Beyond Selidor

Day 7. Think of the last person you hugged. What would you do if they vanished completely?
The last person I hugged was one of the people from my German language course as we were saying goodbye after a sushi party on Saturday night. I can't remember who I hugged last, but my answer to the question in today's post would be the same, regardless of which classmate it was.

I would be sad, and I would probably cry, but I would get over it fairly quickly. I've known these people for just over a month, and while I really like several of them and enjoy their company and consider them friends, I don't consider them close friends and my life would close up over their absence in a reasonably short period of time. I hope that doesn't sound cold-hearted.

The last person I e-hugged was thelxiepia, and I would be a wreck if she vanished. An absolute mess. A world without thelxiepia isn't a world in which I'd be happy to live.

( the other days )

Day 6. Talk about a recent experience that has affected you greatly and how.

As some of you may recall, my grandmother recently discovered that she had cancer. I'm pleased to report that she's doing as well as can be under the circumstances. The cancer was in her liver, and luckily the doctors considered her healthy and strong enough to go through with an extremely serious operation to remove the cancerous part of her liver. She had her operation just under two weeks ago and came out of it fine. In fact, she's recovered so quickly that she'll probably be able to come home from hospital quite soon, when we'd expected her to stay there until at least the end of November. The doctor also thinks he removed all of the cancer.

Obviously with cancer nothing is certain, but so far what's been happening has been the best possible outcome for all concerned.

I adore my grandparents. (Only my mum's parents are still living; my other grandparents died in the early 90s.) I respect them greatly for overcoming the difficult circumstances into which they were born and doing everything they could to make a better life for their children and grandchildren (while recognising that the 1950s was a time of great social mobility in Australia). I love them for their seemingly endless capacity to love, for their obvious pride in their descendents, for their life well-lived. To say I was devestated by the news of Marnie's cancer would be an understatement.

And while ours is an affectionate family, very comfortable in displaying love towards one another, Marnie's illness made me resolved to continue in this regard. I write often to my mother and sister, but I've started making a point of telling them I love them in every email. I've made more of an effort to stay in regular contact with my aunts, and told them I love them too. While those I love have always been aware of the fact, since Marnie's cancer, I've been completely open and honest about how I feel about everyone I love. (This may explain why my LJ seems to have turned into a sort of blissed-out love-fest of late.)

Life is precious, and love is precious, and I am incredibly grateful to the people who love me, and whom I love.

( the other days )

Day 5. Pick a song that projects the same mood as your day or week and explain.

'Please Ask For Help' by Telekinesis completely sums up my week. 'I'm not going to knock you down, but I'm not going to help you up' essentially paraphrases how I've been feeling for the past few days: maudlin, unintentionally self-sabotaging, and able to see how to get out of this state of mind but not being able to do it. I'm frustrated with myself, and ready to go back to Cambridge, which, thanksfully, I'm doing in exactly a week.

As far as today goes, though, I'm feeling a bit lyric-less and contemplative. I'm about to head over to the apartment of one of my friends from my German class, where our whole class is having a sushi party, and it's hard to be in a bad mood when there's sushi on the horizon. In any case, while it's not fun to feel unhappy, I'm kind of okay with feeling the full range of human emotions, as I've explained before. I tend to get analytical about my feelings, focusing on them and trying to work out why I'm feeling unhappy at a particular moment, but I don't try to push the unhappiness away or hurry it up. Thus, today's song is 'Kaleidoscope' by Tiësto feat. Jónsi. I can't explain why this song reflects my mood, except to say that it always evokes the image of standing on a bridge, on the shore, on the cliffs of Selidor - some liminal space - and wondering.

The song I've been playing all week, especially over the last 24 hours (50 times!), is 'Girls Like You' by The Naked and Famous, but I don't think it's hugely reflective of my life, aside from the line 'run, whirlwind run', which is totally how I feel all the time. I'm even known as 'Typhoon Ronni' within my family due to my sudden melodramatic flarings of emotion, and the fact that I seem to walk into the house trailing drama behind me...

