in local news...

Until recently the Telfer Subway's walls were a mix of sub-Banksy stencilling, tag scribbles, and abstract debate on understanding and action. Not so bad, for visuals you catch in fractional glimpses while your attention is 90% focused on not stepping in the copious piles of dogshit. One bit was actually quite nice, a white-haired busker stencilled where the usual guitar-and-whistle busker stands:



Last week, the Rhinoceros company water-blasted the walls down to bare brick, and rather than having someone semi-official in to mural up the graffiti-begging walls, they've left it a blemishless cream.



This will last how many hours before it's nothing but random scribbles, not an interesting visual in sight?

glands and repeats

There’s a family history of autoimmune disorders…at least on one side. The other tends to drink themselves into sudden heart-related events, lucky bastards. My grandfather’s got myasthenia gravis, my mother has MS, and my misguided white cells attack my thyroid.

I’m just so goth, cutting isn’t attention-getting enough; I have to slowly destroy a gland that regulates all bodily functions. Look upon me, lip-pierced neck-tattoo guy, and weep at your own insufficiency.

Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is not life-threatening, even without medication…at least not right away. When you’re 800 pounds at 32 and die of pustulated bedsores…hey, nobody lives forever, and we have to accept that our metabolisms slow as we age, right? It’s instead deeply annoying because the syndrome manifests as visible moral failings. Put on more and more weight? You’re gluttonous. Barely drag yourself out of bed? You’re lazy. Trouble remembering where you parked the car, what the last chapter covered, your own age? You’re purposely stupid.

And that’s just from doctors who, if you manage to impress upon them the seriousness of your issues, might order a single blood test, which actually tests the pituitary gland’s function…and, inevitably, will tell you you’re ‘within normal range.’ More likely, the white coat will admonish you for lying about how much you eat, sleep, and exercise and insist you live better to feel better.

Which is why I buy my thyroid hormone replacement pills from Canada. I’m done wasting time with medical doctors who barely know where a thyroid is (left clavicle, right?) and wasting money on nutritionists who’ve done less research than me and keep pushing for expensive Chronic Fatigue Syndrome tests, with its even more expensive ‘treatments.’ I’ll never again be dependent on them for, quite literally, my lifeforce. Instead, I take my little pills on the schedule that seems to work best, swallow a handful of vitamins every morning, hit the gym as often as the body can manage, and make my baby steps toward health.

The latest MS research continues to support the theory that genetic predisposition is only part of what leaves someone with a dead stupid immune system – some sort of tipping point is required, like a viral infection. So, I could point toward that bad summer of 1997, when I came down with some virus the family GPs lackadaisically diagnosed as ‘not mono,’ after which I was allergic to everything. Air was deadly, or at least the pollen, dust, mold, dander, or wayward latex powder wafting on it left me choking and vulnerable to every bug in the dorm.

And, apparently, my thyroid was suddenly on the most wanted list as well. There’s a pattern of pre-diagnosis weight shifts with hashi’s…during the period your immune system is in its aaaaaaagh a thyroid, attack!!! mode, the dying cells dump their load of stimulating hormone into the bloodstream, and you lose weight. As a bonus, you have trouble sleeping, feel anxious, and can slip into panic attacks. Then there’s spells where your immune system is mellower, and your poor damaged thyroid returns to functioning, albeit not as well…and lucky you, all the weight you lost and more piles on, while your hair thins and your limbs are made of lead. But, chins up, soon enough it’s all thyroid, grrrrr! again and you lose the weight! Aaaand then put it back on. Then lose it again! And put it back on.

Over time you lose less and gain more, until you’re anxiously grinding through the overactive periods still suffering the exhaustion and gain of the underactive ones, and THAT’s when you finally accept something is wrong and go see Your Friendly Family Doctor, who runs one test, then kicks you in the shin for being a fatty-fatty-two-by-four looking for a magic thin pill.

Anyway, that sums up 1997 – 2004, until I was finally diagnosed. Mystery virus, you did stick with me.

