One Week

It's been a week now since I had the company of another human being – the first week of another 3 year wait? Hopefully not, but I'm still reliant on people coming to me instead of trying to get out there into the world to lasso up some friends for myself. I suppose then it's a good job that I'm so magnetic and charismatic that I can attract anyone here at all! Just need to focus on either making sure they come back, or never leave. And since that XL cage I ordered for last time never showed up, I guess I'll just need to work on being a fun and exciting host. I'm leaving negative feedback on that cage though.

I've already done a post here looking back over the years and reflecting on how far I've come, but its just hugely frustrating that the final roadblock, the last thing for me to get over and get back to some sort of normalcy is proving so difficult to get around. I've actually been out 3 times in the past week; not going anywhere in particular, but just trying to make some sort of symbolic stand against an imaginary construct of my limitations. Suffice to say, it's not gone so well.

I've been battling with M.E. for a full decade now, and I would say I've got a reasonable handle on my symptoms and how to manage them, so its all the more astounding really that I managed to misjudge this one so badly. Going out takes energy. Just because you insist that you're “trying harder” or putting up some sort of fight about it does not in any way negate the amount of energy that going out expends, leading to a rather major flaw in the plan of “I'll just do it lots and lots until it gets easier”.

My other brother returns from his travels in continental Europe tonight. He's my younger brother by age, but he passed by me socially many years ago. It doesn't help with the mid-life crisis when you're still pining over things and experiences that someone you're meant to be more advanced than has burned through them all and got sick of them! Next he'll be finished Uni and off into the world of employment, while my nights are filled with dreams of the school bus and sleepovers.

Still, I've got the chance to dazzle him with my culinary prowess that I've been working on while he's been away. Buttered pasta with grated cheese, and yes – I did grate that cheese myself.

Just Dance

Just how did her shirt get turned inside out?

Bears

Today I'm going to talk about something that's been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time now: pandas.

First off, I feel a special connection with bears. They're a lot like us really, you can imagine that at some point we were at the same path along the evolutionary tree. I know we WEREN'T, in a quite literal sense, but still, this is my blog and my analogy so I'll say and do what I want thank you. Anyway, we were at a similar sort of impasse, in that the tasty things we liked eating just didn't want to be eaten themselves. What to do? For humans, we developed our brains, our cunning, we outsmarted our meals and gained intricacy and dexterity, learned to use tools to do our bidding and tamed fire to cook and soften our prey. Bears on the other hand, went all out for power, massive strength and no sophistication with using it. 8 feet tall, 800 pounds, arms that could rip you apart and a jaw that could chew through bone, the brute force, sledgehammer approach to catching their dinner. And really, you've got to respect that as a lifestyle choice, it's working out well for them.

But then we come to the panda. For some reason, its decided to take all those tools that evolution has handed it, and uses it... on bamboo. And not only that, they're on the verge of extinction because they can't be bothered to carry out their most base of urges and reproduce!

First off, although they might look cute and fluffy, a panda is still a goddamn BEAR, a half-ton wrecking ball of unholy monstrous fury. So what's with the vegetarianism? The natural order of the food chain is meant to go from plants, to herbivores, to carnivores. Pandas are perfectly happy to take all the genes and the evolutionary benefits of their bear ancestry to avoid the drawbacks of being hunted, but want to have their bamboo cake and eat it by avoiding the hardships of having to do some old fashioned hard work for their meals. Giving up on the salmon to sit around on their rapidly expanding black and white arses, subsiding on shoots and leaves that aren't exactly putting up a fight is just laziness. How about you get a haircut, put on a suit and tie and go out there and earn an honest day's living at the river instead of whining about how human expansion into your habitat is totally harshing your buzz, man?

And another thing, how can you have any sympathy for any creature that's critically endangered because it can't even be bothered to have sex? Taking away the 5% who are convinced that abstinence is the key to godliness, most of the world's population that aren't getting any would quite happily wrestle in a life or death tussle with that salmon themselves for the shot at getting their end away. Are you trying to claim you're better than us, pandas? Is it religious reasons? Does the great god of the bears want you to wear a purity ring and save yourself for panda-marriage? Or is this just like the bamboo thing and you're too lazy to? Because frankly, when there are witty, attractive people out there like umm... this friend I have... who are trying their hardest and not getting anywhere with the opposite sex, it's just insulting that we can put things on a plate for you and you can't even be bothered rousing yourselves to secure the continued existence of your very species.

