Blue Saturday

I spent most of yesterday evening in the pub, I didn't drink but nor did I talk to anyone. It was shit.

i can imagine.

don't get me wrong there's a ton of good things about not drinking, and much as i love drinking for me it is half nihilism in its purest form and i nihilism i don't want to embrace right now, and many of the people i like to talk to in the pub are interesting and amusing in their own right but come on

it's a bit scary how much of our society's recreational opportunity is built around it. it's not great when yr own brain's recreational imagination is locked onto it

also champions of sobriety still mostly make my inner street urchin want to climb into the nearest bottle of rum

That's what always did for it, for me. The whole kind of "cheerleaders of sobriety" thing, when people took that attitude around me, my inner contrarian would just dig in her heels and down a load of bouze just to prove I could. (But I've managed to turn that attitude round to sic it on itself, when people tell me "you'll never stay clean or sober or temperate without doing AA and giving up bouze FOREVER!!!!" I just turn around and say "fucking watch me." Inner contrarians can be useful when directed in other directions.)

yeah i seem to have formed an uneasy alliance with mine "i will stop on my own terms cheers and not yours"

I think in the end, for a certain kind of brain, that's the only useful attitude to take.

(Me, I am so fucking bored of this all right now. I'm bored of being unwell. I'm bored of being unemployed. I should be doing something, I should be composing symphonies or writing novels or drawing comic books, and instead I'm just back at this "yay, you got out of bed today and took a shower, gold star for you!" and it's like, come *on*, am I 6? Why am I back here?)

i know :(

and like i said maybe i (or you) end up back here a lot cos a lot of what makes us feel this way is real and is outside us and near impossible to control

which makes the things you have made that were worthwhile that much more worth celebrating, and they also remind me that i could do it again

sailed out of sight of land today, looking for realness, realness lost or never really real

touch of fingers touch of lips touch of touch

a few bleak psychedelic moments into the buffeting wind along George Street with the concrete of the multistorey phazing in and out of the concrete of the sky, kinda glimpsing real but the reason i didn't wear glasses for so long - they get in the way, they screen the world out, they goldfish me in

take them off everything's still flat and not quite there, just blurrier

the wrong day to be too full of books and not quite here

the reason Hunger Games made feel so tense and sad, i guess - all dystopias look like documentaries to me

Retreat into surrealness, it's much better here.

i just had a pleasant morning doing Braille with a student and talking about Dungeons and Dragons so y'know there are compensations

http://www.benziger.org/articlesIng/?p=32

shiny diamonds of recognition in my brain

yep yep! thank you for the link

but, how can a person find the thing which does not make them feel like this? what if that thing is not something that allows them to survive? what if they don't even have that thing? and all the other predictable questions

(I agreed to go out tonight and am wondering what I've let myself in for. It's been a while. "Social anxiety" I guess though I'm not sure it's exactly social anxiety. I've got my comfy nest where I don't have to try to make faltering stupid boring conversational noises which fall out of my mouth in the wrong order and where I don't have to be constantly reminded of what other people see when they see me.)

i'm still digesting the Benziger/PASS stuff, trying to decide what's wishful thinking and what might be science-ish; sometimes these things give me a model for thinking about what's wrong, even if they don't help much at finding ways to improve the situation. i guess there's alw

interrupts typing cos the ice cream van came. resumes thought now we all have ice creams

ays something to be learned about little things we can do or avoid to make the work world a shade less worse.

going out is usually worse in anticipation, right? sure things will be fun when you're out there. judicious application of gin is indicated for social anxiety disorder.

Aw, I hope you have an OK time, Spacecadet. Social anxiety and "going out", yeah, bad combination. I find I'm better if I make myself a little comfortable nest while I'm out - a booth in a pub or a particular seat at a party - and not leave it, so that I feel safe and have a space to retreat to, even "out".

