Tuesday, February 28, 2006

March 1

My favourite piece of news for the year is the one about the suicidal Frenchwoman who had half her face eaten by her dog while unconscious after an overdose of sleeping pills and subsequently became the first person in the world to have a face transplant. It has everything you could want in fact or fiction, from desperation to bestial behaviour and the redemption of modern medicine, and provides a conversation starter from an endless number of standpoints including:

1) what an amazing operation
2)what a fucked up woman
3)what a naughty dog

If anyone would like to pursue any of these lines of discussion, you known where to find me.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

February 23

Suffering a small scale human tragedy of the decision making variety- I went for a job interview at Appen where the mistress ( an obnoxious specimen by the name of Julie Vonwiller- I wonder if this will appear when she googles herself) showed me all her teeth at regular intervals for an hour and said that she was almost sure they could use me. It seems that the issue is that I am in fact too employable. She is such an abrasive character that I tell myself I will only accept the job if she offers me a million bucks but of course in reality I'm interested. The thing that really horrifies me is the idea of calling someone up and telling them that I've had a better offer but probably it will provide some long- needed training in assertiveness. Interesting isn't it that I like to imagine myself as a powerful and independent woman but then crumble into a small heap at the thought of saying no to anyone.

Occupying myself more than I probably should with the proceeding disintegration of Katherine- and -Tawfiq: the plot is now so thick that Hollywood would reject it on credibility grounds, and I have spent hours straining my mind trying to work out what's really going on. I am inevitably coming down on Katherine's side ( the sisterhood isn't dead after all ) but having a few regrets as I had Tawfiq earmarked as a nice friend for Marcin to guide him through the pitfalls of migrant life. To be continued.

Monday, February 20, 2006

February 20

Contemplating womanhood recently - a difficult subject which is, believe it or not, further complicated by the fact that I am one ( a woman I mean). The subject gives me a sort of vertigo, as if I am inside a building trying to picture how it looks from the outside. How to distinguish the characteristics of my natural self from those attributable to my second X chromosome ? I am thinking of these peculiarly feminine sorts of behaviours and desires such as the urge to tell people to take a warm jumper with them when they go to the movies and a more generalised sense of responsibility for things which I can't control (the happiness of my prospective spouse, the imaginary feelings of my prospective employers should I decline their kind offers ). I fight with the niggling worry that my conception of liberation, and in particular the idea of sexual freedom, is just another nasty joke by the patriarchy - an insidious fashion which isn't really freedom at all but a twisted expression of all the old urges and a novel way of exploiting women by convincing them that they are doing exactly what they want. What can you do when the woman in a burqa (or the woman sucking a stranger's cock in a nightclub dunny) says, this empowers me, I'm acting on my own will, this is what I choose ? Having been so thoroughly molded by the external pressures of socialisation and ideas about gender, an attempt to get an outside perspective feels like an extreme effort akin to a mental space program that catapults me away from the gravitational pull of The World as We Know It. Think of the hazards and casualties of this sort of program- how many dead simian astronauts, how much galactic politicking, how many shat-in space suits, all for the sake of seeing a few square kilometres of dead rock and the vision of the little blue marble called Earth which suddenly looks like a perfectly good place to be after all.

Monday, February 13, 2006

February 14

Anarchy is in the air - it's a time of divorces and flux, and it's reflected in the demolition process going on at the university where they are knocking down the building beside the library. Behind a high wire fence they are slowly reducing it to a pile of rubble and it's a peculiarly satisfying sight: the smashed windows, the twisted wire supports protruding from the concrete, the sudden visibility of previously hidden rooms as they are torn in half and reveal that inside, there is nothing interesting at all. The same impulse that leads me to secretly hope to see a terrible car accident is the impulse that makes watching this destruction such a pleasure: it demonstrates what everybody knows, that nothing is stable, that everything will fall apart when the right amount of pressure is applied in the right place.

