Aw Diddums

Black Cat from the U.S.

I was mulling over ideas for an image contest I might enter… not having settled for anything yet, I looked through a gallery of stock images for white cats. The search term didn’t work that well and I ended up with all sorts: black cats, torties, tabbies, Siamese, Tonkinese, grey cats, tigers, cougars, women in costume…

At first I was just flipping through, stopping at this picture or that, thinking “this one would look good but I would have to paint the tail in” and so on. After a while, I got sad. My tinnitus changes to suit my mood (and reinforce it, I suspect), so I heard the pop equivalent of plaintive violins. I can’t identify it. A male voice singing kindly, as if over a guitar in the deepening summer dusk. A little bit distant, as though I looked over to the next hill slope and he’s sitting there in the honey-warm heather, warbling away on his own.

It’s a wonder I haven’t just drifted away in my sleep… stopped breathing, as the world I live in is not this one! Some of those modelling photos made me uncomfortable: they brought it home to me that I’m surrounded by a host of people living on a different planet. If we’re all on that other planet, who’s on this one?

Back to the cats. I wondered what the unwitting feline models would think if they realized people were putting them in pictures of their own, painting them, or just looking at their cute little button noses from the other side of the world. Each cat was individual… I could imagine how I would have loved each one.

I’d just finished that sentence (not wearing hearing aids as they were tiring my ears) and there was a loud bang, one of those that you feel all through you. You thought somebody was attacking and threw your arms protectively round your head, then realize something fairly major has fallen down or exploded… by ‘fairly major’ I mean not just a pile of books toppling to the floor. I whipped round, my heart hammering. Samson was chasing a moth and had knocked over a heavy tower of tape cassettes.

He wasn’t in the least bit repentant, just chased the fluttering will ‘o the wisp all the way down the stairs and back again, even with me standing on the landing shaking a fist. I looked over my shoulder just now, and he was skulking round by the foot of the tower again… doesn’t care if he knocks it down. Chased him out of the room a second time, but he’s immediately come back.

Sigh.

Where was I?

“Each cat was individual… I could imagine how I would have loved each one.” Sitting looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths… and I believe them.

Why should that make me sad? I have Samson and Delilah (otherwise known as Springy and Squishy). I’m thinking of other cats I’ve known… Sharky heads the list, followed by Thor, Fusspot, Lucky, Tarquin, Scampi, and others. Tarquin was a black moggy with a white bib; I named him after a character in a Georgette Heyer novel. (Well, I was 12 or 14 or something like that). Mum said Tarquin was the stupidest cat she’s ever known. A comfortable, friendly boy though; I miss him.

Does this mean that we can never look at something we like with without feeling pain? The only item I can look at and think “I’ll never lose this,” is my bed!

The accompanying picture is one of the cats I hovered over for ages in the stock photo gallery… he has kind eyes and a modest expression like Thor. if I could have given him a hug, I would have. The original picture can be found at One White Whisker. The cloudy sky is one of mine.

Later, when Mum came upstairs, I told her about the tower of cassettes being knocked over. She said (unsurprisingly), “yes, I heard.” Then added, “my friends tell me it must be nice to hear somebody moving about the house.”

KABOOM.
“Who did that??? Don’t DO that!!!”
(Sound of cats thundering uncaringly up and down the stairs).

What questions do you ask your pets?

This is the one I asked Delilah today… “is emotion a weakness?” She blinked lovingly and did not reply. I only asked because I’m reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I keep feeling confused by his talk of highly emotional intelligent people doing better than their opposites, regardless of IQ. When I thought about it, I identified a deeply rooted part of me objecting, “if they’re emotional, they’re not going to do too well, are they? How can they be doing well?”
I have to bat it away with, “he’s not saying that they have tantrums all over the place; he’s saying that they don’t, even when they want to.”

Perhaps it’s the word ‘emotional’ I’m having trouble with, rather than the concept.

To link back to where I started…

Delilah is the more warm-natured of my two cats. If you remember, I chose Samson first, an older playmate of hers at their old house. Delilah came a few days later in an effort to coax him out from behind the desk… it worked very well.

It took Samson a long time to get used to us even then. He would come up for some attention, (purr purr), and loved being petted, but when you reached out your hand to him, his eyes widened in horror and he ducked back. It was as though he was fluctuating between two views of his situation: he liked comfort and attention, but on the other hand, just look at who was giving it… these huge bipedal monsters who could rend him limb from limb!

He is very affectionate and loving, and comes more and more often for attention, and flinches less and less… but I said to Mum how even his tail feels like a coiled spring. Delilah sags softly in your arms, and Samson is all muscle, tension and barely damped-down suspicion. We stepped in through the front door after I said that, and Delilah was just inside, draped lazily in a cat hammock. I said to Delilah “hello Squidgy.” Samson came galloping up, his tail vibrating vertically, and Mum said “Squishy and Springy.”

The cats have got a handle on me and how I might react to any given situation. When they are happily torturing flies, for instance, I will allow those poor bewildered insects to escape out the window. They can guess how I might react when they come in with a flapping bird.