And I don’t know why it bugs me, having a start date for this thing. Maybe because the years prior to 1997 were so unlucky and sometimes tragic, and I’d been crawling out of that. Learning who I was when I wasn’t just focused on surviving, that I loved kickboxing and making prints out of toxic chemistry and hiking and sometimes even pretty lace dresses…and then I was back in survival mode, too tired for kickboxing and hiking and too weak in the lungs for darkroom smells and too fat to wear my pretty clothes, too uncomfortable in my skin to buy new ones that also wouldn’t fit a few months.

There’s another school of thought, that allergies and more serious autoimmune conditions are partly caused by neurotic anxiety, dem ole bad vibrations. In which case…ha ha!...I was also screwed. In one sense, I can see this, the nearly constant adrenaline grind interrupting metabolic and immune function eventually leading to a sort of snapback, as a woman who gives birth can have temporary autoimmune problems when her immune system overcompensates for nine months of suppression. But how has this been measured, or even noted anecdotally? An overactive thyroid causes anxiety and an underactive thyroid causes depression, and both color memories in an anxious/depressive light. It’d be easy to take the effect for the cause, given a firm grounding in pseudoscience.

Still…I can feel the difference when I’m stressed. It takes longer to recover from exercise, and a cold bug can knock me back for weeks. I’ve been trying to cut back on pointless anxiety, with some success (and pointlessly worrying about that, since the desire to write and take pictures is a pointless anxiety that work alleviates). At least it’s something I can put a little hope in, instead of only cursing whatever classmate or fellow coffee drinker passed on my little virus friend.

disconnected

Deadly exciting stuff today – walked across town to go a Tesco, instead of the usual Sommerfield or Lidl. In the rain. It’s already late-autumn feeling here…remembering wine festivals and rinkydink carnivals and October weekend trips to Ocean City just before all the shops closed for the season. The weather suits the mottled basalt buildings.


We got coffee in the supermarket Costa, where we went back in May when we first visited and stayed down the road, killing mild hangovers with caffeine and setting up appointments to see flats.

I love the thousand-yard stare on the woman in the background. It's this century's absinth drinkers...the lower-middle-class lattee sippers.

catching up

Slowly getting the hang of this daily photoblog craic. It’s actually helped to begin work, since it not only has me waking across town twice a day (trying to find shortcuts, which always leaves me near the castle – it’s got the same magnetic force as the gherkin), but takes me to an extremely photogenic area. It’s turning into a habit to grab a photo of anything marginally interesting, which is what I hoped it would poke me into doing. Thinking about doing the same here as well, just to be pressured to write something every day, where it won’t be blithering on friendslists. I complain about having an audience, online…I must be lying.

I really just want the potential for conversation. Whether it materialises or not doesn’t matter, so much. Maybe it’s getting older…keep a journal when you’re 16 and it’s cute, but do the same ten or fifteen years later, and you are actually compiling a hardback book of creepiness for the police to eventually find and analyse, ending your cat-and-mouse serial atrocities on amateur microbrewers. Writing where nobody reads, but some desperate freelancer with a deadline in five hours might stumble across in a really extended procrastination binge, implies some small amount of accountability. Without the angst of actual associates potentially expecting accountability.

Hmmm. My logic chain has some linkage problems.

best of a bad city

Been a busy few weeks. The upshot is, we’ve now got a flat in Edinburgh and are moving up at the end of this month. Yay?

It’s more difficult that I expected, leaving London. I’m tired and claustrophobic in this city, more than ready to go somewhere it isn’t a major undertaking to pick up a pint of milk, but all the same…we’ve been here three years. It’s familiar. Like a long depression, after which smiling is scary.

Still, there’s bright spots I’ll miss.

The University
I’m back to working with the big arts university through the end of the semester (and serendipitously, my move date), where I’ve floated through a few contracts. There’s a few aspects that drop me into a vat of spicy boiling rage once or twice a week (primarily, the huge mess the last person left me to mop up, and my supervisors’ determined innocence of this fact), but the benefits far outweigh the hassle.

My coworkers are nice. This is simple, but huge. Most of them pitch in when there’s a big task or a crisis. And nearly all of them have some artistic hobbies, so their conversations are interesting and no one stares at you for scribbling in a sketchbook or reading over your lunch break. Also – lunch break! You’re expected to take one, instead of getting the skunk eye for eating away from your desk.

