It’s Friday night and I’m not feeling good. A terrible job interview today and I am beating myself up about it. Accusing myself of self sabotage.
Then I reach out to you on WhatsApp and you don’t answer. The lack of an answer spins my head out. The paranoia is right there under my heart, a knot in my stomach I am sitting here thinking you have gone back to him. Another mend in the constant cycle of break and mend, each one an arrow through my heart.
I was watching Gentleman Jack, a British TV show, and the main character, a lesbian, is seducing a young woman and I imagine doing the same; kissing the back of your hand, then the palm of your hand, then your cheek, and then your mouth, your full, soft lips. I imagine folding you up in my arms, wrapping myself around you, holding you close.
Sometimes I look at you and the yearning for touch becomes visceral, a temptation, an almost irresistible impulse. The urge rises for me to reach out and take your hand. Just that, nothing more, reach out and take your hand. I could reach out but even if a did your hand is miles and miles away even when you sit across a cafe table. But if you reach out, my hand is right there next to yours.
I spend too much time when people that love me are not right here. Too far away, too hard to see and too hard to for me to hold. Life is desperately lonely and how I feel for you is twisting a knife in the open wound.
How long do I have to wait before someone truly loves me? How long before a lover’s kiss?
I had been feeling unwell. Breathless a lot with a persistent sore throat so I decided to take a COVID test. I seem to be taking a test about once a month “just in case”. I certainly didn’t want a major illness to creep up on me. It seems one did, I must have had COVID for a few days. The first test looked strange, the T line was strong and bright but the C line looked a little faded. So the next morning I masked up and got some more tests. The new one looked identical. Can’t disagree, I’ve got the ’rona. Certainly explained a few things, the low energy, the fuzzy head, and that sore throat.
(Thunder outside. Luckily my two runs to the local shops and my Coles delivery are all done.)
Next step was a phone call to the GP clinic to arrange a phone consult. That got me some good advice and a script for anti-virals. I had to have one particular anti-viral as one of my meds, the one that helps with my sleep and anxiety, made the most popular one not a good choice for me.
I also wrote a note to the housemates and left them some masks and hand sanitizer. (You mean you didn’t pick up a bunch of those little bottles of hand sanitizer when the lock down lifted and everywhere you went seemed to be giving them away? I’m down to two.)
The persistent cough went but the breathless has stayed. I don’t feel it walking around the house but any trip down the stairs means one back and that will make me breathless.
(Heavy rain out there. I hope it doesn’t ruin a Xmas Eve for people.)
I mentioned the shakes in the previous post. They are so bad I can’t do Lego before lunch. Even now, in the late afternoon my fingers are shaking when I stop typing. I’m definitely halving the steroids tomorrow morning, my asthma is extremely well controlled so they may be overkill but you can’t stop a huge dose just in one go, you have to taper.
Today I went out a couple of times. The first was to get milk and a six pack of beer. I wanted two six packs but I thought that would be too heavy. then the second time was when I realised the house was almost out of toilet paper and neither of the others had bought any. The local Foodworks sells these packs of 18 that come with a handle making it easy to carry back home. The bottle shop was only a little further so I bought another six pack. Lots of beer in the house 😃. Still, since it’s Xmas Eve the next two days most everything will be shut so they were necessary trips,
Those trips made me sweaty and breathless. The air-conditioner has been turned on the whole time just to make sure my temperature is well controlled. It goes active for a short while every 15 minutes or so. At night I’ve been turning the temperature up and sleeping under just a sheet as a favour to the landlord, who pays the power bill.
I’ve coughed up phlegm a couple of times, not that frequently, maybe once a day, but today the sore throat was back and I coughed up a couple of times.
We will see how the symptoms progress. I haven’t taken another test yet, I thought I would leave that till I finish the anti-virals, that happens on Boxing Day.
(Look at that, there’s an extension for Visual Studio code that converts to smart quotes. (Nerds get excited about the strangest things. (They also do silly stuff like nest parenthetical phrases (Now how many was it I opened. Oh yeah, three, plus this one (that makes it four, oh no, I opened another)))))
I’m currently locked in for COVID so boredom is a real factor in my mental health right now.
When you’re as overprivileged as I am then boredom is not a lack of choices. Just in media I have about a thousand movies, four and a half thousand episodes of TV, and somewhere between five hundred and a thousand books in my network storage. I know how to get more, indeed I collected 500Gb more media over the last two days. (I wanted all five series of ‘Fringe’ in 1080p and picked up ‘Line of Duty’, an English cop show.)
Let me tell you a tale of how I came to feel bored. This break from work was meant to be dedicated to two things, organising my stuff, and building Lego. I’m not that strong with the COVID so I’m not sure how much organising will get done.
