Blue Saturday

xxp right, and whereas most Sundays you only need to ruminate on one past week and dread one future week at a time, for this bonus Sunday you get to do it for entire years or lifetimes at a time

to state the obvious, fuck that noise

un-xxp Muppets otm, good luck darragh

xp

wasnae sure if that was about The Sound of Music or Ireland for a second there

ah sweet, the Herzog verzh of Bad Lieutenant's on tonight

Well i think my background in one feeds my trepidation twards t'other

APS in all seriousness all the best but cbt bedamned that is intolerable behaviour imo and i dont care what else

xp watched that three times this year with unsuspecting compadres, reaction mixed but who cares rite

tbh in case i sounded saintly and put-upon i was trying a little to get the knife in back, but obv it didn't really work because who's the one who made the decision and who's the one who has other options now? right right

haven't seen BL, not sure i'm in quite the place today buuut

today seems apt, i am gonna nurture my inner Bad Lieutenant in 2014

also hell, it's not like fault mostly ever lies just one way, but rubbish behaviour is still rubbish behaviour

oh it's on after my bedtime, not that that really means anything in this day and age. some other time

further to today as Sunday-of-the-year, ought to be doing the work I didn't do last year because I was in Friday-of-the-year mode, "eh I can catch up on all this over the break and come back fresh" (hah)

on the other hand I have about 6000 unplayed games after the Steam winter sale, which might be a more expansive head-filler, more able to block up all the cracks that unwanted thoughts creep through

Jesus christ tho what an ass

Exams start on 6th btw but ive projects due too

I'd forgotten what a sadistic trick the post-Christmas exam is

darragh I have been enjoying the pictures on this property ad from your fine isle, a couple of them seem to indicate a slightly unusual living arrangement: http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=447453

HNY in orbit

Argh, sorry to hear that, Spacecadet. In my experience, "talking after the fact" really isn't helpful for understanding what went wrong, and should be avoided on any level except "here are your things, pls can have my things" until possibly a year after the breakup. At least. There's that whole "but I neeeeeed clooooosure thing!!!!" which never really is, and is often only a chance to re-open stuff that was starting to heal.

However, I just kinda have to say... um, mileage may vary, but isn't "new ladyfriend" etc kind of stuff that really should wait until *after* you have definitely completely stopped living together? I mean, it sucks when you get stuck living together months after the breakup, but really. I don't know who initiated the breakup, but in my world, bringing a third party into that kind of awful situation is bad news all round, and reflects really badly on the person bringing a third person into an already awful situation. Sorry, just my 2p. I don't know your situation, but I would not be OK with that.

Not feeling very celebratory myself at the mo for various reasons, but yeah. My life is a month of Sundays right now, so what's one more.

At least there's coffee.

Take care BB. I know you're right, as i.o. was right several months ago too, and I am a terrible one for not doing the things I ought to. I tend to get carried away with useful thoughts of positive steps and build up an impossible fantasy of how I'll suddenly start doing all these amazing things and also, oh, effectively become someone else entirely, and then I file it all away in the "so not gonna happen" part of my brain, and go back to doing everything exactly like before.

I wished I could've sent you the sea I was reluctantly staying near over Christmas. Only Dorset but I saw a (small) sea arch (from a great distance) and thought of you.

At least there are reduced-to-clear Polish cherry jaffa cakes.

I don't want you to be someone else entirely, would miss the current you tbh. Your living sitch is basically a cancer tho. Get shut of him.

cherry jaffa cakes is a pretty decent consolation.

also what BB and io said re: washing that man right out of yr hair

In best Auntie Orbit style, pls consider that I have stroked your hair and called you "sweetie" and given you a speech about how things get warped from living w unhappiness and that lots of the perceptions that come from those times aren't the kind of "real" you want to hold onto. I am of course totally unqualified to dispense lyfe advice but that's never stopped me before so onward 2014.

(Dorset/hair-washing threads converge in sudden need to hear "Sheela-Na-Gig" by PJ Harvey, loud, on repeat)

A sea arch! Awesomeness! I'm so jealous.

Echoing what IO said: I don't want you to become a new person! How disorienting would that be! I want you to stay your own thoughtful self. But "your own thoughtful self in a non poisonous situation" would be a far preferable option. It's tough to get up the courage to do this huge revamp-your-life type decision. It seems like an almost impossible set of individual impossible things that together are in-the-realm-of-fantasy to overcome them. But, y'know, changing one little thing at a time is in the realm of scary-but-not-total-fantasy. And from experience, I know that once you have surmounted the seemingly insurmountable things, it's so much better on the other side, that you will say to yourself "why the hell didn't I do that thing months/years ago, it looks so easy from this side!" But, you do things when you are ready to do them, and not before.