That is what Samson did yesterday… he scooped up one of those overly-trusting baby blackbirds and brought it in to show Delilah. The cats saw me looking, and realized their fun was about to end. Samson darted away, growling, but I cornered him and got my hands round his jaws, which were clamped like a steel trap on the bird.

I’m aware that emotion, pain etc would cause the most loving pet to turn on you, and Samson is the more highly strung of the two cats. There’s a greater chance he would get angry or scared and go a little out of his mind with it. I usually get a bird away by manipulating the cat’s jaw and he’ll drop it, but Samson held on grimly. So I put my hand in his mouth.

I never put my fingers in a cat’s mouth, no matter how much I love or trust that cat. But there was a part of me that said I would be a coward if I left the bird to be crushed. What’s a hand compared to a whole body? I knew I would probably get bitten but decided I would just have to accept it.

I could feel his teeth pressing hard on my fingers, and he was angry, lashing his tail… then he let go and fell away, leaving me with the bird.

It died – though not right away. It looked up at me with slowly dulling eyes, and chirped more and more weakly. There was blood on my fingers and I thought I would find cuts… there was a small nick on my ring finger, but apart from that I was unscathed.

I’m still surprised at myself – I generally have a healthy respect for the weaponry of even the kindest of cats.

The next time Samson approached me, glancing sideways at my face with caution and slight resentment, I felt a wash of love for him. I was impressed that he didn’t bite me when he could have and was angry enough to. It seems to have bonded us a bit more, and today he came and slept on my lap, which has not been a habit of his. Maybe he has more emotional intelligence than I credited him with, though I’m not too sure about mine…

What’s strange is how you change your mind about something you’ve written or painted… not just once, but two or three times. You create it, and either think it’s wonderful or it’s nice enough, and then you come back to it after tea and suddenly it looks horrible. You consider deleting it, but caution gets the better of you and you leave it alone. After another fortnight or month of living with it, you decide actually you like it best of anything else you’ve done recently, and enter it for a competition or a carnival.

After all that, I tend to feel that even if I’ve ended up liking it, it’s probably not all that great, but then again, other people will come along and say it’s their favourite too.

So confusing, but it’s one vacillating reason why I feel that nothing we do or see is 100% true. If it was, we would know a good thing the minute we saw it, and not hum and haw for weeks. We would like or dislike the same things. Furthermore, what comes from the heart can end up looking cheap and shoddy, often enough because so many others have followed a similar path. Familiarity breeds contempt… as does thinking we understand where someone else was coming from, and that it’s nothing new or fresh – looking back and down from our relative vantage points of maturity and experience.

But it IS all relative, isn’t it?

Being impressed by something somebody else fails to rate is often an indication of how far we have come – “yes, been there, done that…” and something looks good to us because it’s better than our previous achievements. It might not impress others, or yourself further along the line, and sometimes we fall into the same traps we saw other people fall into and meant to avoid… just because we got there ourselves and those traps were grinning wide with welcome. One way or another, achievement and failure (two sides of one coin) are merely a point of progress or a state of mind.

The arty sites have a plethora of contests, just for fun, and I’ve been finding them a source of inspiration. I’ve only entered one so far, but got an honourable mention. I’ve been working with others in view, and it’s had the effect of making me even more prolific but not actually posting anything… just in case I post something I could have put in one of these small contests. Most of them say “only new images please.”

I’m usually reasonably pleased with the pictures I turn out, but something unsettling has occurred. The last four pictures I made… I didn’t just like them; I loved them. I was using techniques I avoided before (drawing and painting) and didn’t set out meaning to; it just happened. Even stranger, I only wanted to make one of them, and that was in the nature of a quickie (to try out a Photoshop tutorial).

A short aside: I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to talking about this particular hobby. I don’t like saying ‘my art’ or ‘my artwork’ as it sounds so pompous, and usually alternate between ‘my pictures’ and ‘my images’… but that gets old quite fast. Another mental block I have is when it comes to digital stuff, I can never say “I painted” or “I drew,” as I see those being for traditional media only (real pencils, paints, paper). I know that ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are accepted terms in digital media too… isn’t drawing with a mouse or a tablet pen just as much a physical process as drawing with a pencil? And it’s not even as precise, half the time. Still, I avoid it, as I know if I said “I painted a picture today,” most people would assume I’d had the watercolours out.

That leaves me with the problem of how to describe the process… “I made something, created something, did something?” Icky. Overtones of school and Blue Peter.

About the four pictures I made that I liked more than I expected to… I was fairly sure none of them would work, and if they did, it would take some hard slogging to make anything of them; wouldn’t it be easier to make a vector picture with gradients and layer styles? I was in two minds about trying these projects at all. Even worse, I disliked the raw material I started out with… two ugly fractals, an artificial vector flower (made by myself in Paintshop Pro), an untidy Photoshop brush (still be to superceded… deliberately spelling that with a ‘c’…) and a shaky drawing with the small El Cheapo tablet dating from the Year 2000 which I recently dug out from a plastic bag. (It doesn’t go with Mac System X, so I had to put it on the PC… and even then the installation was a bit iffy).

