Archive for December, 2008
December 30, 2008 at 14:04 · Filed under Daily Life, Random Mutterings
So I’m sure that I should be providing you with a proper post, something heart-warming and seasonally related perhaps. Not a chance. My blogging mojo doesn’t extend quite that far.
Instead I’m sitting here at work with nothing to do because there’s nobody in to provide any work in the first place. Events seem to be rather dull (and I’m sure will be until the obligatory New Year’s Eve post is up) and I have nothing to report. At all. Except that I’m draining water faster than a leaking pipe supposedly maintained by Thames Water in an attempt to calm my sore throat which I’m sure is the result of not drinking enough water yesterday and consuming far too much coke (not to mention the Southern Comfort that I felt was necessary to accompany it).
So I’ve been having a bit of a look back through the archives. It seems that 2008 has been about a lot of things: educational dramas, the first day at school and the trials of homework; my admission of and battle with my compulsive overeating; my search for a new job, the trouble with resigning, and helping to find my own replacement; starting a new job and finding out what it really means to be a float; moving house; joining the gym and engaging the services of a personal trainer in an attempt to get thin; multiple trips to Legoland; buying a car, breaking down and giving up and getting a different car; young love; my NaNoWriMo entry and search engine stories making it over here; and especially recently, I’ve taken lots of trips down memory lane.
In less of a ‘rundown of the year’ style, this blog has been about me finding more of a style for my own writing, instead of writing tiny snippets of daily life. I’ve found myself venturing further into the blogging community instead of keeping to the small circle of friends that I met back in ‘04. It’s been a move that has led me to find some wonderful reading, and find some great blog-friends.
2008’s been a good year. It’s had its ups and its had it’s downs, but it’s been good. I’ll be glad it’s over though, because 2009 can only be better.
December 28, 2008 at 01:21 · Filed under Daily Life
It was the summer of ‘99. We had jobs, if that was what you would call delivering leaflets and free papers. A future of drinking and partying, boys and dates lingered ahead of us in the hazy air, so thick you could taste it. We needed real money.
Mum’s friend worked in Woolworths, they had jobs. I took the tests and aced them. No interview was needed; they knew mum, had heard that I was a good kid. That was enough.
I started working Saturday mornings, four hours standing at a till weighing pick’n'mix and smiling at all who passed. Four hours turned to five and I stacked shelves too. By Christmas I had reached the holy grail of the weekend workers and found myself working on the entertainment counter, along with longer hours, more days, and more money.
I loved my job, I was good at it. I was asked to work full time, to quit college and stay there. Coming from the manager it was the highest of praise. Friendships were forged, relationships that would help me through the darkest of times. When I left after two and a half years, heading out into the big bad world of full time work I said goodbye with a mixture of happiness and sorrow. I could’ve stayed forever.
14 months later I was back. It took less than a week to arrange and in some respects I slotted back in as if I’d never been gone and had simply took on the job I’d been offered all those years ago.
It didn’t work out, but even so, when I left almost a year later I left with fond memories of what had been. If things had been different I could still be there now. Facing unemployment.
Last month Woolworths entered into administration. If things had been different I could have been working there when the news broke, instead of sitting at my compter feeling a pang of nostalgia for what the UK was about to lose.
This afternoo0n as we were driving past the store where I’d worked I saw a sign advertising 80% off. We stopped and I popped in to see if I could get any bargains. It was a big mistake. It was like watching vultures pick over a corpse, except this was a corpse you knew. Only this was three years of memories looking back at me as they were torn apart.
I guess it was partly morbid curiosity that sent me walking through those doors this afternoon, a little desire to recapture the memories that I once lived as well. It backfired on me. Instead of now remembering those years with a hint of fond happiness they will now be tainted with the image of vultures and an empty skeleton that barely resembled the visions from my memories.
Goodbye my friend.
December 23, 2008 at 12:57 · Filed under Daily Life
Last night I was craving cheese, but not a piece of cheese, baked cheese goodness like a pastry cheese twist. I realised Delia could come to the rescue, and dug out the bible and found the recipe for cheese scones.
It was like falling into an old memory; sieving the flour, adding little bits here and there, grating cheese, beating an egg. Even though I’d not made those movements for years they were familiar like my tattered old yellow baby blanket that I used to carry with me.
Sundays were the day, we would all take the ten minute drive over to Nan’s. Sanwiches for lunch, egg mayonaise. Sometimes soup, leek and potato with french bread. That was Delia’s recipe too. Grandad in one armchair, Nanny M in the other, the sofa left over for the rest of us, or more usually, the floor. Sometimes there was homemade ice cream and mango sauce, that was my favourite. Thomas the Tank Engine and games of hide the duck with our family shouting “warmer!”, “colder!” enthusiastically as we searched.
The afternoons were for baking. The men would sleep as the women gathered in the kitchen to entertain the kids. We would make scones, cheese, my favourite, as mum washed up the lunch plates. “Use your fingers; don’t get the flour on your palms” Nanny M would say. “Delia wouldn’t get flour all over her hands.” But I didn’t know how, and the flour only stuck anyway. Rolling pins and cutters clattered across the wobbly kitchen table as I crafted my baking under the watchful eye of my mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Four generations of us baking in that familiar old kitchen.
Tea time would arrive and the scones would be drawn from the oven, paprika dusted cheese melting over their tops. Tea for the adults, coco for B1, the milk heated in the ageing microwave where Nan always kept a mug of water – just in case B2 decided to play. I would drink orange juice, always the same. And we’d eat the scones we’d spent the afternoon baking, sitting by the orange glow of the electric fire in the living room.