( the other days )

ETA: You NEED to go and check out the Stratford-on-Hellmouth Tumblr. It's got Whedonverse macros with appropriate Shakespeare quotes pasted over them. My favourite is this one.

Day 4. What do you think it means to be in love?
This is difficult. I know I'm in love, but it's hard to distill the distinct aspects of that feeling into coherent words. I'll try. A caveat: this is how love feels to me. To other people it might feel very different.

Firstly, love isn't selfish. That is obsession, not love.

Love makes me feel filled with compassion for everyone in the world. It was as if the state of being in love increased my capacity to feel love, and it's now as if I'm overflowing with empathy and the desire to nurture everyone I've ever met (I try to tone this down).

Love is empowering. It makes me feel braver, stronger, wiser, kinder and more beautiful. It makes me feel as if I am more myself than I have ever been.

Love doesn't mean that I am always blissed out and happy, or that nothing bad will ever happen, or that the bad things won't affect me. Love does not protect you from harm or pain or bad luck.

Love is both a comfort and an adventure. I feel safe, and yet I feel like I'm embarking on a journey every day.

( the other days )

Day 3. Where have you been spending your time lately? Three/Five/Ten years ago would you have expected to be there?

Inevitably, I missed a day. So you all have the joy of getting two posts within a few minutes of one another.

I have been spending a lot of time on the internet recently. (I am ignoring the fact that I, for all intents and purposes, don't have internet at home and thus am spending a lot LESS time on the internet than usual. In general, on average, I am spending a lot of time on the internet.)

Three years ago I would not have been the slightest bit surprised. Five or ten years ago I would've been shocked and disgusted at myself.

I was born in the 80s, and am thus a 90s child who grew up without the internet, and then all of a sudden it was there. (It was obviously more gradual than that, but because I literally had not heard of the internet until the first year of high school, and then suddenly everyone was talking about it, and using it with increasing frequency, I had that perception.) I was massively technophobic (I blame this partly on incompetent technology classes at school and partly on my own nature, which is resistant to change), and, without ever spending more than, at most, an hour a week online (mostly checking emails; remember this was pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia), I formed an extremely negative opinion of what the internet was like.

'It's so dehumanising!' I cried dramatically. 'It gives people a false sense of connection when in reality they're becoming more and more distant and disconnected from one another!'

And then 2007 happened.

I had the sense, somewhere amid all the unhappiness that was fogging up my mind, to remember some forum that I'd joined way back in 2003 after idly Googling 'His Dark Materials fansite'. And wow am I grateful I did! From day one the sraffies welcomed me with open arms. Pretty soon, I was breaking every internet rule I'd ever been told by scaremongerers: I told people my name. I told people where I lived. I posted photos of myself. I met people (my first srafcon was with a then 15-year-old lucubratae, and it was basically a four-hour-long geekfest. With awesome food and tea) in real life. I poured my heart out to these people, and they actually listened.

And when I was in a better state of mind, I did exactly the same for them.

Over the years, I've got to know the sraffies better and better. Since moving to the UK, I've met more and more of them in real life (20 at the last count), and I even was in a relationship with one of them for a little while, but I refuse to accept that the 'real life' meetings somehow make the friendships more legitimate, that our online interactions are somehow suspect and not real friendship.

I've celebrated university offers and graduations, births and marriages, the beginnings of relationships and new jobs with them. I've cried with them over deaths, bad luck and bad choices. I've laughed the hardest I've ever laughed in my life with them. We've helped one another with our school and uni work, edited job applications for one another, fixed technological problems for one another. I've watched TV with them, listened to music with them, read books with them, talked about everything from philosophical musings on how language arises to mock battles between vampire and werewolf armies. We have our own language and modes of speech.

We have held each other when we screamed, and danced with each other in sheer joy. They saw me at my worst and stuck around. If that's not real friendship, I don't know what is. Tell me again why my internet friendships aren't valid, and I'll show you the millions of words that thelxiepia have poured out to one another over the past four years. I love her as much as I love my own sisters.