The tablet is supposed to make drawing easier, but my first effort was messy and not worth a second look. I thought “never mind, I’ll send it across to the Mac so the little white Mac-mouse can clean it up.” That’s not what the tablet is for… but the shaky drawing is now in one of my Golden Four pictures.

The thing is, you often hear people say (usually of photos) that if it was bad to start with, you can’t make it good. I disagree. You could take the worst photo in the world and turn it into a thing of beauty, though it probably wouldn’t be a photo any more.

To start with, it’s all I can do to keep on with these tough projects, but as time goes by and I see signs that something good is emerging, a sense of wonder creeps in… and you couldn’t drag me away.

This might not seem to be connected, but we were watching Stargate after missing the beginning. It was about an alien city in a dome; the citizens were linked to a main computer and were being brainwashed. People were being killed to keep the population small and manageable, and the survivors’ memories were altered so that they wouldn’t notice their fellows had vanished. I was convinced the Council (or some higher body) were the villains, but they were as much victims as anybody. At the end, I said to Mum, “who was doing it?”
“The computer,” said Mum, squinting strangely at me.
“I just thought… someone must have programmed it to do those things?”
“It was the computer. It got into their minds, like it’s got into yours, and makes them all unseeing and unheeding…”

So, the computer’s the villain. Such a weaver of fantastic worlds and things that don’t exist… even pictures that aren’t on paper. Though, the other day, someone I was talking to said it wasn’t till she had one of her fractals professionally printed and held it in her hands that she realized it was real.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I die… will all these pictures, including the Golden Four, be zapped? My diaries burned, disks shredded, words lost? My whole life on computer, deleted.

Mum says she doesn’t care what happens after she dies. The whole planet could blow up; it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But it matters to me. Apart from caring what happens to cats, trees, and dolphins, I want to feel I’ve left some kind of mark. If the planet implodes, so do my pictures. Maybe I will be the only person (apart from Mum and the Computer) to have seen them.

It’s funny how the subconscious mind operates. The other night I dreamed a young student was procrastinating by churning out fractals and Apophysis scripts instead of studying for his exams. His study topics included fractals but he was wasting time on fractal art instead. He even wrote a little poem which he put on his site… and this is it, word for word, not a woolly half-memory of a fading dream:

The breaks are in the wrong places but it has exactly 17 syllables… like a haiku. Yes, I suppose the computer has got into my mind.

Goodness me:
Show Us What’s Happening (contest). I don’t feel inspired myself, but had been wondering if I could depict agoraphobia or even deafness; this contest isn’t a world away from it.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and pondering (don’t we all?) on the uncertainty I often feel about the day ahead. I was wondering how I would describe that if I had to. At first I thought “it’s like going to battle without your armour,” but we don’t wear armour today…

This is the nearest I can come to it: it’s like going to work in your pyjamas and bunny slippers, and everybody else speaks a different language. It’s going to rain, and you haven’t brought your umbrella or handbag, which are at home with the door unlocked. You’ve got on the bus and and realize to your horror that you either don’t have the fare or have lost your ticket, and you don’t recognize the part of town you’re in.

I hate feeling like that in the morning.

I keep writing blog posts and not posting them. I’m not even sure where they’ve got to.

I’ve discovered I can add simple elements (letters and symbols) into Apophysis to be rendered as beautiful fractal art… it’s just as well I can’t add photos and things, as I would be rendering fractals of the cats. There is now a version for Macs called Apophysis-J… I’ve not tried it yet as I’m trying to hold off. Partly for my sake, partly for the Mac’s.

A couple of nights ago I made 16 pictures. They weren’t straightforward renders or ’snapshot fractals’ as I’ve seen them referred to; but they seemed so easy. It could be I’m feeling a little tired of it now… not forever, mind you. I always come back to this.

Last night I was amused because somebody wandered past one of my art pages and said “Really crazy work you have… out of the ordinary.” I imagine that was a compliment, as he added one to his favourites (not the other crazy stuff, mind you). I don’t think I do anything different; I’m trying all sorts of things and haven’t settled down to anything in particular. Today I’m doing fractals, tomorrow it could be airbrushing. It depends on the genres you’re used to viewing.

I came up with a picture a while ago using Photoshop brushes which Mum said were like hat pins. The person who made them requires permission if they’re used commercially, and someone sent her a photo of a pizza box with her ‘hat pins’ all over it. They hadn’t asked her first.

I feel in need of a megamug of very hot strong mocha to clear the fog I’m in. I hope I find what I’ve done with the other blog posts. Maybe they fell into Apophysis by mistake, and are spilling out as floods of spirals, curls, swirls and Julias.

Normally, around this time of year, I’m muttering about crowded cafés, shops, streets and roads. Not so much this year! For a couple of weeks now I’ve been smiling happily, feeling warm and giving… I suspect it has something to do with the art sites I frequent. When people are being people around you, having their quirks, weaknesses, concerns and their strengths (largely the creative process, or at least the desire to do well at it) – it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling!

