Need to stop thinking about…

I’m wishing tonight, after having a pleasant dinner out, that I could stop thinking about things that touch me too deeply. Tears are welling in my eyes and threatening to fall down my cheeks as I can’t do anything to help. I’ll try to concentrate on something I COULD do last weekend.

I managed to help my young friend Olu “Climate” Idowu from Nigeria raise the last couple of hundred dollars that enabled him to attend an important meeting in Ethiopia. He has been running a program to teach youth to sustainably work the land so they can become employed and feed themselves and their families. By flocking to urban areas, rural people in developing countries have lost the skills they thought would be useless in the city. As Olu and I were chatting on Facebook I also got a message from Thalini who is training to be a surgeon in NSW, Australia, wondering how to do something that I know all about, and I thought !! Bingo!!

Maybe Thalini would have some of the cash Olu needed for his conference and I could in turn help Thalini with her problem! It worked and didn’t cost me a cent of the money I haven’t got!

So this week I became an international online entrepreneur! That must be an achievement I can be happy with.

What techniques can I use in the future to stop myself becoming too sad and emotional about problems that other people are in a much better position to fix? Genuine help needed!

Positive post script:

The rescue cat pictured below was adopted and neutered. She was previously on death row at Manhattan Animal Rescue in New York City because she was found roaming the streets. She was approximately 5 years old, and as you can see, not the most attractive-looking animal you might expect to take home.

Kitty’s got the blues

I contacted a heap of people who lived in or near NYC to try to get her a kind, warm home. Someone responded and I am so very relieved.

Dour musings

It’s a happy time of the year, Christmas time and the Aussie summer holidays and I am pleased to be quite cheerful this year and not “pretending in the hope of becoming OK”. I’ve tested the practice of putting a smile on my face so that I can make some “happy chemicals” that cheer up my brain and it works (a little), but it’s no good long term. I either honestly feel pretty OK or I don’t.
While I would have called myself “chronically suicidal” over autumn, winter and most of spring during 2011, I was never in danger of jumping off the cliffs at Hallett Cove. However, one friend did succeed in killing himself in autumn and two other people I knew died in November. One suffered in isolation, consenting to one last-ditch dose of chemo for his bowel-liver cancer which he should have skipped and had a good trip to the Barrier Reef; the other was elderly and died peacefully in his sleep as everyone had wished he would.

The death of my friend from cancer, only in his early 50s, affected me quite deeply. It made me think of what it would be like when I know the lights are going out for the last time. With Richard, there was probably another century’s worth of things he could have done in his life, as he had multiple enthusiasms and stacks of friends to keep him company. Yet the curtain came down on him very early and it’s like he never physically existed. How did he feel? I can only imagine the swift fade of sensations and the rushing “water in the ears” sound of an anaesthetic taking effect, but then no waking up. How would that be different? I guess it wouldn’t be. It’s just hard to think of my own personality and “liveliness” not being in the world. But that’s what will happen.

This should spur me on to fit a lot more in my life before I go. I AM doing quite a bit compared to winter, so maybe I’m on the up.

Day 8 NaBloPoMo: Memories, pets and ashes

Several things crossed my path today which seemed to be vaguely connected- although some people may object to me thinking this.

A Facebook friend living in the Northern Hemisphere had just built a terrific indoor enclosure for her small pets to be sheltered from the cold in winter. The first night she had all the pets inside (cats, guinea pigs and rabbits), was the first snow storm of the year. during the night the house’s back door blew open in the wind and one pet went wandering out, exploring, as he might have done in the daytime. This young rabbit was very unlucky because as he went out at dead of night, in the countryside, quite remote from anywhere on a farm road, what should happen but a truck races by, squashing him in the middle of the lightly snow-covered roadway. Poor little guy- apparently he would have died happy. His owner put a little memorial poem/song on Facebook for him- she was quite attached.

However, I couldn’t go more than halfway through the little video: Thought of You.

The lyrics:

Everything that I said I’d do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on…

I got halfway and I started thinking of my beautiful cat Marmy, who was the twin of one of our cats who are with us now (Mogadon). He died on his third birthday, venturing over our back fence, through adjoining properties and was skittled on the main road leading to the local waterbird sanctuary- he knew where he was going I guess. We found his perfectly preserved, curled -up body in the gutter- hardly a mark on him, but stiff and cold.

I miss him so much- I have only just managed to stop myself from crying evey time I thought about him and now my friend’s rabbit dies in similar circumstances.