(Says a woman who spent 4 fucking months getting up the courage to ring the boiler engineers, during the worst winter of 100 years or whatever, because: crippling social anxiety. So who am I to talk about not living in impossible situations that are making things worse? But really, things got so much better after I rang the boiler people and they sent someone, that I could not believe it had taken me so long and so much pain (literal pain, of freezing showers in February!) to do it. Except, yeah, I can still see the whole reasoning of why I couldn't. And though I can laugh at it now, the actual crazy-logic, wow, winter is still cold and my flat still has damp, but it is so much better with a boiler!)

But yeah. Sea arches. I am also being jealous of cherry jaffa cakes but then I just remembered that I have ginger biscuits. Oh yeah. Chocolate covered stem gingers.

Are those Sainsburys Taste the Difference, because they are the best

Sainsburys Taste the Difference all butter Belgian Dark Chocolate Coated Stem Ginger Cookies, oh yes! The actual gold standard of chocolate covered ginger biscuits.

Huh, I'm the only person in my department in work (there was supposed to be one other person today but they're off sick; my boss is working, but from home). Head so full of useless thoughts and no distractions. Well, y'know, except the vague obligation of looking at some work tasks I don't really feel capable of understanding.

Good practice for how it'll be at home if I get him to leave, I suppose. There is contemplatively wistful techno on headphones for either situation.

Nobody round here either ive just nipped into an empty office for a nap cye in forty odd

IIRC, this time of year is good for all those tasks that are too boring to do at any other point. Alphabetising the clutter of manuals that hang round the office filling up bookshelves. Re-indexing tables. Updating schematics and the outdated instruction manuals/documentation that no one ever reads but they give the new people when they arrive.

Feeling quite astonished because I actually seem to have defused resolved a potentially rather nasty situation with new neighbours in a completely friendly and super-positive way. I'm not sure when I acquired social skills, but it seems to have worked. Also, they come across as actual Good Ppl which is such a relief after the last lot. (It was totally Not Their Fault; estate agents are lying bastards.)

Spacecadet, I'm sure this has crossed your mind many times, but I'm going to stand on the shoulder where the good angel usually resides: if you cannot "get" him to leave, it is an intensely freeing thing to pack up your belongings and remove them and yourself. Yes, it sucks when it feels like "they get to keep your flat" but OTOH, you will then be living in a new flat without old memories and old pain, where you are free to indulge wistful techno only because you want to.

i begin to see it as a mission to re-occupy crevices of time in the edifice of wage slavery

the nature of these slices of time circumscribes the uses to which they can be put - a para of Marx here, a Taoist epigram there, football tactics, ILX just to plug in to some idea of a world outside this institution

It's now proper January and I should be updating my CV and starting to look at finding another job but I just can't face it, and an already apocalyptic family situation has just exploded (again) and really. At what point are you just allowed to say "fuck this world" and turn your back on it permanently?

Sorry, I am having a serious failing in the "keeping it positive" circuit right now.

:(

i think turning your back permanently shd always be around as a viable option. i just personally keep finding the struggle is worthwhile, just about.

i'm sticking this post of Matt's here because i just found it and i want to come back and think long on it later and maybe even it deserves its own thread but for now just a reminder to think about it

i think that social power is kind of like this free radical rn and it's harder than ever to talk about because it's so decentralized and maybe not as officially directed along gender pathways as it used to be, but it's still structuring desire and our bodies and stretching young people too far (abuse) and generally doing what it does to sustain itself more than ever. feel like it can be generally difficult for someone who has been stretched too far to relate to someone who hasn't, like i feel hyper-aware of/freaked out by power dynamics in the smallest social moments you can possibly measure while my partner generally moves between places along that spectrum with what seems to be minimal effort and cognitive dissonance. he doesn't seem to feel the kind of existential dread i do whenever i locate myself in a social moment.

i think where i see a potential issue with polly's response is that accepting flaws, specifically the poisonous stuff, shouldn't be conflated with falling back down into that behavior and using it again as a point of power, i.e. this is just me you'll just have to accept who i am, and if you're with someone who is also prone to codependency, there you are. there's something weird, almost out-of-body about locating the place deep within your neural pathways or wherever where the impulse to blame and judge just sort of bloom out of, this structure that makes up your desire and a lot of other habitual parts of you, and then just like trying to undo it by letting it happen in a contained sort of way, watching it from the outside and not being "in" it. i find myself being quiet a lot of the time, trying not to feel anything but slightly disoriented about the fact that i have this wiring that i don't want, and then like, giving myself gentle pets and soothing talk and shit like that.