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*Note: I sometimes feel that when I praise the sraffies, it comes across as being a bit critical of my real-life friends who were around me at the time. I know a lot of them would have helped if they had known there was a problem, but I tried to hide what was going on (all the while getting more and more resentful that they WEREN'T NOTICING MY PAIN, OH MY GOD (because depression is logical like that)). It's impossible to help someone if she won't let you, so what I'm saying shouldn't be read as a condemnation of my real-life friends, who are all extremely compassionate and empathetic people.

( the other days )

Day 2. Who are you? In comparison to who you used to be? What made you change?
I am a person with a fragmentary identity, a different person depending on the people around me.

I am where I come from: the daughter of Keri and Jim, the sister of Mim, Kitty and Nell, the granddaughter of Eileen and Fred and Peter and Friedl, a Phillips woman, a Canberran, a Sydneysider.

I am the identities I claim: an ASNaC, a sraffie, an Obernetter, a Usydgrouper, a nerd, a geek, an internet person, a student, a book-reviewer, a library worker, a woman who worked in patisseries. A reader.

I am the emotions I feel: all of them.

I am the relationships I have: girlfriend of M, friend of too many people to name, secure knowing that I love and am loved.

I am my beliefs and ideologies: a feminist, a social-democrat, an atheist.

I am my words and deeds: the acceptance thereof.

I write about exile having never felt more included, more connected in my life.

I believe I am always changing, so there was no one point where I can say, 'There, there I turned a corner and everything changed', except that I used to be a much more unhappy and disappointed person, much less secure in myself. And it was Cambridge, Cambridge and the internet - specifically the sraffies of The Republic of Heaven - that changed me. After these two places, I was myself again. They gave me strength and confidence and love and by some miracle got me out of the six-year-long depression into which I had fallen, and I am forever grateful.

ETA: I got to thinking about why it is that Cambridge and the 'Pub changed me, and I realised it was because that in both those places, for the first time in over two decades, I had to be myself and build myself from the beginning, without any external references. I was coming into both those situations unknown. And that was both liberating and empowering.

( the other days )

elizabethtastic's been doing this meme for the past couple of weeks, and I was waiting for November to roll around so that I had a neat 30-day month in which to follow suit. So, without further ado, I bring you Day 1 of the 'Deep Thoughts 30-Day Meme'.

Day 1. What happened today? If it was the last day of your life, how satisfied would you be with your final hours?

Today was a public holiday, so I had no class. I began the day with an early run in the mist and cold, which was wonderful, as we've just put the clocks back and it's finally light in the early hours of the morning again. I'll put up with longer hours of darkness in the evening as long as I can run in daylight in the morning.

Then I discovered a new bar/cafe that has free wifi (yep, still no router at home) and went there for several hours (basically until my battery died) going over the translations from the thesis chapter I'm revising. Then home, and lunch and a bit of German homework and reading of Harry Potter in German (I did five pages in about 15 minutes! I'm getting better).

After that I did yoga in my room for half an hour. I was going to do it for an hour, but I didn't realise that aerobic exercise aside, I'm really out of shape, and so I did less than I intended. But I still felt great afterwards.

Then I cooked roasted potatoes, sweet potatoes and Spanish onion for dinner while chatting to thelxiepia and reading forums where the users snark fundamentalist cults. After eating, I got infuriated with the wifi at home and returned to the cafe/bar, which is where I am now. I'm in #btts for the first time in a month, and I'm glad I did so.

In answer to the second part of the question, yes, although it's not simply because I had an enjoyable and productive day. It's because I have a personal philosophy of embracing and owning all my emotions, and accepting that I'll have good days and bad, and that the bad days are as important to me as the good. It's not so much 'live each day as if it will be your last', but 'live a life that encompasses the whole range of human emotions and experience'. So if I'd spent today sitting glazed-eyed in front of the computer, eating chocolate while wearing my pyjamas, I'd still consider myself satisfied with my final hours.

( the other days )

Edited to correct a spelling error in the copy-pasted meme questions.