You can just imagine, Christmas dinner round at the bear family household, where Ma Grizzly and Pa Polar have slaved away over a hot, umm... stream, catching a nice juicy salmon for the whole family to enjoy, and effeminate cousin panda pipes up saying “actually, if you don't mind I'd rather have the bamboo”.

No, panda. No. We weren't offering you a vegetarian option, and we're all very disappointed in you.

Me against the music

I've always had a different sort of approach to music from those around me. Over the years, people close to me have found it helpful to share their favourite pieces of music with me, hoping to share an intimate, personal connection, and it's been something I've almost always completely taken wrongly. One reader in particular I know will utterly cringe at the memory of me pompously telling her off for trying to use 'borrowed words', written by someone else to express what she felt inside instead of putting it in her own way. It's just something that I've never quite got invested in in the same way as 'normal people' seem to, and it still persists to this day.

My top most played song on iTunes is a Ukrainian-language one that was available in English, but I preferred in its native tongue. I've been unbearably smug at being ahead of the curve on some of the very few European pop songs that have escaped into the wild of the UK charts – I was aware of Tatu before they hit it big with All the Things She Said, for example, and I still prefer the original Russian; I'd heard of the Turkish Eurovision band before this year's contest, and I know that a different reader than the one I mentioned before (because I have MORE THAN ONE FRIEND, ha, don't I rule) will always say that the song she associates me most with is a Moldovan one that more than just escaped into the wild of the UK pop scene, but went global via a fat guy dancing on webcam to it on the internet. In fact, maybe I should be slightly concerned or insulted that she associates that with me? Talking of song association, I've mentioned before about the bridges that I was helping rebuild with this blog, but I'm a bit concerned that the revelation that there is one poor soul who shall forever be linked with the Lonely Island song “Jizz in my Pants” might pour another barrel full of gasoline on the newly built foundations. Let's just hope none of the construction crew are smokers!

Were I somehow capable of being even MORE pretentious than I already am, I might suggest that I have a similar approach to music as Kurt Cobain, that I appreciate his approach of using the voice as just another instrument instead of insisting that music has to be its own form of art, conveying messages through lyrics and emotional investment. It's entirely possible that that wasn't remotely his views at all, but I think I read it once somewhere and it stuck with me. If any of my readers want to correct and educate me on what a misunderstood modern genius REALLY intended to get across with his art – I really, really don't care, sorry.

It's for those reasons though that my favourite genres of music are classical, dance and rap – slightly eclectic to say the least, but in a very superficial way I like to be proud of that and how 'quirky' it makes me. Like most aspects of my life, the only issue tempering just how far I take my pretentiousness is effort, in that truly caring deeply about it in any sort of way would just not add anything more to what I get out of it. Plus trying too hard would betray my radiating ennui that just makes me too, too cool. Irony. Malaise.

I know I'm being unbearably smug, but so long as I draw attention to the fact that I'm aware of that it makes it ok. It's roughly the equivalent to answering every question in a debate with another question, that way when you get called out on your bullshit you can claim hey, I'm not invested in this in any way, I'm just playing devil's advocate here! Either way, I'm too cool for it to affect me. Beautiful unique snowflake, etc.

Anyway, reappearing from my spelunking expedition up my own arse, I've come around to the 15 year old 'quoting lyrics out of context' deal, in an ironic way of course. Stylistically, cutting and pasting chunks of feeling out of songs devoid of their original context appeals to me in the sort of sense of a ransom note, cut and pasted out of magazine and newspaper headlines and all the more threatening for it. Picking a single line from a song charges it with all that intent, all the weight of the emotional investment that its original context provided it with, but leaving the littlest remnants of doubt over the reasons and motivations of what parts exactly were snipped out with the line itself, and what parts were intended to hang unsaid in the air along with it. It really is quite sinister, I just can't bear to risk that the intricate subtleties put into it would be missed, I demand recognition of how great I am for noticing and pointing it out!

No, I don't have a corgi / I had a hamster but it died cos I ignored it.

I'll be there for you

I'm on my own with my thoughts today – the rest of the family are off to a wedding, leaving me with an empty house to throw one of my legendary wild parties in. It might have been interesting to go, but I figured that seeing as it was a family wedding, the bridesmaids would be too much of a minefield. Plus, to make myself look presentable enough to be seen in public I'd have had to do something with my ever expanding beard, and that would have disturbed the family of sparrows currently nesting in it.