Also, there’s free publications of varied quality lying about. Most are displaying student work, but others include random how-to’s…what open-source software can be used and what still required professional stuff, the important laws regarding squatting and the local squat-arts scene, etc. I like leaving these on the bus when I’m done and watching people’s fascination when they pick them up, expecting a Metro or London Lite. The best was when I dropped the Student Union magazine, ‘Less Common, More Sense,’ with its bizarre cover of a sausage in a banana peel, on the seat in front of me, and a young guy picked it up, flipped through with a growing grin, and pulled out a Polish-English Dictionary to begin working through the first article.

It’s also, several times a week, a satisfying job. Most of my job involves scheduling and maintaining records of the advisors and counsellors, which as I’m partially an anal retentive picky pain, works for me. I spend a lot of the day on the phone with students, which is entertaining in itself, and sometimes they’re really in a bad way. It can be exhausting, on days you’ve heard too many sad stories and haven’t been able to help, but then in another day or two, you’ve gotten them a time to meet with a counsellor and they are happier. I haven’t done the hard work, but I have gotten A and B together, so I feel like I’ve had a positive effect on my corner of the world.

random thoughts upon exiting

Bouquets of flowers just make me sad. That, and the allergies they provoke. I can't keep them going--a day later, they're a sad wilted bunch melting into mold and smelling funny.

Potted plants are better. It takes longer to kill them, and I feel like they had a better shot at life as I throw them in the bin with the cut flowers and the tub of hummus I never get around to finishing.

modestly proposing...

I’m not saying that it’s a rational impulse, the wish to murder someone who pronounces ‘here’ as ‘hnun-yheah.’ Even if they start and end every sentence with ‘hnun-yheah.’

But common sense dictates, to keep the population at a sustainable number, a reasonable licensed hunting season. Say, September through April—enough to stock the deep freezer with hnun-yheah steaks and hnun-yheah bratwurst through barbequing season.

Most of my father’s duck callers would need only minor modifications: hnun-yheah! hnun-yheah!

Hey, pods! Come and get me you scum!

This is the second day of the new job at the old office. It had seemed to be going pretty well until this afternoon, which is when my erstwhile trainer went into full meltdown because the backlog she’s put off for three weeks isn’t done. Every time I’ve approached her since to either a) report I’ve finished part of the backlog or b) ask to borrow the office diary in order to complete another part of the backlog, she’s been one notch down from the full Sutherland:



Soooooooo…I make this face a lot:



And hope I won’t wake up tomorrow next to a pile of dust looking like this:

3...2...1...

It’s now the downhill bit of my notice period. The embodiment of upper-middle-class white male privilege bossman has continued to be a turd, but it’s only 8...7...6 days to go. Hah!

He’s actually getting worse, not only to me but to the rest of the team. They’re developing the hollow-eyed fearness as more and more I get to say, gee, I’ll be gone when that meeting happens, so you’ll need to arrange details with the Prancer and send the invite yourself you fool, you poor poor fool. Bwa ha ha. Prancer has made no moves to arrange for my replacement, of course, the better to sink into a deep rotted entropy that leaves the next poor sod on the back foot from her first day.

Of course it’ll be a her, not a him. His sagging pastry libido couldn’t stand the blow of a male assistant. I’ve suggested to the agency that they look for a former marine. Hooya, Prancer. Hooya.

As to my own future, the next steps are falling together with somewhat worrisome convenience. I spent some time with the agency rep beating my cv into shape, and for the past two days it’s been a golden ticket. I fear the ironic comeuppance surely lying in wait.

And yet, if there’s been any unifying theme to my life, it’s that common sense is a big rusty beartrap while huge impulsive moves lead to the yellow brick road.

incoming outgoing

Right, what sadist came up with the month’s notice scheme? It’s barely been a week and I’m ready to soak the bridge not yet behind me in paraffin and chant about the fifth of November.

Sadist, I’m well aware of the reasons for fleeing this office like I just let loose a largish pack of sexually frustrated guinea pigs on the tea counter. Especially the one where the exec is seemingly incapable of looking at his own schedule, remembering when he’s demanded I fit meetings in, or giving me small unimportant details like who should be at a meeting until five minutes before it’s due to start.