When folk come along and add your work to their favourites, that doesn’t hurt either… all sorts of people, from teenage girls to 65 year-old guys in Finland. You have something in common with them and so you’re no longer thinking (for example) that older people play Bridge rather than get on the net, or that younger people are an alien species who lurk on street corners. When I was 16, if I’d known other 16 year-olds who were keen to share their passion for drawing, painting or photography with me, I’d have been delighted. Who knows what difference the internet would have made to me at that age?

Getting back to my recent resurgence of love and goodwill to all humankind, a possible factor is that phenomenon I mentioned in an earlier blog post: when I don’t do something very much, I glide through it with ease. If I was going to town every other day, I’d be a lot grumpier than I am now.

A couple of days ago, Mum asked me why I was grinning. I told her I got a new comment on my ‘introvert bloggers’ post and was thinking about how disastrous it would be if the internet collapsed all of a sudden. “Imagine life without it,” I said.

“Aiee!” said Mum, then (after a pause), “introverts have a warped view of life.”

Pushing away the niggling thought that I have a tendency to ‘think’ myself into tight corners, I said “but you’re an introvert yourself.”
“Yes – I’m an introvert.”
“Though you have lots of friends and sit on all those committees.”
“When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been able to give speeches and talks, but it’s not so bad now. Anyway, we can’t let idiots run everything.”
“By idiots… do you mean extroverts?”
“Er… more or less. There’s usually a balance.”
“Extroverts go out and do stuff without thinking, while introverts think about things so much they don’t want to do them?”
“Something like that.”

Hmm…

A stray memory surfaced in my mind just now. I was working on a large poster with a friend in art class at school. It was beginning to grate on me that she was so bossy; she would say “do this” and we did it all her way, though I was a better artist. I found I was scared to touch the picture without permission. Further back in this post I was complaining that I couldn’t share the fun of artwork with friends (apart from the odd scribble with felt tip pens), but what was going on here was not sharing.

One day I decided it was my picture too, and I was jolly well going to put some dots in. Of course they looked terrible, and if I’d been in my right senses I would never have bothered with them. When my friend saw them, she got very cross and painted all the dots out again, and I didn’t object. She was completely unaware, I think, that I hadn’t put the dots in because I wanted dots… I’d put them in to assert myself a little.

This is doubtless one good reason why introverts and extroverts don’t always work well together. If someone you know at work or school is acting mulishly, throwing senseless spanners in the works, it’s possible that something similar is going on. If you don’t want me to break out in a rash of dots, don’t boss me. (Ahem).

I’ve gone a little quiet, I know – I’m following more Photoshop tutorials. It’s great when I find ones I can use in Photoshop Elements 2.0. So many other Photoshoppers seem able to afford the top applications.

On Wednesday night I had a dream…. it cast a slight shade, a transparent gradient, over my day. The closer we got to bedtime, the bluer the cast of my mood.

In the dream, I went to tea with one of my cat clients, doing my best to make pleasant conversation, but she cocked a sardonic eyebrow at me. I was relieved when one of her cats shot off to the end of the garden, and a terrible caterwauling arose. It seemed her cat was picking on one of my cats, Lucky. Lucky died years back, before I started this blog.

I rescued him by picking him up and carrying him back to my seat. He seemed surprised at first, then clung closely to me, purring deeply. I could feel it vibrating through my heart. He seemed to be saying “it’s such a long time since you last held me.” I was bemused to realize it myself, and couldn’t think why such a distance had grown between us.

Later in the dream I discovered I had a huge aquarium at the back of my upstairs sitting room. It contained three large fish, about 40 cm long: two sharks and a human diver. I had to carry one of the fish to another part of the house in a red plastic bucket. I could have picked any of the three – the diver, the slim pretty shark, or the strong, sturdy, moody shark… I picked the moody one. He was the most likely to bite, but I felt he would be better able to deal with being removed from the tank. After scooping him out, I was annoyed to find there was no water in the bucket – I had to dash off to get some before I could put him in.

We were possibly showing him to a visitor, after which I returned him to the tank… he was slightly limp, but recovered quickly. Nobody had been bitten.

Sharky… I wonder if there’s a connection. Cats who have passed on… one of them missing me, and the other swimming moodily in a tank.

And then thinking how people are here one day and gone the next. Dad working abroad, making a life for himself and his family – and now it’s just us. And the baby mouse… I rescued him from the cats. At first I thought he was dead, and Samson was pinning him down with one claw, but when I got closer, the little thing was shaking. His legs were so thin and crumpled under him that one looked broken, but he was just weak. I took him straight outside with some crumbs. I don’t like wearing my nice pink slippers outside, but for the mouse’s sake, I trekked them across wet grass and placed him in a snug corner near the shed. He hobbled and wobbled slowly under the shed… Not convinced he will have survived, but maybe he found a nest of leaves and slept himself to recovery.

Mum accused Samson of nibbling the top off a muffin, but I said I gave it to the mouse.

I was in Photoshop Elements painting a light bulb in a lamp, when a song came into my head… one of Melanie’s most ’sobbing’ melodies. It might have been Candles in the Rain but I’m not sure; it’s years since I’ve played her music. It wasn’t Ruby Tuesday; I would recognize it as soon as it came up.