I started building my Lego Ferrari 488 Corse, around seventeen hundred pieces. I got as far as half way through the first bag when I found I couldn’t find a particular piece, I found three but I needed four. The likeliest reason for the absence is that I accidentally dropped the piece and it is somewhere on my floor. I did a good search that included darkening the room and searching with a torch (you might be surprised how successful it can be).
The final step in the search was to log in to ebay and buy the piece. Still no piece has ben found and I am waiting for the piece to turn up some time next week.
My thoughts then turned to a clone kit, Wildflowers. One of the problems you find in clone kits is that the fine tolerances of Lego are not found. You can get a kit with sloppy fit, fine fit, or tight fit. Wildflowers had extremely tight fit so I can only work on it for a few minutes at a time before my fingers give up.
The final attempt was at a second-hand Ferrari F40, not the Speed Classic one but a larger Creator model. I don’t have the instructions for it but that’s no problem, Lego will give you a PDF of the instructions for any kit released in the last fifty years, and maybe even beyond.
Since it’s second-hand it comes as a box full of unsorted pieces, some still connected to each other. I can work on that for longer at a time, sorting pieces into large bunches before I narrow down the size of each bunch with a sub-sort.
That’s going well, I think one more session and that will be ready for sub-sorting. Pulling pieces apart still hurts my fingers, perhaps not so badly.
Then there is the media. I spend an incredibly long time flicking through various pots of film and TV without settling on anything. I even have three streaming services, the SBS, and ABC to flick through. Most of the time I start a few new films, watch for ten minutes, then move on before deciding to watch something I’ve watched before.
The other variable at the moment is the effect of the medication I’m taking. The largest contributor to that is the large dose of prednisone, a steroid, every morning. It gives me a hot flush a couple of hours after taking it, leaving me with jittery shakes and slightly hyperactive. Luckily my asthma is pretty good so I’m not taking Salbutamol (Ventolin, except I buy generic to save the dollar) which makes those symptoms stronger, last for more of the day, and amp up the anxiety.
Therefore the boredom isn’t a lack of choices, it’s hyperactivity and an inability to decide.
(Apologies for my terrible graphic work but you get the idea.)
The stickers on the lid of the MacBook Pro were talking to hers from across the coffee shop. It was the caffeine molecule decal that caused it. The first to get loud. It was having an argument with the Día de Muertos David Bowie. David had appeared on the laptop while it was in the Noe Valley in San Francisco.
The laptop had enjoyed San Francisco, he spent most of the time in the Air BnB in the Noe Valley, left behind while the boy did the tourist thing but he had been on expeditions to the Castro (great restaurant) and Haight Ashbury where he spent most of a day in a coffee shop on the way to the airport. He didn’t see as much of the town as the iPhone. Smartarse thing was always getting taken to the best spots, he saw the Disney Museum, Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf. At least the laptop got a way cool sticker from the trip.
Now the stickers on his lid were arguing about the girl and it had attracted her attention, or at least the attention of her laptop stickers. They were listening to the argument, or at least trying to.
The laptop didn’t like it when the stickers talked, but her MacBook seemed nice about it. He would have liked his boy to have started a conversation with laptop girl but the boy didn’t have the confidence of Bowie, particularly a day of the dead Ziggy Stardust.
It seemed that was what had started the argument. Caffeine thought Ziggy should cool it and let the boy speak up. Stardust thought that was highly improbable, unkindly saying something about Satan and ice skates.
So Bowie had asked her name. Well, he didn’t ask her. The stickers had a hard time talking to people but _her_ laptop stickers weren’t exactly silent.
The girl seemed happy with logos, Bowie could see an iTerm icon and a GitHub octocat, rather than the boy’s quirky stickers but it was the rainbow ohmyzsh which had answered. I guess it had enough cool to not be totally intimidated by the Day of the Dead David.
“She calls herself Monica. Who’s doing the asking?”
“Stardust. Ziggy Stardust. The guy at the keys is Simon.”
“Lookin’ fine, Space Cowboy. So what is some 70’s British cool in a Latin suit doing asking for a girl’s name.”
“Just thinking your girl’s gotta be fairly geek. My Bart Simpson here was just sayin’ not everybody can hold it with an ‘octocat’ like that. That’s pretty keyboard warrior right there.”
“Right back atcha, David. I do like your pixelated mate there. Some nice eight bit wand waving he’s got goin’ on.”
“So you saw my ‘Open Sourceror’ wizard friend. Yeah, the boy at the keyboard can cut some code when the cuttings good.”
“Why isn’t your guy raising his voice and talking to my girl here?”
“Well Rainbow, he’s not exactly forward when it comes to the chat. Anxiety could be his middle name.”
“That’s a shame, pair of geeks both driving MacBook Pros and sharing a WiFi network should be able to talk, Stardust. Your boy’s gotta have seen my girl, seen the Apple logo, seen me and my decal mates. They should at least give each other a nod.”
“See what I can do but don’t come unglued if he don’t.”