These maudlin thoughts provoked partly by Katherine and Tawfik's separation, which is unfolding as we speak in surreal technicolour. He went to Egypt to photograph an archaeological dig, fell in love with a sexy young headbanger and came back listening to Iron Maiden and requesting a separation. My powers of imagination are so exercised by this unlikely scenario that I am even dreaming about it and trying to make sense of it in my sleep. My first thought is that he has gone completely mad but Katherine tells me that 'that's what she thought at first, but that's what people always tell themselves when they're being dumped.' She is vocal and articulate about the process- the pity succeeded by rage with a constant drumming of pain in the background. Destruction is not only a source of secret fascination, it' s also unbelievably easy: it's possible to ruin something that's been years in the making in a matter of minutes.How depressing it is and how paranoid it can make one.

On another, not entirely unrelated topic , yesterday I made my first ever visit to a psychiatrist. I had to meet my mad phone-friend's doctor before meeting her, so at 12:30 I rolled sweatily up to the door of a discreet house in Paddington which had the blinds drawn and only a tiny Please Enter sign to indicate that it was anything other than an ordinary residence in a fashionable part of town. Inside the decor was relentlessly beige, the trashy magazines (Vogue and Cosmopolitan, not New Weekly- there is both money and taste here) lined up with military precision on a spotless glass tabletop, the light moderated by pale, neutral blinds, soothing music and a smiling, unintimidating receptionist hunkered down behind a high desk. Obviously the designers didn't realise that a lack of any discord is just as likely to cause an outbreak of madness as a hot pink couch and a Black Sabbath soundtrack.

Dr. Both himself was smooth and pleasant in the same uncompromising way - polished shoes, a balding head shaved to minimise the obviousness of his hair loss, neat ironed trousers. He sat in one wide beige chair and crossed his legs in an accomodating (as opposed to defensive) manner : I sat in another one opposite him and mirrored his pose. An easy conversation followed with exactly the right amount of eye contact, guided precisely by the doctor who gave me (in an unemotional but caring fashion) a rundown of Julie's illness. Diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia 20 years ago, she has never worked due to her condition and currently lives at home with her parents as she has for most of her life. She struggles with finding ways to occupy her time and has only recently ( within the last couple of years) found a medication which controls her symptoms (voices). She has made a couple of unsuccessful suicide attempts and frequently suffers from anxiety in new situations.

This, then, constituted the only discordancy: this recount of what has basically been an unhappy life circumscribed by recurrent madness, uttered in this reasonable tone by a pleasant- faced young man in his beige office.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

February 9

Last week I went for my first job interview in a mad people's service provider in Ryde. I had forgotten how heavy the silence is in the suburbs- the only commercial sign of life was a bakery selling yellow bread hard up against a decrepit pet shop with empty fishtanks in the windows, the occasional bus rumbling by and stopping to drop off a pensioner in front of a shuttered house.It was forty degrees and I was dressed in my best brown polyester and sweating like a pig- being my father's daughter I arrived 2 hours early and since there are no public amenities in the suburbs I was forced to leap the fence (risking destruction of aforementioned best brown polyester) to piss in the Field of Mars Nature Reserve. Luckily Mad People Central was airconditioned to arctic temperatures so when I finally got inside my synthetic cocoon stood me in good stead.

The panel consisted of a gone-to-seed Morticia Adams, a smurf, an earnest young blonde and a shadowy HR representative called Nhu Nguyen. They gave me a list of questions before going in and the interview consisted of me reeling off my prepared answers while they looked at their notepads on the other side of an enormous round table and scribbled. The only hitch came partway through when the smurf started to cough his lungs up over to the north west- I was too deep in my incantation of Disability Service Standard 2 (Decision Making and Choice) to notice until Morticia stopped me to enquire ostentatiously after his health. The smurf (who liked me) hushed her irritably and my earnest recitation continued unbroken for the next half hour.

Apparently this lecture suited everbody as they offered me the job. Now I'm in a quandary- since, apparently, I am capable of getting a job, maybe I should keep trying and look for something better ? I want to keep studying as well. Will I get to be a famous linguist if I spend my energies reminding mad people to pay their rent and clean under the sink? I am already planning how to combine these two diverse interests.