The Photoshop tutorial was absorbing, but while working on it, I remembered a stray comment from one of the 30 or 40 others who have already followed it. She said she decided to do it because there was nothing else to do, and she was feeling sad, longing for some human contact. I became aware in my mind of all the others tracing the same lines – some quickly, some slowly, some happily, others less so.

I’d like a nice pink gradient tomorrow, please, and a different song.

I like Morrison’s instant mocha – I figured I would be one of the very few who did, but when Mum was shopping with a friend, she told her I liked that drink, and the friend bought some to try. My toes curled in embarrassment as I was convinced she would hate it, but one day there was no mocha left in the house… just a box of Morrison’s instant latte, which I’m less keen on, though it’s OK.

Mum said she looked and they were out of it in the supermarket, but she got a box of latte instead. Then she said her friend was with her again and wanted more mocha, so she let her have the last box.

Ah… well I’m glad she likes it. Move over, Rolo.

I do like the so-called healthy drinks as well… there are a couple of juice bars in town and I sometimes opt for those instead of coffee (she blogged smugly, only having had two juices so far… one from each bar).

The first was a mixed fruit juice which included ginger. It was called High Flyer… very tasty indeed, but there wasn’t much I dared order from that shop. They almost all seemed to have names like ‘Hangover Remedy’ or ‘Stress Reliever’, which are hard to ask for at the counter. ‘High Flyer’ was possibly a veiled warning…

The other bar had much better names, and I chose a smoothie called Bali Hai. That was lovely too, and very cool as there was crushed ice in it. Although I asked for small drinks in both shops, they were too big for me and are very hard on the stomach. Coffee seems to slip down more easily.

I start to understand why fruit juices are sometimes described as ‘hits’. I have a juice-making book which is very fond of the word, but that doesn’t seem to me particularly desirable… don’t they say “all good things in moderation”?

I have the suspicion that other people drink more than me. Folk are always stopping for coffee, more coffee, and then tea; then there’s the crowd who have round after round of drinks at the pub. I don’t know how people get through even two drinks at one sitting… I’ve generally had enough before the end of the first. This fascination for beverages of all kinds has me completely mystified.

Mum said she used to worry I wasn’t drinking enough, and that was as recently as me coming to stay with her… then she noticed how rapidly I was knocking back the juices and the Coca-colas! That’s usually after a dog-walk, especially in hot weather – I get very thirsty then. I also make coffee almost every time I pass the kettle… it’s the routine I love; I leave so much of it to go cold.

The sheer size of mugs offered by some cafés is ridiculous – there have been ‘medium’ ones which were so big and heavy I needed both hands to lift them. It’s not just McD’s who go in for this ’supersize’ business.

I spotted a short piece in a newspaper recently… it said they don’t know where the idea came from that people need eight glasses of water a day to remain healthy; there is nothing to indicate that’s true. Some people seem perfectly healthy and happy drinking nothing but tea.

It’s not quite the end of March and there are icy showers of hail aplenty, but my stress levels are already rising.

I have more problems in the warmer, brighter weather when people come out to enjoy the sun. I don’t look around and think “awk, look at all the people! I’m going home!” Usually what happens is that I set out to have the same kind of day that I had yesterday and the day before, and it’s only when I notice how troubled I feel that I realize there are more people around than usual. The increase would be marginal and I react to it before noticing on a more conscious level.

I felt quite bad today, and it’s only Friday – it felt more like a Saturday. I didn’t want to continue feeling that way, so I straightened up and looked around, thinking there must be something in the way I think that brings it on. It’s often what you can’t see that is so scary… if you are looking away and there are shadowy figures loping towards you, they could be anybody. But if you look directly at them, you see a harassed mother clutching her 6-year old; an elderly couple ambling around contentedly; a group of tall schoolchildren looking at nobody but themselves. They are no threat. But even as you glance at them, they move out of vision and other shadowy figures enter in.

I’m not afraid of them as people – not in any real sense. Sometimes I feel alien in their world as though not experiencing life the way they do, but as soon as I recognize them as fellow human beings with troubles of their own, my inadequacy dies away. It’s this initial lack of recognition that causes the problems. When I first start to stress out, I don’t shake, although a panic attack would be on the cards if I felt really trapped. I feel tight, tucked in, maybe a bit dizzy – and ill. I’m not sure I know what ’sick building syndrome’ feels like, but if you put the word ‘people’ in there instead of ‘building,’ that’s what I imagine it would be like – though I’m probably way off course.

To get away from the bodies pressing round me, I withdraw more and more into myself. I’ve been accused of not seeing friends when they pass me on the road… “I waved and said hello and you didn’t see me”. That’s deliberate – that’s me trying to escape into myself. I have no intention of ignoring anybody, and if I do see you, I will smile back; relieved to see a face I know… but disassociation seems to be my way of keeping to what I’m doing or where I’m going without being thrown off course by the strangers around me.

The problem is, having withdrawn into yourself, you can’t withdraw any further; you’re still conscious of people, and would pull back even more if there was anywhere to go. That’s where the tight feeling of tension comes from, as though I’m leaning back into a wall and wishing it would let me through.