― From the Album No Baby for You! (Matt P), Friday, 3 January 2014 22:47 (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because i guess i am in this nexus now between feeling lumpen and asocial and also being stuck in this set of real life shit that needs to be done just to make tomorrow and tomorrow happen (and lol at me saying this whilst side-stepping chores for a few minutes) and being aware of at least the possibilities of taking steps to make my life more like i want it but running up against what seem to be hard social constraints that are also tied in with hard personal constraints that are also, i don't know, dust bunnies of the mind

not all of which is related to what Matt says there but lots of it is in lots of ways and i'm obfuscating partly out of character and partly out of not being sure exactly what i'm thinking. i guess in short i'm finally coming round to the idea that i'm a single person and i'm fairly sure that i'd like to start (dating?) i dunno i don't have comfortable words really - seeing somebody, having some kind of romantic or sexual relationship where i'm using a pretty broad definition of the words romantic or sexual; but these feelings and ideas bring up all sorts of complicated shit for me - not least of which is that it feels kinda wrong to want those things in the abstract, like there shd be a person to attach those feelings too before i just go hunting for a companion, but recognizing that's not necessarily true

and then all the recognition of my past and current failings and that kind of self-criticism about what do i even have of worth to offer somebody, and that creep into an economic-esque language of interaction that feels wrong to me too, plus the recognition of my own internal judgements, even the ones i don't want to own, "this wiring that i don't want"

p-r-e-v-a-r-i-c-a-t-i-o-n

overthinking everythink and not trusting people who tell us not to overthink

to some extent this internal audit is good, like coming back to life, coming out of a worse way of being, but on a ton of other levels there's just frustration and maybe the fear of getting swallowed by my own navel.

thoughts, oh boy

Where is that quote from? I don't think I understand it out of context. Though the situations it describes sound kind of familiar.

About the "thinking you want to start dating but feel bad about these feelings without someone to attach them to" thing... oh, sweetie, don't feel bad about that. That's just deep level human wiring of some kind. That most people (well, except aromantics, so not all, obviously) do feel a loneliness, a "skin hunger", a desire for a partner of some kind, even without the stimulus of another human being to wrap those feelings round. It's a very fundamental craving on an instinct level, it's how most humans work, how evolution or whatever binds together what is essentially a social animal.

Although it's ideal that one should find a person one mutually likes, and then negotiate a relationship with them - in many ways it's worse when you have a person onto whom you have projected all your knotty tangle of desire and skin hunger and loneliness and instinct-level stuff, because then they have to live with the weight of it.

Me, I've pulled totally back into my shell. I'm sick of getting hurt by fools who don't understand what I'm asking for, even when I ask for it directly, so they just project their whole knotty-tangle onto me. I'm feeling kinda "done" with humanity right now, and want to just lock myself in my flat until the money runs out, so I probably shouldn't even try to give advice. But I'm not even giving advice, I'm just saying, I'm here, and I'm listening, even when I don't understand.

Matt's quote is from the dating thread and related to stuff about social power relationships and the way they channel desire, the negotiations between two people within and without a relationship, and worse i guess the unspoken negotiations, the will to shape another person to fit our own desires even at an unconscious or - i think? - conscious but rejected-by-ourselves level. i'm speaking for somebody else here so all i'm talking about is the recognitions it sparked in me, not claiming this is what he meant at all or absolutely.

and in broad general terms we don't think about this stuff so much when we're younger. and that has a lot of negative effects, because we don't examine our conduct and motivations so much, we don't express our desires and therefore maybe we don't fully understand our desires, we take other people for granted, this is all part of immaturity and it's ok as long as you can grow beyond it. and the up-side is for many people that relationships can form in this magical glow of spontaneity that may or mayn't be real but looks a lot like romantic fiction and carries the same (sometime) happy glow.

