Blue Saturday

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 Updating schematics and the outdated instruction manuals/documentation that no one ever reads but they give the new people when they arrive.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

i need to make a game of this in my head

stealth employee

actually just some proper for real coffee might do the job, or hallucinogens

Monday the 13th is the real evil here. I'll put the percolatorix on, make some hallucinogen-grade coffee for you. Send it down the Interpipes 2 U.

Challenge yrself to pass for motivated just for the craic

have reached warp factor "adequately engaged"

Im in my last week here and have an exam on thurs my inner scotty is locked in the engine room with two pints of bells and ten broons annuals

trying to forget there's more to life than completing NVQ modules and monitoring staff absence

noodle vague questionnaires

[Removed Illegal Image]

lolz

clownish

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

― not a player-hater i just hate a lot (a passing spacecadet), Wednesday, January 1, 2014 3:13 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, this started out as a pretty OK Saturday afternoon, with a nice walk down to Pollards Hill, and a great view past Croydon to the North Downs.

And it has just turned into the bluest Saturday and I don't even know how to get it back.

NV, do you remember a very long time ago, when I was having a shit day at the bottom of an ILX clusterfuck, and I can't remember the exact words you used, but you told me something like, "why do you get so upset by what people say about you on ILX? No one on the internet really knows anything about each other, it cartoonifies and really, fuck whatever a cartoon character thinks about you." or words to that effect.

That was really wise advice, though it took me forever to understand it. I wish I listened to it more. But the problem is, when people have drawn a cartoon monster around your head, and then start acting as if that monster was real, and that monster was *you*, they start reading every damn thing you say as if you were that cartoon monster. It really doesn't matter how you act, if you act nice or mean or funny or intelligent, or some just-human combination of the above; if people are determined to see a cartoon monster instead of you, all they are going to see is the monster. I know it's not a judgement on me, as you said to me before. It's a judgement on a cartoon monster. But that doesn't stop it from hurting if you are already predisposed to see yourself as a monster. Insults only hurt if you secretly believe that they are true.

OK, this doesn't seem to be doing me any good. But I just wanted to say that those were kind and wise words, and I don't know that I ever thanked you for them. But I'm doing that now. Thanks.

So after the complete emotional blindsiding of yesterday, today I seem to have to have come down with some illness and wondering if that sudden emotional vulnerability was down to incipient illness and low body = low mood, rather than ILX being any more cruel than usual. (I've come to view ILX like weather, there is always someone or other prepared to be cruel, it's a question of whether I feel strong enough to cope with/ignore it.)

Sometimes I get this delusion where I think there's some secret code whereby if you crack it, and say the right things and display the right emotions, you can access that level of mutual support and understanding and acceptance that many, many people on ILX (and elsewhere) seem willing to show and exchange with one another. But... there is no secret code. There is no access level. It's not there are some people inside and some people outside, it's that there is no inside/outside. Some people can ask for sympathy and receive it, and some people cannot. It's just another of life's brutal unfairnesses, which is simply to be accepted, rather than puzzled over and worked out.

A good weekend to anyone that wishes my wishes for one.

I would suggest...logging out. its just a messageboard.

When people say to me "it's just a messageboard" or "it's just a phone" or "it's just a community of people" or other things, that indicates to me that they do not understand the nature of humans, or the nature of human communications.

If the problem is disconnection and alienation (and yes, loneliness and feeling intensely misunderstood) then switching off merely the *source* of communication is not going to make those problems go away. It may in fact make those feelings worse, since all communication (including those that might relieve those feelings) is now gone.

But, thanks for trying to be helpful.

ilx is too big and unwieldy to be consistent. it's the law of the jungle, like you learn in any werner herzog movie. no matter how warm and fuzzy you think the grizzly bears are, at the end of the day humans are nothing more than bear food. don't overanalyze it.

I suppose you're right, GB. It's naive of me to be an optimist. Sometimes all of us play the human, sometimes all of us play the bear, I guess.

But now I am laughing at the idea of grizzly bears posting to ILX and wondering how they get their massive paws on the keys and laughing, so thank you for the image!

I'm going to make a goats cheese omelette now.

hey BB thanks for your thanks, it actually means more than you might think it shd, coming from a cartoon :-)

i know i can't know the flavour of your disconnection and alienation, but i think i know pretty well how those things feel. and i hope you can remind yrself sometimes that the you that "secretly believes" insults levelled against you are true is in many ways not you, but a voice from outside that we learn to let in and make home and mistake four ourself

i dunno dude. some people just say horrible shit sometimes cos it's easy and life-affirming. not everybody feels that way, and most people don't feel that way themselves most of the time. i wish i had some pat bullshit Facebook meme to end this with a hug and send you on your way but i don't. so i just wanna wish you a big internet-distanced hug and remind you of all the strength that you do have inside yrself and hope that you can be yrself and keep on grooving and find your path

NV, you are a beautiful human being - and this is one of those things that makes you such an excellent creature: the willingness to admit that you cannot understand the flavour of a person's pain, yet, still, the acknowledgement that the pain is there, and express empathy with it. Bear hugs (but not grizzly bear hugs because mind those paws) received, and returned with gratitude.

Captain Awkward has a great phrase for that part of you that secretly believes the internalised insults are true - they call it Jerkbrain. It's doubly disconcerting to see jerkbrain statements coming from the mouth of another person. But of course, that's how it works. Those jerkbrain statements came from outside to start with. When I start trying to explain and justify my very existence, instead of just saying "thanks for your opinion, good day to you" it's wrestling with a shadow self that happens to be wearing someone else's face as a mask.

Right. Now I need to hoover and clean the house and prepare another place to sit because tomorrow I'm having a visit from one of my favourite people in the whole world so I should try to tame the dust.

Thanks for the hugs, NV, and thanks again for the advice and the general awesomeness.

The endless minuet of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed together by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into streets, offices, factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no apparent reason. Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Innocent and good-natured crowds? What a laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on every side, clumsy and embarrassed in the enemy's territory, far, very far from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their eyes.

me irl