I decided there had to be a way of re-asserting my right to the spot I’m standing on. I’m too aware that others are challenging me for it – some humbly, others more aggressively. I’m constantly under the impression I have no right to standing room unless I’m alone. The only thing to do is to stand tall, take a deep breath, and look calmly but directly at the other people and at the area around me, and stop trying to escape when there’s nowhere to escape to.

It gives me a little breathing space, but I continue to feel ill – and I can never stop in one place for long because there’s always somebody trundling round a corner and bouncing off me.

Talking of what gives us balance – I’m a much steadier person when I have lots of time alone. It makes everything else seem like an adventure in comparison. If I experience too many such adventures, it becomes stressful… I’m usually much better after a few days at home, rather than going out day after day. It was like that when I was going to the skating rink… I was a fair and balanced skater for a few days after getting the hang of it, and then I lost my nerve, surrounded by other people wheeling crazily around. I stood at the side, gripping the handrail, and didn’t want to go back. I didn’t get better the more I tried… I got worse. I’m like that with lots of things. I don’t believe that ‘facing my fears’ and immersing myself in situations I dislike is to my benefit; it usually has the opposite effect.

I’m looking out at softly falling snow… it’s brighter weather, but not all that warm yet. The sun is coming, though. Oh yes, I can feel it, waiting with trembling anticipation behind its cloud. Nothing I can do will make it stay there.

Yesterday morning when I woke too early, I thought I might fall asleep again if I tried a little meditation.

I’m unused to talking about any such thing, and have to keep fighting off the urge to say ‘medication’. Meditation would be more relaxing if they called it something else. Anyway…

It’s difficult ‘meditating’ when the kittens have woken up and are thrashing around playfully, but I closed my eyes anyway, attempting to visualize something pleasant. The other day I read about a mother who took up meditation with her little girl; they would sit together and fall asleep. When they closed their eyes, the girl liked to think of her cat. So do I. When I’m trying to come up with a pleasant image, I always end up filling my mind’s eye with Sharky. He stares at me with his clear green eyes and blinks contentedly, and that dark stripy tail wraps itself round his feet.

Feeling guilty, I’ve tried to think about the kittens instead, but in my thoughts they fix me with their devouring gaze, giving rise to the unsettling feeling they’re about to thunder over my feet with their claws. That doesn’t make me relax. So I summoned up a beautiful sparkling blue-green wave. It was tight and rolling, rearing up higher and higher – the pit of my stomach dropped away when I imagined the wave swallowing me up along with forests, villages and towns.

I shifted my thoughts to the nature photos on the Caedes desktop wallpaper site. I thought of sunlight arrowing down between tall green trees… beautiful. Static, though; no real depth. I needed something that moved.

Said hello to Sharky again and buzzed past… thinking there must be other images out there I could hold in my mind. Finally I had it – winter snow in Edinburgh. Not just any snow, it has to be early 1980s snow. You would get up in the morning for school, and look out into the blackness, and it was whirling down. Through the back window it disappeared again into more darkness, falling behind the rose bushes and apple tree, but when you looked out the front window, the sky seemed lighter and the snowflakes flew into the hedge.

Normally I hated having to face school early on a cold dark morning, but heavy snow often meant we got to stay at home. That makes it a positive memory rather than a negative one.

In my mind’s eye I tried to be part of that scene, looking out of the window at the hypnotic motion of the snow. A distant pair of headlights appeared at the far corner of the vision, startling me. Headlights? Where did they come from? I didn’t ask for headlights. But they would have been there… cars and buses creeping cautiously through the slush, window wipers beating, leaving plenty of room for each other.

Funny how those headlights beamed out of my memory all by themselves.

The kittens gradually stopped pummelling the lights out of each other, and in my mind the snow spiralled down against a dark grey backdrop… now lashing with fragile fury; now drifting implacably. Next thing I knew, the sun was high and Delilah was curled against my neck, chewing my thumb.

I watched a Natural World documentary on the rescue of swimmers by dolphins. It was so amazing that I watched it again the next night. The incidents were not all that recent, but I don’t remember reading about them in the news.

Four years ago I was talking with a friend who swam with dolphins. She said she was told by the trainers that dolphins were just curious and did what they were trained to do. Looking back at that email conversation, it seems I had seen the following:

There was something on the news recently about a trainer being attacked by a killer whale, who went berserk and tried to drown him in front of everybody… do killer whales suffer from burnout and breakdowns too?? I would have done the same to some of the folk at the office, given a large pool and a bucket of fish.

My friend said she’d heard that the whale in question was an adolescent, probably wigging out teenager-style.

All of the dolphins in the recent Natural World documentary were wild. They were not performing for fish. Dolphins are obviously no friend of sharks… it could be a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That still points to emotion – a more active emotion than swimming away thinking “thank goodness it wasn’t our turn to get eaten.”

Whatever their aims, it doesn’t seem to me to prove anything when someone points to the fact that dolphins can be aggressive and cruel to humans and each other. Nobody ever said that humans were angels; we still consider ourselves capable of altruism. We recognize that we have personality differences, imbalances, feuds, rivalries, suspicion and so on… why would dolphins be any different? They’re not fairytale creatures; they’re flesh and blood.