Prancer: These people I’m meeting with later—is anyone from marketing attending?
Oda: (opens the meeting in his Outlook calendar, which contains his original email requesting to set up the meeting) No, just you.
Prancer: Fuck, why not?
Oda: Your email didn’t mention anyone but you.
Prancer: Well I thought I’d implied that I didn’t want to meet with them. I hate those fucking idiots. (sulk...glare...)

Or...

Prancer: Get us lunch for a meeting I’ve just made, tomorrow.
Oda: (has long since accepted that no one else realises catering isn’t magicked up by eternally burning golems rather than temperamental pseudo-chefs) Any specifics you’d li—
Prancer: Whatever.
later, after a frantic email exchange confirming what catering had in stock:
Oda: Your lunch tomorrow is sorted, and I’ve reserved Room—
Prancer: Is it a light lunch? Because I don’t want all that shit you usually get.
Oda: No, it’s—
Prancer: All I want is sandwiches, sushi, and those little chocolate biscuit things.

The worst part is, that’s exactly what I ordered.

This is how the Stockholm starts, isn’t it?

pursued by a bear

Yesterday I was fired.

Technically, I quit, twice, after which Prancer declared that it wasn’t working out for him and I would have to find another position. O noes, rly?

It’s typical that even this conversation immediately deteriorated into a sophomore break-up. No, you’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you! Just picture me working for a short, podgy version of Ross Geller.

But only for four more weeks! Or less, if I land another contract sooner. Whee!

I should not be this happy to be unemployed in a maneating city like London. And the fellow buttmonkeys I’ve told shouldn’t have been so happy for me. And yet.

mama cass’s melancholia

The editors behind me are going mad for rickrolling (which made it into the Metro last week) and trying to convince themselves it’s a good idea to have an actual rickroll on the homepage to support the article. Way to catch up to last month, guys.

We’re supposed to be taking off from Terminal 5 later this week, and I’m coming down with the mandatory pre-holiday cold. Starting to wonder if our occasional extensively planned, budgeted, and clung-to weekend holidays are dooooooooooomed.

I’ve also had most of my hair cut off. For the trauma and liberation of cleaving away the long curly hair that too easily becomes part of a woman’s identity, I’ll refer you to the Rotund, who also underwent the big chop last week. I wonder what possessed me to get a cut that requires I break out the straighteners every time I wash it or risk the Lyle Lovett effect. Still, when I’ve got straight long bangs falling in my eyes, I look like someone else, someone fast and sly who probably jogs.

Someone who could pick the lock of her boss’s storage locker in under 20 seconds.

(In my defence, he did leave his virus-infected laptop in there, giving me instructions to get it reformatted, but no key.)

So that’s me now, and fairly accurate. Plus, my head is lighter without the hippy-mop-cum-Victorian-corkscrew-curls, and I don’t need a bagful of products just to get a shower at the gym...which was 90% of the reason for shifting that heavy mess, actually.

Life at the moment is slow chaos. The sole benefit is that I’ve been writing again, and it’s coming out easily. It helps that I’ve liberated a handful of characters from a long piece that had less chance of working with every revision, and they’re leaping along like Harry Harlow’s control group in a new environment.

At least I’m making fictional people happy, right?

I put in my notice, which turned into an argument (“it can still work” / “no, it can’t” wash rinse repeat)...how can I yell and curse at someone who’s already not happy with me and still not be fired? So I’ve agreed to give it a month, because...just because it’s easier. Like most of my major decisions, it comes down to did my best, now can’t be arsed. Or perhaps I’ve just given in to the overriding meme of my life, that those I try to warn will agree with me after the disaster but never beforehand.

There’s probably a myth like that. Maybe Greek? Nah, Russian. Definitely a Russian outlook.

never trust anything that insists it lives on sunbeams and happy thoughts

Now is the season that air becomes the enemy. For me, that’s all seasons (thanks, London, for your fug of car exhaust, friendly black mold and generational layers of dust), but the spring months are the ones in which everyone else get miserable, and I am smug. See, I want to gloat, I always feel this way, you weaklings!