Although this may be a tasteless connection to some people (leave now)- I was also reminded of the shortness of life tonight, and how some people cope with their loss in ways that seem strange to others. A friend at our restaurant table told me about the suicide death of one of her sons’ one time school companions- a young woman lawyer who worked for an international charity. She had returned home from the unpromising Copenhagen Convention on Climate Change and had committed suicide.

While the suicide death of a twenty-something year-old is not so uncommon, unfortunately, the way her mum is dealing with the loss is definitely not very adaptive. She carries her daughter’s ashes everywhere with her in a little urn in her handbag. My friend met her out bush-walking- and there were the ashes- brought out for showing as they spoke.

It is very difficult to predict how the self or others will react to death of someone or something to which they are very emotionally attached.

I daresay I will continue to grieve a little for Marmy (and several of his predecessors) for some time yet, but the pain is fading and I know it will all fade into the background one day. However, I don’t carry a little collection of his fur or anything around with me- I know it wouldn’t help and would probably REMIND me all the time of the loss. What is going to happen to that poor mother with the ashes?

R.I.P. Marmy

Day 7 NaBloPoMo: Quickie not following a prompt!

A few days ago I received a terrific surprise in the mail- an annual report on my World Vision Child in Haiti! She had survived the massive earthquake and problems afterwards. I hope she doesn’t get cholera- but her report said she was very healthy and hadn’t visited the doctor for anything other than a check-up.

Her name is Chrislove Dorce and she is 11 years old. She lives with her parents in a small tacked-together dwelling on a hillside with a tiny area of farm and some goats and chooks. She doesn’t do well at school and is repeating 3rd grade of primary school for the third time in 2011. She doesn’t look academic and never mentions books or enjoying school. I guess she is not the type, poor little thing. I don’t really see a rosy future for her, but she is alive, healthy and may change a lot before she becomes an adult. The French schooling system there is not very forgiving of children who don’t have good basic skills and logical thought- she starts at a disadvantage. However, I can’t go over there and offer her an alternative, just keep my fingers crossed she doesn’t get totally pissed off and leave before she can read a health warning sign!

The letter from her district office came just as I was becoming quite distressed over the currently-running World Vision ad on TV. I keep looking at the little boy- “Apilat” I think is his name, according to the big youngster narrating the ad. The poor little one needs sponsorship because he is malnourished, drinks dirty water, has malaria and often has diarrhoea. I hope the big boy is able to get a scholarship to enter teachers college as he wishes and that “Apilat” and his compatriots gain sponsors.

I can’t contribute more- my partner is already putting in my usual contribution because I have no job or regular income. If I had a job, I could sponsor another child, but that will have to wait.

Meanwhile- how about anyone who reads this post giving it some thought?? Any contribution is better than the possibility of one child suffering longer, in my opinion.

 

Day 6 NaBloPoMo: Without sight- I wouldn’t want to live.

Which of my senses would I miss most- sight, definitely- I truly would rather die than not be able to see.

All my life I have been a lover of colour- and bright colour, at that. No matter what the fashion or decorating trend, I like certain colours and combinations of colours above others- I love to design colour combinations for just about everything possible. I also love reading and finding things on the interwebs- without sight, all that would be lost to me. Knowledge is a great value for me too and I need my eyes to voraciously devour anything I can get my hands on. My job used to be very much knowledge-based (health research) and I would love to get another job in that area when I finish my Masters degree shortly. Merely filing and classifying things, or doing things using someone else’s ideas soon depresses me so I couldn’t get a job like that. However, when I don’t have a job (and I’m happy enough) I enjoy a myriad of things that revolve around vision.

It’s always great to move into a new place as I can give vent to my crazy colour sense. In our current house, I started painting it as soon as I could, although things came to a halt before We had finished. One day soon I’ll get going on it again. The outside of the house is OK as the previous person did it- variegated brown bricks with black window frames and doors. On the inside, it needed some pizazz! It was various shades of cream throughout with puke-beige window frames and skirting boards- blerghhh. I’ve changed the skirting boards and window frames to a greyed sea-green, planning on dark lipstick internal doors (we only have 4). In the front room, where we enter, the walls are a clear pale aqua and we’ve hung some screenprints of sandhills. In our combined kitchen/dining/TV area we have bright wall, the colour of orange peel!

In our previous house (a modern apartment with bedrooms on the mezzanine) we did the whole place in bright Mexican colours. There were 3 areas- one in deep turquoise blue,

another in dark, cool pink and another in terracotta. It looked great together! All the other apartments were bland white and grey- depressing!