Do you ever think that Lily Allen comes home from a really nice date where nothing went wrong and thinks, damn, now I've got nothing to write a complaining song about? That's about how I feel just now. Yesterday I had a lovely friend over, for the first time in 3 years, and it was great. Where's the comedy to be gleaned from that?! We watched a film, wandered around the garden and played some Wii games, and it was great to just have some very nice company. I even cooked the tea for us all (even if it was only pasta and chicken), how domesticated am I? Such a grown-up, sane, normal human being thing to do, even if we did arrange beforehand to have a dedicated moment put aside for trading some Pokémon.

I feel a bit like the writers of the IT Crowd now – I've run out of amusing ideas. Oh snap, I went there! Etc. After my last epic monstrosipost took a lot out of me, I'm not really sure how to go on. Whining about my going out fears was supposed to be the nuclear option, and I wasted it the second I saw a particularly frightening looking gerbil. Metaphorically speaking. Maybe this is a post-apocalyptic blog now, to stretch that analogy well beyond any reasonable sort of breaking point?

The town mouse and the country mouse

I think that was some kind of children's book, but I can't remember the moral of that story. Didn't the country mouse get eaten by cats at... now WHY do I want to say at a mouse strip club? What kind of warped childhood did I have to conjure that mental image?! Maybe the moral of the story there is that mice/country-folk/strip club patrons are stupid? Hit me up if you know what I'm talking about... or I suppose I could wiki it. But more fun to beg for comments instead.

The problems that face me day to day are quite different from normal M.E. sufferers mainly because we live out here in the middle of the country. When I was growing up we lived in a suburban wasteland, sprawling rows and patterns of identikit houses with nothing in between and the only way to do anything was to get on the train to Glasgow. Not long after I finished my exams and dropped out of school we moved house, into much more of a traditional town – voted the most generic in Britain, in fact, so that's one aspect of my experience that should be identifiable with! It brought its own issues with it, mainly being that with my new health levels I was unable to get out to make any new friends to replace the ones I'd lost from school, and I've more or less been on my own since.

The next step though, about 5 or so years ago (I've lost count), was moving out to the country. It was only half an hour down the road, but for an agoraphobic.. the move itself wasn't nice. Maybe one day I'll do a deep dark entry about it, but to keep myself sane for just now I'll leave it as just saying it was very, very tough, and has taken me a long time to get over. Having your entire safe zone evaporate on you and forcing you to make any sort of trek out into the unknown to try and set up a new one is not something I'd be in a rush to do again, but then I'd hope that where I am mentally now would let me be a lot more equipped to deal with it.

So in a piece about country life, I'm onto my 4^th paragraph and that's us only just filled in on the background to it. In some ways, things have been really good here. I love that I can look out the window and see deer, birds, that last night when I was particularly wiped out I could just sit and watch a wild baby rabbit chewing on a leaf for long enough to let my frantic jumbled mess of half-ideas and theories about pokémon maths melt away. The quiet and tranquillity has been good for me, with no background noise (both literally and metaphorically!) to impose itself on the tasks I've managed to come a long long way with all my other anxieties and problems that sadly tend to come as standard with the set of conditions I've got. The big one though, the one that's standing between me and whatever could pass for an attempt at 'normality', is going out.

So far most of the people who have admitted to reading this have found it through connections to the M.E., so might not be familiar with some of what agoraphobia actually involves. As well as the regular 'not going out' thing, other aspects to it involve people coming into your own space, and over the years I've struggled with that immensely. Phone calls, people coming to the door, workmen/window cleaners/gas man, all add to the wonderful package to come and find you even when you're curled up in a ball hiding from the world wishing it would go away. Literally hiding from a ringing telephone as if it can see you when your friends and peers are off getting drunk and partying at uni isn't a particularly nice way to live your life, and I'm very grateful and proud that I've managed to almost totally overcome that aspect of the condition.

We recently had a massive, multi-month project going on in our house when we had building work going on on the conservatory, and despite everyone secretly fearing the worst and preparing contingency plans to try and get me through it, it passed without a hitch. I can handle people coming to the house, either planned or unexpectedly, socialise with friends of the family, keep appointments with doctors and OTs. I can even go for walks on the moor (and in the rain), as far as my physical constraints will allow me. I've come a long long way with that side of it, and maybe I should take more chances like this to look back at how things were and be grateful that I've cut the number of limiting factors on my life down from however many there were to just the one or two now. But context is everything, and what I find now looking back at my time living in a town is that I don't remember how bad it was having the busyness and noise imposing on my ability to step back and recharge, and instead just pine for the time when it was within my grasp to go for an eye test, grab a McFlurry, even (at a push, admittedly) making it to the cinema.