As I rubbed the butter into the flour mixture of those scones last night I remembered Nana M’s words: “don’t get the flour on your palms”, and as I looked down to my hands the flour was there, dusting my skin in patterns that shouldn’t cling to my hands. Even now, over 15 years on, I still can’t get that bit right.
December 22, 2008 at 12:56 · Filed under Daily Life
The winter of 97/98 was an interesting time. Finally I was finding my niche amongst the popular and the unpopular kids, somewhere under the wing of a hard-assed girl you wouldn’t mess with. Finally I was settling; I felt happier, I ate better and even if I didn’t know which direction I wanted my life to take, I was happy letting it continue.
The internet appeared in our lives almost overnight. One person, then another and another found their home computers hooked up to their telephones, tying up the phone line, preventing others from making and receiving calls. We would huddle around computers whilst one of us typed messages to strange boys on the other side of the country, giggling as their boyband good looks filtered through onto the screen. There was an innocence to it all, flirting with these boys that we would never meet, never have any intention to meet. Yahoo messenger was our toy and, unlike our parents our younger siblings, we were proficient in its use.
Whilst my friends were happy with their lot, I painstakingly built a website with the most rudimentary html. Angelfire was my new best friend and I loved those black pages with their lime green text as if they were a child of my own. Those words were my diary and they were the closest thing to the truth that I could say. I forewent the chatrooms on Yahoo that my friends rushed to every evening, instead finding my comfort in the spaces on the net where the geeks congregated. In our own ways we were all geeks then, the newly easy access to such technology bringing out the excitement from within us.
Slowly I made friends, speaking to those same 14 year old geeks night after night was comforting. In some ways we understood each other better than those in our real lives. Things were very distinct then; real life and your internet self. My name was Jaxia. Without having to look a person in the eye I could be cool and confident; I had the knowledge to back my claim up.
Those new friends introduced me to ICQ and as those in my real life lost interest in the internet world they had so intently pursued in the past six months, I threw myself deeper in.
College came and as I grew more depressed, losing myself in the music I listened to and the words that I laid on pages of a notebook, that world was the one who took me in. The internet was a place where I didn’t have to be afraid. If I felt like I couldn’t carry on there were people who would carry me, people who wouldn’t judge me for what I thought or felt.
I drifted into poetry, and with it a new set of friends. I felt so comfortable because although those words of fiction were not quite as fictional as they might seem I had found a group of people who were not afraid to tell me what they thought. At times their words may have seemed harsh, but they shaped me into a better writer. When the group disbanded a few of us held on to those tenuous shreds of the friendships we’d formed. They were the ones that lasted for a time.
The year ended and between college and working and drinking the internet lost its hold on me. Those friendships that I’d so carefully created all but fell by the wayside. It’s more difficult to keep in touch when your friends can’t make it round to your house to drag you out of your depressed and drunken stupor.
Then it all came crashing down. I slipped from the edge that I had been teetering on for so long and fell into the abyss. I was unrecognisable but so much of me didn’t want to change that. In a moment of clarity I built another website. Even now I can’t tell whether it was for revenge or release, but I doubt it ever crossed the paths of the objects of my anger.
I wrote. Everything that crossed my broken my made its way onto those dusty rose pages that held my life. I thought of myself as that thumbsucking fairy who’d lost her wings, not quite in this world but not quite in the other. All I had were my words.
It was an outlet, but not a support, and like so many things that site fell to the wayside.
Life carried on, I struggled, and when I came to realise what I needed to do I went back to that site. I changed my life, turned it around, and found a little shred of happiness in doing so. And I went back to that site and I wrote. The little details, thoughts, feelings, they appeared once more on those fragile pages that held the pain I had felt over a year before.
This time was different. The truths that I wrote had lost their bitterness, even when there was sorrow there was happiness between the lines. If I drifted away I also drifted back, the intent was always there, even if the means weren’t.
I wrote through happiness and I wrote through pain. When I was falling apart from the inside out I wrote and I felt better for a moment, even if not for long. People came and I went. We supported one another through the ups and the downs. There was always someone listening and always someone willing to offer a hug or kind words.
Some of us have followed each other’s lives for so long, and so closely, that it feels as if I know you better than many of the friends I can reach out and touch. Yet sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes I want to reach out and hug you, because it’s clear that’s, more than anything, what you need. Sometimes I really want to give you a good ol’ slap and tell you to pull yourself together, because sometimes you truly deserve it. But distance and a faint smattering of anonymity hold me back. Sometimes I need someone to hold me and tell me it’ll all be ok, but it’s just too difficult to get that across with words that don’t always say what they need.
It’s been a long time now. 1997 seems a life time away, but friends do not. Many of the friendships forged through blogging circles seem closer, more solid, than some of those I hold in real life. Many of my readers have seen a side of me, the real me, that people in real life just don’t get close to. The lines now are blurring. Those internet friendships are creeping their way into real life and for a while I felt confused. Should the internet cross over into real life or real life cross over onto the internet? Should I worry if real life sees the facets that the internet does, and should I worry if the internet sees how superficial real life can be?
Right now I want to sparkle, to glitter in the sun that all but seems to have disappeared under the haze of winter’s cold. I’m feeling lost again, somehow torn between the different ways that life pulls: what I want, need, have and have let slip away. They’re all different, but all the same, and somehow don’t reconcile. I don’t know where to stand.
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