I go searching for inspiring colour combinations on the Net sometimes, and on one foray I discovered Kuler. It is a colour-freak’s dream! You can play with the spectrum, using any shade or hue, extract the main colours from a photograph and get ideas from other people’s colour swatches. I have spent hours doodling around there- much to my partner’s puzzlement!

Isn’t this summery?:

Surf ski

Unfortunately I can’t make the images appear in here as Adobe has encoded them for use only in Adobe programs- more’s the pity! However, visit the Kuler site and have a look- heaven!

My hobbies usually involve colour- knitting, sewing, felting, a little painting and drawing, making kiln-formed glass and shape comes second. When I wanted a theme for a new garden after we had built a new house on an empty block, it was colour that came first, then adapting the type of plants for the climate, space and aspect. I tried very hard to obtain plants that would survive in the colours I thought would work. At our second house, once we had arrived for the handover of the keys from the builder, the first person on site was a petition-bearer from local residents objecting to the colours we had the house painted. (!!!) Although the house was the first on a new estate and at least 200 metres from any others, and the road past it was a cul de sac, the residents claimed our colour choices were decreasing property values, were “ugly”, “tasteless” and “too bright!! We had a cream rendered house with deep turquoise eaves, paler blue window frames and a bright yellow front door. Eventually we persuaded people that the colours were inspired by Mediterranean homes (it IS a Mediterranean climate here and about a quarter of the residents originated in Italy or Greece) and we only conceded to change the shade of yellow of the front door. We figured they wouldn’t go to the trouble of getting a court order and so we made the front door a more gentle golden wheat colour. I wish I had a photo- but I’d have to scan an old print and it wouldn’t be done in time!

Anyway, sight wins for me over sound/hearing although I have a degree majoring in music! While I can reproduce quite complex sounds in my head, I’m not nearly so good as with colours and visual stuff generally. If I went blind I could listen to music but I couldn’t produce or consume luscious colours any more. Nor could I read to fill my brain and keep it pulsing! Taste and smell would be a problem to lose, but I’ve had many times in my life where these were blunted by illness and I didn’t pine a lot for them. Touch has never been at the forefront for me, although without the feeling of pain I might damage myself irretrievably, like the crazy brother in the Steig Larsson trilogy. Due to the way I was brought up, it always puzzled me when people hugged each other. It was only when I got to the age of 25 that I found someone who could “make me feel something” when I was hugged! I have no memories of being hugged before that age and there are no baby pictures of me being held warmly- more stiffly or away from the body. So I can certainly live without that again- with some regret, but not devastation!

It seems as though I’ve spent far too much time on this blog, so I’d better do something else- it WILL be visual!

Seeya damorra!

 

Day 5 NaBloPoMo: Zeitgeist! Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is a difficult word for me to get my head around. I’m sure it’s got that semantic trick of meaning more in its original language than in English. To me it’s the prevailing mood or background to significant events- whether they be part of one person’s life, a community’s or a nation’s shared experience.

I can’t say my whole life has been infused with one particular Zeitgeist things come and go, I change, living circumstances change. At the moment I am realising what a material person I am. Most things I want to do involve acquiring something that costs money. This must be because I am having a terrible time adjusting to not having a half-time to full-time professional job with good pay. I haven’t had full-time work since 1999 and was looking for it until 2007, when I gave up, defeated. At first, when I worked around 30% to 50% of the time, the household seemed OK, we even had some short holidays; however, when I got the boot in mid-2007, we suddenly had to tighten our belts in a way I hadn’t done since I was a student. It’s tugging at me now, this mood of not having what would satisfy me and I think it’s because Christmas is approaching.

Christmas shouldn’t really be material- at least for Christians, although it seems to be on the surface in most directions I cast my gaze! Christmas was never religious to me and has come to mean a time for relaxing, catching up with friends and exchanging presents. To me it’s a time when people give physical gifts in appreciation of a person’s contribution to their lives- not just for the custom of giving things to all and sundry. The last few years, presents in this household have been pretty sparse. My partner always gets me things and puts them under the tree and I always try to get him some things too- although last year and this one it will be pretty much using his money.

Now there is a definite zeitgeisty sort of thing I’ve discovered while writing that last sentence- since I have been conscious of what people do for each other (or NOT), I have been fiercely independent. The dependency for money and shelter on someone else is something I have avoided ever since I was a teenager, and independence of feelings and thoughts is something I have hung onto since about the age of ten- and probably unconsciously before that.