I am supposed to be going out tonight, but my sodding heel is still not OK. Like, it's fine to walk up to the high street and back, but just knowing it would not hold out on the loooong bus-train-walk trip and back I would have to make, and it's likely to be a "standing around" party which I'm not physically up to (and scared I'd damage myself if I got drunk enough not to remember the injury). And then I just start thinking "wow, parties are so scary, and I like all these people *LOTS AND LOTS* and if I could sit down with all of them and chat to them individually one at a time, for maybe 20 minutes tops, that'd be great. But all at once, in a party, while feeling in significant pain, this is not a bright idea. :(

I'm going out to have dinner and watch a too-long film (NB not a date, or at least if it is a date then many hilariously wrong assumptions have been made - but no, it is not a date)

so I may have to weigh up the application of gin vs the importance of not needing to walk out and look for the cinema toilets more than once (not at all is best but I figure once is the socially acceptable maximum)

why are films so long, why? but at least they remove the need for conversation

sorry about your foot and the party scariness, BB

i like a long film if the longness is part of the vibe but if its just a 90 minute idea that got out of hand it annoys me. on the other hand, if you're in the cinema then the lack of conversation removes the need for a swift drink, as you say, and then at least after there is something obvious to talk about

Ooh, going to a film is a really good idea. Because you're right, you don't need to talk. And when you do have to talk, hey, you can automatically talk about the film you have just seen.

Avoid too much gin, have fun on your not-a-date!

so much of my problem drinking was wrapped up in "how can i feel comfortable in this uncomfortable social situation" btw so my medical advice is compromised

xxp That's a good point but suggests this evening is the wrong way round as the talking portion of the evening is before the film and after the film I suspect there will be scuttling for our respective nightbuses

I might be a little bit ADHD (person who endlessly complains on this thread that they can't concentrate at work in inventing neurological reasons for same shocker) but I am highly suspicious of any films which are more than 100 minutes long, which basically means all films made in the past decade

BB I keep reading your display name as part of your post and thinking how you are going to be standing around at a small viking rave with a bad foot. Can you go to the party, say "oh I'd love to stand and chat but MY LEG", and plonk yourself down on a chair or other convenient leaning post and make people come to you? or is that not likely to be appropriate/successful?

BATH CHAIR

THANK YOU.

I firmly believe that nearly all movies should only be about 90 mins long. Going to see one today that is 2 hrs. 9 mins and while I want to see it a part of me is already thinking that that's just a little too long for me. I get so antsy!

like i said, if you are an art movie where nothing happens with looooooong slow shots of people staring moodily into the distance then the longer the better but if it's a genre flick then 2 hours = get tae fuck

LOL, no, I am not going to be DJing at a viking rave with an injured foot, but TBH that sounds like a v v BB thing to be doing.

It probably would actually be totally OK to plonk myself down on a chair at party and say "ow my FOOT (the gout, gout*)"

*it's not actually gout, but this is funny as it is a wine and cheese party

But the big problem is actually the travel. There is a significant walk at the other end which would mean either arriving totally bad tempered and in pain, or else taking 3 separate busses right across London on a Saturday night, and really, no.

Films over 100 minutes long = this is for DVD. I was just talking to my Mum about this, like, I can no longer stomach having to go to a theatre and sit through a film and not be able to pause it to go to the bathroom, or refresh my drink or get dinner or basic human needs. There's a reason long gigs have intervals between movements or support/main band. 90 minutes tops for how long I can hold my attention.

x-post YES YES bath chair!

Especially if accompanied by Charles Ryder lookylike to push it through Hackney. With an armadillo on a string. This would be excellent.

I can no longer stomach having to go to a theatre and sit through a film and not be able to pause it to go to the bathroom, or refresh my drink or get dinner or basic human needs.

YESSSS. Netflix has killed my ability to sit through a movie tbqfh. I'm going to need my drink refilled and a smoking environment and at least one bathroom break, AND it would be good if I could text and read twitter on my phone and pause the movie when I saw an interesting article.

DJ-ing while being held aloft on a Viking shield?

My apologies to movies and everything but my brain is just not made for their presentation model.

I suppose it's funny how films have been getting longer while the average film watcher's attention span has been decreasing

(allegedly, according to clickbait pseudoscience articles everywhere, and also the anecdotal evidence of my own alt and tab keys having no print left on them)

Kind of explains how most big movies have tended more and more towards 'whoa!!! awesome' set pieces every 5 minutes at the expense of plots that make sense.

(No film. Film had sold out and we hadn't booked and there wasn't anything else on for ages so everyone went their separate ways. Kind of... relieved? Dinner was OK though, nice to see people but I felt a bit out of it. Hope everyone else's evening is going OK.

Now, what to do with this mental energy I've built up...)