I suppose that, like in so many other ways, I'm very lucky to have been born into this digital age, since so much of what I need can now be taken care of via the internet. I don't have to miss out on the newest films and games with sites like Amazon that deliver to my home, and I can still stay in the loop in terms of discussing the football and pop culture happenings via forums and messenger services. But its the simple things that can't be substituted that make this system fall down.

About 18 months ago, I somehow managed to trip over nothing in an empty room and broke/tore something in my foot. I couldn't walk for quite some time, but it was impossible to get it properly seen to – I'll probably get an x-ray on it later in life to discover that it was broken and never properly reset. I've had blocked ears and had to try and keep hold of my sanity for weeks or months with no hearing while I wait for the waiting list for home doctor visits for non-urgent procedures to slowly trickle down. When my general anxiety was still bad, I was terrified that I was going to break my glasses and I'd be effectively blind unless I made it out to the opticians to get new ones. It's still pretty restrictive being stuck in like this, because the last lingering thread that won't go away is the ability to go out in the car.

There's a tiny village a mile down the road, and on a good day, I can manage that. I've been to vote, there's a village shop that I can go to to stock up on Pringles and Nuts magazines, and there's a recycling bank where I can go when I want to feel good about myself saving the earth. The next step, the one that could make so much of my boredom and loneliness go away, is a decent sized little town... 6 miles away.

Six miles. There are bridges and tunnels longer than that, but its beyond my limit. Tunnels in Norway where the entire distance through them is longer than I can manage out in the car. 12 minutes, if we go slowly enough along the road to admire the scenery. 3 and a half songs, I couldn't even finish listening to Pixie Lott's greatest hits before I'd arrived, but... its beyond me.

I was making so much progress, too, from the start of the year I could barely manage anything. Now, I've managed more than halfway there. I can quite comfortably do maybe the first third of it, jump in the car and make it down to a junction in the road without so much as a flutter. It seemed like it was all coming so easily, from nothing to what felt in those early days like everything, as if it was finally over and I was within touching distance of being free of it. We even worked out the distance to the nearest uni – all I have to be able to do is manage an extra mile a month, and I'd be able to enrol for classes next term. So easy, I almost forgot there was anything wrong in the first place.

One day, with the sun shining and the stars aligned, I made it as far as the garden centre on the outskirts of the town. Probably about 5 miles. It was the most I'd done, barring one disastrous attempt, since we moved here. And I just... couldn't breathe. Apparently its one thing getting there and back, but once you're there... you have to keep yourself together in that unsafe place, outside your comfort zone, and not only that, but prepare yourself mentally for the journey back. It was a horrible realisation, it all seemed so easy when I was taking the 10 minutes to get myself ready to face the trip out, but to keep myself together and conscious in another, unfamiliar place, and find the strength again to do it all again to get home was just... too much. I've had to try and come to terms with that since then, the reason why my progress has stalled was the reason that it needed worked on in the first place.

To most people, getting somewhere and back are just the bookends on an experience. They're the unnoticed, blank spaces in the schedule, you write off an hour's travel time to get where you need to be. To me, they're poisonous, oozing. They cover and coat anything in between them, going beyond just ruining the day out, but leeching everything that's good and fun and worthwhile out of it. The most beautiful experience, the most fulfilling, rewarding, eye-opening, it wouldn't just be bookended by a spot of discomfort, it'd have everything good ripped out of it and spoiled, degrading my achievements and my experiences to just the horrible recharging gap in the middle, the time where I had to try and keep myself together long enough to find the strength to come back home again.

I don't know how I'm going to get past this. I don't know how to solve a problem that trying harder at or putting more effort in can't fix. So far it seems that the best hope lies in expanding my safe zone, getting familiar with the road and eventually the town, letting me feel free to move about within it as I please and once the net gets wide enough, my quality of life should get a big increase. It's only 6 miles. The other end of that tunnel... and I shouldn't complain that I've come far enough to see that light, if not quite reach it.

I'm sorry for the length of this entry. I don't expect anyone to sit through it, but if you do I would love to hear from you. Drop me a line on MSN or the comments. I'll buy you chocolate.