While feeling so tired and disillusioned, it’s nice for me to ‘believe’ in something that’s out there, particularly something dwelling in an environment as alien and frightening as the sea. It’s the next best thing to believing in superheroes… no; it’s better than that.

Are we completely on our own here, or are some animals prepared to show kindness?

All the time I was writing this (most especially in the middle of my last sentence), the girl kitten (Delilah) gave me at least three playful, painful, completely unexpected scratches. On thumb, finger, and the inside of my elbow. Apart from Cheeky, she’s the worst kitten for scratches I’ve ever encountered. She’ll land on a bare arm or hand with all her claws digging, or suddenly slash at you as though your finger, hand or foot was a mouse to be slaughtered. No holds barred.

The boy kitten, Samson, is old enough to be gentle. When he’s playing, he just holds your fingers with sheathed paws and touches them with his teeth. That’s what Sharky (my last cat) used to do. Delilah will learn too – most kittens do. When kittens are too fierce with my friend Kristin, she will draw back and say severely: “don’t do that – that’s BARE SKIN.” Cats seem to get the message eventually.

Humans are soft, fragile and defenceless in some situations – they need to be cared for.

Out of interest, I fished out an assortment of links on dolphins, and on animal emotions in general.

Three Dolphins Rescue Tourist from Sharks

Dolphins Rescue Swimmers from 3m Great White

Dolphins and Animal Assisted Therapy

Do Animals Have Emotions?

Animal Emotion: Do We Drug Normal Human Behavior?

Animal Sentience

Farm Animals ‘Need Emotional TLC’

I liked them all, but especially the last article. “Please do not shout at the cows.”

In an earlier blog post, I was mumbling about the ratings received by the more ‘different’ names on Baby Names Country. There are also ratings on Baby Names World, but I couldn’t see a way to do that, so I imagine you have to register.

On Baby Names Country I was reading advice claiming that in the U.S., 85% of first names are chosen from a list of only 200 names – and other countries are more or less the same, presumably including the U.K.

That is shocking – I thought humans were supposed to be imaginative and adventurous? So many people would like to consider themselves as being apart from the crowd, but this naming convention is proof that most people prefer not to be all that different.

Of course there tend to be naming conventions within families as well – the same first name being used for the oldest son (so that you have to distinguish between ‘Carl senior’ and ‘Carl junior’ as in Snow Falling on Cedars), or the wife’s maiden name is used as the middle name of one of her children, or the mother-in-law hints she would be delighted if the first-born bore her name, and so on. Family connections are important, but when they restrict naming opportunities this way, they complicate life.

Perhaps it’s comforting to believe that there will always be a John Brown, son of John Brown, son of John Brown living in the village, and it all runs into one in your mind… you feel that life goes on forever. But sometimes you don’t want the different people to merge in that way.

There will always be bad and unfortunate names as well as good, but I wish we could have the courage to strike out a bit more; to search for a little more individuality.

Total Sensory Deprivation – a few nights ago I recorded a Horizon documentary on the subject. It reminded me of the office I used to work in.

You would expect everyone to have a fair number of office connections and opportunities for socializing (if only by the water cooler, though we didn’t have one). Unfortunately I wasn’t really talking to anyone after my original friends and contacts left for pastures new. I tried in my quiet way to make new friends, but people had their own friends already and didn’t pay a lot of attention. I think they didn’t want to get involved with someone so deaf and so ’shy’, feeling that I was not their responsibility. They could get on with office life in their own comfortable bubbles and leave me to my colleagues in my own small department. After all, the folk in my department were the ones who chose me.

The feeling was awful, actually, and the longer it went on, the worse I felt. I wasn’t getting any of the office news or gossip, and I had no one to vent steam with or help me get a sense of proportion about things.

Some people were quite kind and friendly, but when I asked one what happened at a pension-related meeting, she forwarded my email (without checking with me first) to the Human Resources Manager. He told me people were not allowed to advise others, for legal reasons. It was now office policy.

Because of my profound hearing loss, I never knew what people were saying at meetings or amongst themselves. It made me wonder how I was ever going to inform myself if no one was allowed to discuss meetings with me… I wanted to tear my hair out!

There was an image in my mind of what I was going through, and I can still recall it. It felt to me as though I was falling down a bottomless well. I was trying to reach out and touch the sides but all I felt was air whistling past my fingertips. Not Alice in Wonderland – more like Diddums in Limbo.

That was my state of mind not so long before I crashed.

Total Sensory Deprivation? No, not quite. But the concept reminds me of that office situation – of me falling down my dark well, disassociated from everybody else.

The Horizon documentary was interesting – in an experiment, people were shut for 48 hours in small, bare cells without light, sound, human interaction or entertainment. It had quite a disturbing effect on them – some started to hallucinate, but I wondered how much that had to do with tiredness. That’s probably the point – they’d feel tired, out of touch and less sure of themselves.

