trying to pay close attention for one long session I'm good for nothing afterwards. I need shorter sessions, I need to not to have to sit through lectures on topics I didn't sign up for, and more to the point, I need ADHD medication.
To get ADHD medication I need to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist, there are no short cuts. This is not a speedy process.
On the plus side, this week's lectures have confirmed my suspicion that archaeology is not my subject and I should never, ever, go down that road.
Felt fraught at work this morning, for at least five unrelated reasons.
This afternoon's lecture was delivered by a woman with a voice like a pneumatic drill, which was very hard on the ears.
Tonight I've been trying to crack on with the assignment, which is due in on Friday, and not getting very far.
I've written the opening paragraph (61 words); only another 1939 words to go.
Not sure why but I have the Wiki page of Michel Lotito, aka Monsieur Mangetout, open - the man who ate an aeroplane. I was probably trying to find some inspiration.
Best thing I saw today is also Photo of the Day: a row of seagulls lined up along a railing of a footbridge spanning the River Taff.
Started to feel bad around 6pm, after I'd finished.
Sunday Night Syndrome with added pandemic.
My next assignment is to write a 2000-word critical review of a short paper on burial customs in the Upper Palaeolithic period.
Reading the paper prompted me to google not just the entire Palaeolithic period and all its evolving cultures but also the Samburu and ǃKung peoples, the Slovenian language, periostitis and rachitic lesions, ochre, the definition of ritual, shamanism, the author of the paper and every burial site (around 20) mentioned in the paper.
Although I haven't yet started writing the review, I did find a useful list of Slovenian idioms and swear words. I learned the author of the paper shares her name with Czech playwright and a tennis player who's won a total of $98 in prize money so far. I also discovered the Samburu have starred in films alongside Kevin Bacon, Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, featured in an ad for Mastercard and also a Nike ad:
"Samburu runners were famously portrayed in a late 1980s Nike commercial, in which a Samburu man's words were translated into English as the Nike slogan “Just Do It.”
This was corrected by anthropologist Lee Cronk, who seeing the commercial alerted Nike and the media that the Samburu man was saying “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.”
Nike, in explaining the error, admitted to having improvised the dialogue and stated “we thought nobody in America would know what he said.""
(Tristo kosmatih medvedov! But nice to see anthropologists being useful I suppose.)
Hours consumed by interesting tangents.
And they wonder why it takes neurodivergent people longer to do things.
Found a link to the University of Kent 'Covid 19 Business Recovery Response' webinar series, some of which look worth a look even though I am the opposite of business and business-minded.
Opened my mail after ignoring it all week. A belated Christmas gift from a niece. A book I'd ordered. The letter telling me I'm eleventy milllionth in the queue for a vaccine. My Oh No pin.
Today's pic: Work Tomorrow!
Pondering deep-time sort of helps to put measly homo sapien concerns into perspective I guess.
Felt slightly happier today, possibly because I had no work and no lectures, but correlation is not causation.
Just an amazing coincidence then.
I read a brilliant piece of writing by Rafael Behr, about how politics and the personal are deeply, and sometimes dangerously, entwined.
He suffered a heart attack while out jogging:
"[Now] I try to run to a place where I can see the horizon. I venture along the
Brighton seafront, or up into the South Downs, clocking up around 45km a
week – way more than I ever managed (or even attempted) in the years of
battling through angina. I can fit into the suit I wore at my wedding
15 years ago. I have read a bit about running technique. It turns out I
had developed all sorts of bad habits. The worst was my tendency to
stare down, hunched, focused on the ground just in front of me. I’m
working to correct that now. The trick is to relax the shoulders, don’t
clench the fists, breathe evenly. Look out, look up."
That last line - look out, look up - got me wondering about how posture affects your mood.
And after all, Tories wouldn't pay their consultant mates a fortune to advise them to stand like this if they didn't think body language projected something:
(I found an essay on this phenomenon that argues, with some interesting tangents, that "the so-called Tory Power Stance, far from being a posture depicting
authority and control, is actually a defensive masquerade, displaying a
postural articulation of the ‘fragile phallus‘.")
Quite. But anyway, staring at the magic rectangle, my head's usually bent forwards and my eyes are downcast. I'll feel awful, call it "doomscrolling" and blame the awfulness on what I'm reading online, but could it also be something to do with that hunched-up, downwards angle?
A cursory search for 'looking upwards' brought up two Psychology Today articles; there'll be many more out there I'm sure, and proper research too:
I'll have a look for the proper research once I've conquered the more immediate problem of my own degree work. There's a deadline on Friday chaps! Huzzah!
I watched La Jetée, the short film composed entirely of still photos that inspired 12 Monkeys.
It almost exactly captured the experience of shopping in The Range the other day:
I splashed out in the online shop of False Knees, one of my favourite Twitter artists:
Had to walk into town to collect a library book this afternoon, and on the way back I saw these guys:
This is going to be Photo of the Day because I didn't realise quite how much I needed to see daffodils before I saw some.
Went in The Range on the way home from work just to feel something.
I picked up a sketchpad and when I went to pay for it, the cashier suggested I might like to consider buying something like a bottle of water as well, because if the sketchpad wasn't accompanied by an 'essential' item, he wasn't allowed to sell it to me.
I obediently trotted off to find a bottle of water, and as I paid for my necessary unnecessary item and my unnecessary necessary item, the cashier and I shared a conspiratorial moment when he announced very clearly, possibly for the benefit of any passing supervisors, "So you came in here for a bottle of water, and then you saw the sketchpad and picked that up too," and I agreed loudly, "I did!"
Human contact: you've got to take it where you find it these days.
Afterwards, a quick stroll through the park, seeing as the sun was shining. Most satisfactory.
Lectures after that, so all in all I've had very little time for idle browsing, and the list of things to bookmark/follow up contains only 10 of the best virtual travel experiences today.