So now I see that the parts of the zeitgeist of my life are all about being an individual and always having an “opt-out” clause due to my (formerly) maintained ability to be independent when I feel I must. Now I feel trapped in my collection of habitual thoughts and I can’t adjust properly to my changed circumstances. Other people think I am OK or just smile blandly when I say I dislike being dependent, but really I’m sure they don’t appreciate the depths of my despair at not being able to break free and be me again.

Got it- my life needs STRUCTURE!

That’s it- I’ve finally nailed it- my life without a full time job has lacked the basic structure for a normal day and I’ve been floundering for 10 years! I knew I always hated getting up at Spotrick’s late hour instead of my natural early time, but it’s dawned on me that it’s more than that- I need to start the day when I AM comfortable and get on with things in my own time even though I have no 8.30 deadline for getting to work. I’m SRSLY gonna try to do what I used to do: get up early, go straight out in the garden, potter about in the cooler air, get the cups of tea at 7.45, wake up Spotrick, eat brekky and start some work by 9am. I’ll add some more to this, but since it dawned on me, I thought I’d better blog it or I’d forget or leave it forever…

RIP Second Valley sheds... all torn down

Now to add a bit (it’s the 26th Feb now).
I’ve decided that my life particularly lacks structure as there has never been anything like a marriage and kids to keep me focused even when I might have felt like neglecting myself. Most women I know centre their lives primarily around their kids, even if they have high-powered jobs- they’ll usually be the ones in the household to get up in the night if a kid starts throwing up, or to organise a taxi to get them picked up from violin lessons after school. These women have the “pull” of the kids plus the obligations to fulfill their job roles to allow them to go with the flow each day, even if they don’t feel like getting up and facing the world. I used to have my job (when I was fulltime for many years), and I was able to keep getting up and going even when I felt horribly depressed. I also achieved a good deal at work, even in an international context.
When I left this work and tried to retrain in the computer industry there was a period of time when each day was so frantic that I could hardly remember what day of the week it was. Gradually the stresses of being alone in a role in a strange organisation got to me and I gave up working in that industry. That’s when the lack of structure probably hit me, but I didn’t notice at the time.
I started to get contract work which meant working part time, irregular days and hours. It became harder to get up in the morning, harder to have my clothes ironed and the cats all fed and cleaned up before I headed out for appointments. My old routine of getting up early and doing 30- 60mins pottering in the garden before breakfast gradually ran down and I started to neglect to yard and the cats’ health. Unconsciously I probably expected that Spotrick would pick up the slack, but of course he didn’t because it had never been his “thing”.
Other friends drifted away as I wasn’t at the same work place and new friends didn’t visit because we lived a long way from the city. I tried to stay in touch by ringing people and going to visit them, but the effort became too much. I started to get less work and when contracts finished it was hard to summon up courage to seek more.
I knew other friends were also depressed, but they seemed to stick to the routine of work and carting kids to school through thick and thin. Sometimes I noticed they were very ineffective at work, spending large amounts of time “mucking about”, gossiping and going for coffee. But they kept up their responsibilities to their families- I don’t know how well, of course!
I sank really when I started getting rejected at job interviews, being told I was not “intelligent enough” or “not suitable for our team” etc., all of which I felt was unfounded and unfair- why tell me such derogatory things? I was especially discouraged (and furious) when I was asked to apply for a number of good positions and always came “second” to a youngster with virtually no experience, but either a previous career in nursing or a PhD (in anything at all). My self esteem fell and fell and I started to spend a lot of time alone at home not doing much. The house and garden were neglected (and still are), the cats became neglected (not having their vaccinations and dental work) and the ones with chronic health conditions (two of them) just deteriorated to the extent they made me cry daily. Having a completely inadequate income didn’t help either- Mr Visacard is making a mint out of me!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, since I’ve realised this structure business is probably the key to fixing up my life, I have started to get into more of a routine each day, although I’m not good at it yet. However, having a little work to do, I am distributing it across the days and committing to doing some regularly, structuring other activities around it. When daylight saving ends, there might be a bit more sunshine in the mornings for me to get up earlier and do some gardening, but at the moment I don’t naturally wake until about 7.15 to 7.30.
However, I’ve made a start, I feel a little better and I’m ready to attack the rest of the year. Here’s to a bit of structure!

Nooooo...body!