but as you get older ime that spontaneity becomes a lot less possible, and THIS IS NOT A BAD THING i don't think, but it's sometimes a regretful thing because it's possible to mistake that spontaneity for the only authentic kind of emotional attachment, and if you get very hung up on that idea i think it might prevent you from moving past immaturity, but there are down-sides because practically it just becomes more difficult to meet emotionally available people who are age-appropriate or at a similar place instead of expressing/understanding their own desires. at the same time that there's more possibility to be honest with yourself and others there are just less people accessible.

and so i find myself thinking more about these processes which is very positive i think, but in analyzing my own desire i find these "wired" parts of me - libido, whatever - that is v. hard to reprogram or to lie to. i go to a site like OkCupid and think about the analogies with shopping and it makes me wanna never get into the searching-for-a-date game but at the same time i recognize that there aren't many (any) real life social spaces for people my age to appropriately use for meeting potential partners

i'm writing in the spirit of enquiry, not anguish, and i'm trying not to generalize too much from my own specific situation/experience. but it feels, on the whole, positive that i can start to articulate this stuff to myself and then that positivity alternates with frustration at the absence of practical possibilities and some darker stuff at "how do we honestly negotiate our (attractiveness) value to other people at the same time as we're evaluating other people's (superficial) attractiveness to us?"

for one part of this, really i don't think i'm looking for the next great love of my life right now, it wd be nice to have some low seriousness dates, but that just seems way less possible at 45 than it did at 25 (had i been single at 25)

(I think that might be from a 77 thread?)

in that case oops see y'all in 30 days

ach god it is, never think to check. if anybody has a problem with me pasting that here then please get a mod to remove it. sorry.

Sorry, feel like a snitch now, but I was searching for the context because I was interested in the conversation, it looked thoughtful and good, and it didn't turn up on a search, coz, duh, I am not on 77. Sorry again.

nah it's a good job you pointed it out

ime it's a v positive thing that you're hitting this thoughtzone/space/whatever NV

i'd veer towards less 'taking on agency for the object of my desires' (such object to exist or otherwise at this stage) obv imma say yr overthinking it, but that's ok you'll obv discount that as you see fit (as you note)

no experience of yr situation, deeply mistrustful of okc-type market, glibly certain that there exists more opportunity to meet people otherwise than going down that route, glibly unable to suggest what those opportunities are

g'luck

now if you'll pardon me this half-adder won't mis-explain itself in 2 hours

people say "go out to clubs or other social activities to meet more people" which yes fine BUT imo you're supposed to go to those things cos you're interested in what they're about, not to pursue yr libidinousness agenda

to what extent is that even true, i wondered

it doesn't really matter is the obv answer i guess. i wd suggest to you tho that yr lack of immediate alternatives to OKC - which, don't get me wrong, seems pretty unuseful to me - makes some kind of point

hey.....there's always work amirite

one of the things my new-found self awareness has picked up is how little eye contact i make with people at work and i get on reasonably well with almost all of them.

Noodles, here is a comic you may find relevant to your interests:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masonicboomk8/10908943173/in/photostream/

The thing is, it's commonly told to older people of all genders, "take a class or join a club to meet people" and yes, the ideas of "interested in these things" and "meeting people" are inherent in the incentives for many if not most of the people who do such activities. The only important things to remember are: 1) "meeting people" involves many different kinds of relationships, not all of them romantic/sexual and 2) even "wants to meet someone for dating/romance/companionships" is not always synonymous with "wants to meet you for dating/romance/companionship".

Number 2 is the one that really hurts, but it also happens on market-ised dating malls like OKC, too.

that is all v. otm and was definitely in my thoughts even when i didn't recognise it :)

yeah, it's the notion of having an ulterior motive for doing stuff that bugs me, i don't wanna have an ulterior motive, i go to Philosophy Club cos i am interested in Philosophy, sometimes people are chatty and interesting there and sometimes not. what i really want is Date Club except for olds like me who do not belong in regular noisy frenetic society

Yeah, I kinda want that too. But for saucy lesbians and genderqueer persons. Which is far too specific an ask, and even if I could, it would probably turn into a geriatric DOMO in 30 seconds flat, and ugh.

What is the opposite of ulterior? Overt? I think overt motives are fine. It's covering it all up with ulterior-ness which makes it icky, not the motives in the first place.

singing "We Want Rum" in my head to the Andrew WK tune, failing that wd settle for a few hours sit-down time with FM2014, or a walk in the sunshine, or a nap and a movie not necessarily in that order or indeed consecutively, or i dunno just not work, i'm full of good will and good intentions it's just come on, this is far from rad