((In search of lost time))

(((I think I have missed your reference but I suppose it's ironic that I will spend tomorrow bemoaning that my weekend disappeared and I didn't do STUFF and yet I had 3 unexpected bonus free hours this evening which I spent on the sofa reading ILX instead of doing anything. maybe that's what you meant but I don't think it is)))

i was gonna watch Rashomon with Joel but we're both just vegging doing surfy net shit i guess

nah what the hell i nagged him

??? I'm not sure what that reference is about now. How odd. I don't think I was saying you were particularly Proustian - oh yeah, the idea that you had psyched yourself up to see people, then those hours were just "lost".

Or maybe the lost chord.

I post very odd things when I'm half writing a ~story~ and half posting on ILX.

not doing overdue work, thinking abt article, wishing there was some way to work out whether i feel unhappy (in general) because i'm bad at my job and don't like it, or whether i feel bad at my job and don't like it because i'm unhappy (in general)

i mean in some ways it doesn't matter, but if it's fixable at all then it makes a big difference which

Unemployed ATM, but thinking about my recent work gigs, it's been that I didn't like the jobs, so I was disinterested, so I was bad at them (transpires that I can't force myself to be good at something I dislike), so I was unhappy.

Yeah, I feel like that might be the case here, but I can't think of anything else I'd rather do, and I'm not sure in my current state I'd be able to give more of myself to anything else either. My current task is interesting on paper but I've been putting off looking at it for ages and I don't quite know why. Fear of criticism?

Benziger article seems to be basically a plug for various services e.g. her book Thriving in Mind which as far as I can tell goes 1. find your MBTI type, 2. ???, 3. profit. Still kind of interested in seeing if it has a more fully featured stage 2 but I just redid an MBTI-alike and got something I've never got before (ISTP, think I've been all 4 permutations of IN** before but never not been IN) which doesn't sound like me at all, so my hope of fixing my brain via MBTI is not currently too high.

(I guess I got S on the MBTI because
0. article made me think "maybe I have misunderstood my strengths/weaknesses, must not blindly click my usual answers"
1. failure to do background reading for work task led me to pick all the "I hate book learning" answers
2. avoided any reason-over-emotions answers because pissed off lately at people who think their emotions ARE rational logic - one of the questions was "My actions are frequently influenced by emotions" and I do not even believe anyone who ticked "No" for that. you are not Data from Star Trek
3. answered questions about "everything I do is planned meticulously" negatively bcz, well, I spend hours going over and over all the possibilities and not making a decision until I have to go, fuck it, time to get out the door and improvise

but no, I am not a cool-in-crisis skydiving firefighter, I am a risk-averse decision-avoider who goes to pieces in a crisis and all sorts of non-crisis situations too)

yes, whenever I do one of these tests and get to the 'do you plan things in detail' type questions I need an option for 'yes, but I still manage to screw up'. the way these things are formatted, are you better at empathising or rational analysis, spontaneity and inspiration or organisation and rigor, doesn't seem to leave a space for people who are crap at all those things.

guys, i see a satisfying career opportunity here. between us we shd be able to develop the ILX Crap Personalities model, which works out which crap personality you have and then tells you to give up and lock yourself in the house playing video games

Seems like too much work. I'll just sit here in the house playing video games.

Fatigue vs Attention Deficit
Despair vs Mania
Nihilism vs Inability to compromise

need 1 more, whip up a few questionnaires, cracked it

questionnaire is the single word i have most trouble spelling i think

dunno why i am feeling the Philip Seymour Hoffman thing so much, perhaps it speaks to my sullen nihilism. then again he was within 12 months of my age so.

i am supposed to be doing last minute homework and every time i look at an NVQ evidence sheet my eyes defocus and my head shuts down

technically it's not homework when you're at work but you get my meaning. christ i would love a big bag of sulphate about now.

Absent-Minded vs. Obsessive

or is that too close to fatigue vs. attention deficit?

went for a good long walk with a friend yesterday that ended with us trudging thru muddy twilight, felt good, especially when we came across a pair of white-bummed deer gadding about in the dark - Roe i'm guessing

so i'm not anhedonic yet. just trapped in a gleefully anhedonic world.

xp sarah that's good enough dammit, i was thinking of something similar re: carelessness vs perfectionism. plus it's armchair psychology, two concepts being near-identical is kinda the point nicht war?

"aren't 'wish it' and 'want it' really the same thing?"

need to alter either "absent-minded" or "attention-deficient" to avoid a clash of As. maybe change "attention-deficient" to "irritable" or "hyper"