Why I should gloat over that, I’m not sure. Chronic allergies must damage the satisfaction synapses (along with those responsible for recognising that english sausages are more like damp fibreglass insulation than edible goodness). Somehow, it feels like that afternoon six months into a new gym routine when you’ve doubled your weight load on every machine and notice the bunny next to you, gelatinous layers of make-up on a face like a slapped ass, struggling to lift five kilos. You know, that second of pride in your progress compared to another, before you choke on her cloud of “If You Like Giorgio, You’ll Love Eu Du Cat Piss” knock-off and the red rage begins...

There’s surely a word in German for this feeling.

USA Today has caught up this month with a 2002 study in Hypochondriac Monthly on ragweed sufferers. From the Blinding Obvious channel, it suggests that allergy sufferers may also feel malaise and even depression. Really, Captain Hero? Someone who’s struggling to breathe, not sleeping well, itchy in membranes that can’t be scratched, and generally under the weather for weeks or months on end might not be a perky polly?

No, I’m not still bitter that in two years, a practice of GPs didn’t connect asthma and breathing difficulties to ‘maybe we should test her for allergies?’, instead insisting Prozac and her bitter cousins were the only possible solution.

Really, I’m not.

It’s just one of the many reasons for trusting my own research in recent medical trials over what some last-in-her-class in a white coat trots out in a 2-minute consultation.

Digress. Possibly as a combination of daffodils and flowering trees popping out and the miserable weather, everyone I encounter is a cranky fucker.

(Except one woman I tangentially work with, the one who happily acts as product guinea pig for her lifestyle articles—how is she so cheerful all the time? It’s just awesome. Of course, people probably think I’m cheerful all the time, given that my job description could be more usefully condensed as ‘smile while executive wankers treat you like a combination babysitter/punching bag,’ so maybe she’s got an extensive graveyard of Sims resembling co-workers on her home computer, too.)

The last few years, I’ve heard again and again in the spring: I don’t usually get allergies, but this year the pollen’s making me want to fling myself in front of the next bendy bus to cross my path, and I’m taking you with me! It makes me wonder...are the plants forming ecoterrorist circles? Do they have secret chlorophyll labs (in rectangular cells, of course, not blobby circular ones) where they’re dicing and splicing their own DNA into airborne gametes of mass destruction? Insult our Mother Gaia with your blasphemous Terminal 5 and Hummer farts, will you?

Or, it could be the bees. Doesn’t that make sense—more pollen, fewer humans venturing outside with their tasty confusing sweat? Don’t underestimate the hive mind—it cured cancer back in 1952, but then little Billy Schwartz just had to thwack that wasp nest into his neighbour’s pool for the fun of watching them drown, didn’t he? The bees would never share after that assault on their freedom.

No matter what the cause of our long national nightmare, here’s some advice to the lightweights experiencing their first allergy season:

• Benadryl and Advil is a combination that guarantees a good night’s sleep, as well as wiping away your memory of the past few days.
• Don’t drink! An immune system already in revolt over a cupful of pollen hammering around its bloodstream will not take kindly to the addition of yeast, sulphides, hops and alcohol. It will make you pay. Pretend to like vegetable juices (a good starting point: carrot and apple juice) and lecture other drinkers to fill the gap.
• Keep exercising, if only gently and inside an air-conditioned gym. Any endorphins will help fight off the ennui, and it seems to suppress the autoimmune misery for hours afterward.
• Lower your expectations. Life will suck for the next few weeks. Be aware of upcoming stress points, cut corners, watch a lot of unchallenging tv (M*A*S*H and Columbo reruns, ideally).
• Remember: your immune system is tied up fighting harmless pollen, and will put all other requests in a queue. Pimples will become semi-permanent beauty marks, bruises will linger yellowly, cold or flu bugs will take longer to shake. Neosporin is your friend, as is Vitamin C, which is (according to many snake oil homeopathic healing sites) a natural antihistamine.

i reject your worthless rag, madam

Just came home to discover this on the mail pile--a St Pat's day card, the thickness of which proved too tempting to either the mailman or one of the other flat-dwellers. I peeked in to discover, as expected, the comic strips and clippings from the local rag still intact, but also--Pres Grant clearly visible, but left behind.

Damn. The US really is heading into the economic horse latitudes when someone in Cricklewood can't be bothered nicking a fifty-dollar note.