Days 106&107 April 17, 2012

Back to work is always difficult …and back to the pressure of coursework deadlines, exam pressures and an AS performance next week harder still.

Mondays (even without pupils) continue to suck: I manage to get in ‘trouble’ for doing my job. I came home without my iPhone and the folder of ‘To Do’ work I’d put together. Suddenly my, ‘ I gave all of my half term and four days at the beginning of the holidays: I’m giving work no more’ mantra of last week seem foolish. My moment of magic?
Escaping into the world of Alice Walker: an actual book with pages (rather than IPhone Kindle); a world away from this one.

Tuesday brought work stress of the kind when you’ve mentally written your letter of resignation by break time and set yourself on fire in protest by the final bell.

I’m determined this term to manage this stress. I came home after the terrors of a rehearsal: walked to the chip shop and sat and watched the water to eat my truly unhealthy dinner… The walk, the growing twilight and the sights and sounds of the water was to be Nature’s apology for the world kicking my ass.

It wasn’t

I realised somewhere between the chip shop and nature that I’d dropped the hearing aid I’d taken out of my ear. I became ‘the woman in the town gone mad tonight’: searching madly, interrogating the chip shop girl and finding the aid too many minutes later between the pavement and the road.

A cruel irony when I was so seeking silence.

I calmed my nerves and chilled my temper with ice cream on the way home.

Days 51, 52 and 53… February 22, 2012

“I shared too much. I was emotionally slutty…”

Carrie Bradshaw

I’ve tried writing Days 51, 52 and now 53 quite a few times: but day 50′s entry has made me self conscious…

So I’m taking baby steps, focusing on the good and reaching only for the highlights…

51: Was grateful that today’s commute was tube free…

52: Cooking up a storm at home- admittedly I was avoiding my school work but a girl has gotta eat! And tweets from a friend who knows my tv indulgences too well. She makes me smile!

53: Birthday cake and bubbles at break time for a girl who makes turning 40 (a long way off for me) seem fun and fabulous!

(I did consider giving up blogging for lent: but I realised that was laziness masquerading as sacrifice…instead I vow to write better, think braver, moan less.)

Day 33 (for the second time) February 2, 2012

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby comments that either he or those he stands in judgement of are,

“wasting the most poignant moments of night and life”

I wasted too much time tonight writing a rather pointless blog about sleeping. But the mighty iPhone failed, or the app did and it disappeared. I refuse to rewrite it.

time is our more precious resource: we should not waste it

There are moments of infuriated clarity when I realise this blog, my writing, is simply self-indulgent drivel…

I’m taking my temper and heading to bed.

Day 30 January 30, 2012

We really don’t miss the water till the well runs dry, or what we’ve got till its gone and…I’m searching for a third similarly themed cliche. I take my health and mobility for granted: I treat my body less as a temple and more as a sewer. I’ve made various promises since Saturday…if my back heals itself I will eat more fruit and vegetables, if the pain goes away I will eat less chocolate/ drink less booze/ exercise more. I will become my own, walking (at a brisk, calorie burning pace) talking health promotion girl… but neither the dreaming nor the drugs are working. I guess prevention would have been better than cure.

And, it turns out that a sore back and teaching ain’t the world’s best combination on a Monday…

As Pink would say, Who knew?

Day 10: Poetry for my soul… January 10, 2012

I miscounted: yesterday’s drivel was 8 and 9 not 7 and 8 (can’t count from 1 to 10 or read a calendar! Alarming! Does anyone offer really, really basic numeracy classes?)

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all

From bad to worse. Some years muscadel

faces down frost:  green thrives; the crops don’t fail:

sometimes a man (or a woman) aims high, and all goes well.

 

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect an honest man (or woman): decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men (and women) become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

I didn’t have the day that Pugh wishes all of us: I was humiliated in front of  two colleagues, (with the apology meeting almost worse than the humiliation: as I continue to fight a battle I thought I’d won), had a run in with a parent that was entirely my fault, I fought with a computer and lost, and have spent this evening filling endless drivel into a form that means yet another night of marking escapes me…

I added the feminising brackets, breaking my own censorship rules in the hope of  empowering  myself with Pugh’s words… in a better mood I would write in detail why the imagery of the poem speaks to both the farmer’s daughter and one time politics student in my soul: and why it has resonance each time I remember or rediscover it.

I’m grateful that words speak to me: that I find humanity hidden in letters and hope in paragraphs of prose… I might write the lines of Invictus on my mirror and allow Henley to become my mantra…

“Out of the night that covers me.

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 

…It matters not how strait the gate

How charged with punishment the scroll

I am the Master of my fate.

I am the Captain of my soul.”

 

Domesticity Without the Bliss November 24, 2009

I think my apartment is cursed or the gateway to some sort of broken appliance hell… my washing machine and gas boiler seem to be as temperamental as I am. Yesterday I had to replace my microwave (and bought a bargain slow cooker at the same time); and my bathroom extractor fan has given up the ghost entirely. And the hours I have spent at the bedside of my terminally ill iPod have been in vain.

Tonight I spilled a new jar of coffee across my kitchen floor and in an attempt to clear up said mess I kicked a bucket of dirty water across the floor. I then knocked all of the books of my shelf- smashing into sad little smithereens a favourite lamp in the process.

It may be karma for the day I spent hung over last week while my Mum painted my living room; or it may be the return of a borrowed curse from a long ago boyfriend who had weird and downright scary associations with the number 7: what demon possessed me to buy an apartment bearing that number?

I hate being a ‘stupid handless woman’ when I first moved in I had a vision of myself, work boots, denium shorts, lumberjack shirt and an American smile: armed only with my trusty pink toolbox and my wits: I would be able to take on the world and at the very least my little apartment…

My Mum is one of those women: she is very ‘handy’: as well as painting my living room  re-attached my ‘fallen curtain’ rail from the wall and is currently searching Ards for some sort of light fitting thingmebob for my hall light to allow it to work again.

But no, once again I sell out the sisterhood- I now have to call an electrician, a gas boiler service person, perhaps the washing machine guy, the scary Apple service people; and I have to somehow circumnavigate that devil that is the MOT service and the Mechanic’s Garage: that’s a lot of testosterone and being called ‘dear’ for one week.

I’m not quite sure how all this (or any of my recent entries) embrace the spirit of carpe diem… unless the ability to call a man, or rather a list of men, to fix this seemingly endless list of things to  right  and take control of my little world once more can be somehow seizing the day!

(First published on Carpe Diem Carrie O’Hara)