The (very) pointless adventures of David and Togepi!

A couple of entries back I mentioned that, for reasons unbeknown to me at the time, I had hatched a near-flawless Pokémon from an egg in one of my old Game Boy games, as opposed to the newer DS ones. Since you can transfer them over to the new generation its not really a problem, but at every single stage of this so far it seems to have thrown up yet another issue to further complicate my already scrambled existence with utter, utter pointlessness. First off, WHAT on earth possessed me to hatch eggs on my Game Boy instead of the DS? Lesson one: nostalgia is painful, ignore it. Lesson two: once you've invested THAT much time and effort into something, however pointless, you have to see it through just on general principle, yes?

First off, instead of happily plugging the game into my DS and transferring it to the new games nice and simply, I decided it might be fun to properly train it 'old-school', before letting it loose competitively on the new, wi-fi, touch-screen modern hotness. Who says there's no room for romance in, erm... Pokémon? All I had to do was spend a day or so working out what in-game berries to feed it.

Problem 1 quickly reared its head: I didn't have any of those berries. So over the course of a couple of nights I got hold of one, grew it, replanted it, until I had enough to go around nicely. Of course, a slight miscalculation in my permanently sleepy state (planting 2 = twice as many) somehow meant that one morning when I woke up to find that I had over 60 of this virtual berry, far more than I could ever find a use for. Maybe I should take up virtual jam-making, although knowing my luck with this whole project so far I'd probably end up living in a shipping crate with only a retro Game Boy and a magic bean to my name.

Next I had to figure out how to make tasty treats for my precious Pokémon. Maybe this was the stage that I should have taken a step back and properly surveyed the utter, utter pointlessness of what I was doing, but for some strange reason it made perfect sense to do so at the time. I worked out that if I made purposely average treats with one of my 60 berries, it would raise its stats in 3 areas at once at half the speed – a net gain! However, with the condition stat stored as an 8-bit integer, it would max at 255, and my treats were regularly coming out at level 23 – if I could just play the treat-making minigame flawlessly twice to boost it to level 24, then it would perfectly add up to a nice, round 255 in 11 treats, saving time and... well, actually if I have to replay the minigame hundreds of times to get it to come out perfectly its not really saving any time is it? But still, it makes perfect sense in my head and I've worked it all out on my own, using my superior intellect and maths reasoning to streamline the training of my virtual creature. I'm being productive!

The next step was actually applying it. Of course, it failed to work. For some reason, instead of reaching 255, it stopped somewhere in the middle. It told me that Togepi didn't like my treats. I failed to account for this in my pokémaths. Thus rendering most of the adventure to date and previous days work pointless. Still, I've got a stack of treats saved from when I last played in 2007, so I just used them instead. It has literally only just hit me that I should have used them in the first place.

Change of plan needed then, and I dusted off one of my other old games and discovered that a very useful move tutor could be traded over from that one, that would really help move things along. The only minor flaw being that I'd need to find another old Game Boy from somewhere to trade with, but my brother used to play too so his will still be about. Amazingly, considering that this could have added another layer of complexity to the proceedings, it didn't and he found it in record time! There was only one minor flaw... the wireless adaptor. A small, grey piece of plastic designed to plug into an obsolete console, that had become separated from said console at some unknown point in the last 5 or so years. I've invested too much into this now to stop though, so on with the search!

While examining the unopened boxes from our house move (4 years ago), I came across the following items:

• a box of wooden railway toys “for passing onto my future kids”

• a box full of 7 year old love letters (as in, from 7 years ago, not from when I was 7)

• a VHS tape of a 2006 wrestling pay-per-view

• a strip poker set, unopened

• a watch

• another box full of cuddly toys

• two full ring binders of GCSE physics and chemistry notes

• approximately 400 obsolete hard drives

• a broken remote control helicopter

• a pair of thumb-handcuffs

• and a partridge in a pear tree.

When I was just about ready to start burning things, I called in my brother for help... and he promptly found it in his own room. In the same box as he found his Game Boy. Maybe I should have started by looking there.

So that's the adventure to date, still nowhere near finished but I think you'll agree, after investing THIS much in it I surely need to see the project through now. All I need to do is trade that item over, and then the minor issue of beating a section of the game 32 times in order to unlock another special move to teach it. But I'm sure that will just fly by.

In other news, my t shirt and socks are co-ordinated today!