“Oh, no, she just picked up the purse. Seems we’re out of here, DB. Maybe next time they’ll get up the nerve. Later Ziggy.”
“Later Rainbow.”
The girl picked up her laptop and packed it away, walking out into the late afternoon sun. Bowie returned to reflective silence. Chance encounters slipping past the boy.
She’d gone in to the small shop because of the delicate mille fiore glass plate in the window.
She must have passed at least a half dozen of the many equally small shops selling glassware she saw along both sides of the canal here in Murano, but it was this one she’d chosen to enter. Because of the tiny, fine, glass plate in all it’s colours, in all it’s glory, sitting in the window of the shop.
Now she was watching the equally fine movements of his hands. There was the flame, the glass and gold leaf in front of him as he worked.
She barely saw anything but the hands and the glass and the piece he was making. The young woman stood motionless, almost transfixed. The hands made small, precise movements.. A few moments after she’d walked in he made a larger movement, a twisting motion and the glass blob was recognisably a cat and she gasped.
He glanced up and smiled. He wasn’t unusually good looking, it was the good looking of youth and health.
She looked away. She looked at the shelves next to her covered in small glass pieces. An orchestra of glass in the centre it was filled with small statuary, dozens of trinkets for the tourists walking the canal, for her.
She picked up a small mille fiore tray full of what looked like wrapped boiled sweets and smiiled as she discovered that they too were made of glass.
The woman took out her wallet and removed two twenty Euro notes to pay for them, putting them down on the counter.
“Uno momento …, one minute, please”.
His voice sounded as good looking to her as the young glassblower’s slim body.
He was finishing the small cat, adding final features, pinching out ears and adding small glass whiskers.
The strong, dextrous hands were wrapping the tray and small glass sweets then he added “for you” while wrapping the cat and popping it into the bag, smiling for the young woman.
She smiled once again, “thank you, thank you” and walked out into the bright Venetian afternoon.
I’ve been told that I display some of the symptoms of Asperger’s, high-functioning autism. I’m sure that’s not entirely true, but I seem to have trouble understanding emotions and I’m not sure I feel the same way as other people.
When I say “I love you” what does that actually mean? Does it mean the same as when you say it? Does it mean the same as when that person over there says it? Does it mean the same when I say it to a friend and when I say it to my daughter, Jessica?
It’s certainly an overused word. We say we love objects, love pets, love friends, love children, love parents and love lovers. I’ve always thought only the last three really count, though some close friends would have to be included.
So where to start explaining what I mean when I say “I love you” to a child or a lover? Talking about emotions is hard. We both understand that the sky is a colour we agree is “blue” and that the body of the Australian flag is also “blue” even though a slightly different colour. When it comes to agreeing about what exactly the difference might be between ‘cross’ and ‘angry’ or ‘like’ and ‘love’ we will have a harder time.
So when I say ‘I love you’ to a lover, close friend or Jessica what is it I’m feeling? What am I saying?
So at the moment I’m shifting on to a new Mac. I’ve previously been using two, a pretty good MacBook Pro and a terribly slow iMac. Now I have a top of the line MacBook Pro, 16Gb of RAM, 1Tb SSD and an i7 processor. It’s pretty schmick.
Of course there’s a downside to a new Mac. You need to set it up just right and that can take some time. It is considerably easier and less painful in this era of cloud computing.
Apple’s iCloud is the first revelation. You log in to iCloud and down come your internet accounts, the passwords saved in your KeyChain, Safari’s bookmarks (and history it seems) and the Desktop and Downloads folder.
Then we get to installing applications. Almost all the apps I use now come from the Mac App Store so getting them installed is just a matter of opening the App Store and reviewing my list of purchased apps. There are another set of apps I have courtesy of SetApp and those are just as easy to install. Ones required for work are installed via JAMF. That leaves a few quirks; 1Password, Chrome, BBEdit, iTerm, and some others not terribly important. OK, Karabiner Elements is pretty important, we may talk about that later.
I just saw a picture of my brother’s first grandchild, Teddy, with a pile of books entirely coverering his lap. It was part of a message from his Mum announcing that she has decided to become an Usborne sales consultant.
The picture reminded me of the important place books held in my childhood and the place they hold, thanks to me, in my daughter’s life.
When I was a small child I suffered from constant, chronic asthma. I was always missing school and my Mum often had to take me along to Uni lectures and tutorials as she juggled a sick child with study.
My family are all big readers. Mum swears I taught myself to read on summer vacation in Surfer’s Paradise almost out of boredom. Mum would buy my brother and I magazines and books to keep us occupied while she and my Dad read on the beach. My father wasn’t as big a reader as the rest of the family but on vacation he read Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carré. I would flick through picture books and picture magazines (Treasure was my favourite, Graeme had Look & Learn that had less pictures and more text). So one vacation, when I was a little over three and a half, while flicking through Treasure on the beach I apparently managed to connect the pictures and words in “Treasure” well enough to start reading.
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