One man who was kept in solitary confinement in real life talked of his experiences. When he mentioned his auditory hallucinations, I laughed out loud. The more he described them, the louder I laughed – and this was in the middle of me grieving for my cat, so I felt slightly hysterical. It wasn’t because I thought what happened to the man was funny, but because I get those… those auditory hallucinations.

I hear music – choirs, orchestras, jazz singers, country singers, opera singers. When you allow them to disturb you, they get louder. And then suddenly they stop, just like that! As though someone took a needle off a record.

It’s very strange.

I never thought of it as hallucinating, which is probably why I’ve been more fascinated than stressed; even comforted sometimes. To me it’s a form of tinnitus. Maybe it even masks the real tinnitus, which to many people is just a wasp’s scream (description courtesy of my mother).

Nor is it like having pop hits playing in your head, or (you’ll hate me for this) How Much is That Doggy in the Window? You can HEAR heavenly choirs or beautiful baritones or whatever – the sounds are in your ears.

At my old house I abandoned my bedroom, preferring to sleep on my sofa. I was never quite sure why I did that, apart from a general feeling of claustrophobia. The documentary offered me a fresh insight. Was it so different from the kind of experiences the people in the experiment were going through? With my blinds closed and lined curtains drawn, it was fairly dark in my room – and without my glasses I’m very myopic. Without my hearing aids I’m almost stone deaf. There were no other humans to talk to in that house: lack of human interaction. Then, when you’re lying there, trying to get to sleep, there is nothing to occupy yourself with. Thus I got the auditory hallucinations quite frequently, and when I was absolutely exhausted but not dropping off for any reason, I very occasionally got visual hallucinations as well. (Like Mr Guppy). Now that DID frighten me, in a way that the heavenly choirs didn’t.

It wasn’t Total Sensory Deprivation, but it wasn’t all that far off.

When I moved out to the sofa, I had two windows and a glass door – it was a lighter room. There were the cats strolling in and out: company. There was the TV… talking people and entertainment just a switch away. I feel sure now that’s why I changed rooms… and I’m not potty or anything, I’m just like any other human being. I like to be a part of life.

Some people love painting their houses. They finish redecorating and promptly start planning a new colour scheme for next year. Nothing is ever allowed to peel or get dingy and flaky. But I hate painting. Probably because it takes me ages to do, and I manage to get paint everywhere, including the taps in the bathroom. No matter how carefully I prepare and clean the area, the fresh paint is quickly teeming with fluff, dirt and lumps – and when I paint outdoors, there are always greenflies and tiny spiders wriggling in it, which makes me feel bad.

I hate the paint itself, and the vicious fluid that cleans the paintbrushes. Mum said I could wash the brushes with water – but it didn’t turn out like that. It washed off, then stuck back on. So we had to fetch the vicious stuff from the shed to sort it out.

I said “I’m the worst painter in the family.”
“That’s not possible,” said Mum. “Your father was the worst painter in the family.”
Maybe so – but he’s not alive any more, so that puts me in pride of place. It makes me feel a little better – I can blame my painting failures on him!

Later, I was flicking quickly through a small book on decluttering that Mum left lying around. (I can’t give title or author at the moment, as it’s still at her house). It said “you can’t take it with you”, then elaborated. It said that we never own things outright, even if we think we do. We don’t even own our own bodies – they are on temporary loan from the universe. And if something we possess gets lost or damaged, we might think it’s a terrible calamity, but in fact it’s not going to spoil our lives – generally we can live without ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was.

I discussed this with Mum. I was no stranger to the idea that we own nothing. The houses themselves are not ours – we live in them for a while and then we move out, and other people move in. Antiques and collectables are not ours – we simply look after them for a while, then pass them on. I’ve known this since I was a teenager. It doesn’t stop me feeling possessive about things that I think are ‘mine’. My house. My cats. My teeth.

I felt there was something not quite right about the author’s theories, though I agreed with some of it – I haven’t put my finger on exactly what. It’s reassuring that ultimately I can depart this mortal coil, and nothing matters all that much, but…

If we really don’t own anything, not even our own bodies, that means there is much else that we don’t own. Husbands, wives, partners? If we don’t own our own bodies, we certainly don’t ‘have’ children. Does one have a life? What about the food we eat? Do we own that? In theory the food is free-floating, and if someone comes along and grabs it from you, they have as much right to eat it as you do – but if they grab it from you every time, and never let you have a bite, you will eventually die. At some point you have to insist on keeping that food. Reminds me of a TV commercial that’s on just now – the girl is moody and pushes her plate away, but when someone tries to take it, the girl goes into attack mode and grates: “touch my food, feel my fork!” She owns that food, alright.

Then there’s the issue about damage or loss of possessions not being the end of the world. I can’t help feeling there’s something more to that than simple possessiveness. Perhaps you have lost an item that gave you something that nothing else could do in quite that way. Maybe the jacket made you look especially smart, and you got a job when you wore it to an interview. Maybe the dress brought out the colour of your eyes and made you feel better as a result. Maybe the draft you wrote was going to be your bestseller and you couldn’t rewrite it quite as well. Even if it’s something you haven’t had time to get attached to yet, you will feel you didn’t get the use of it for your money. If you lose all these things, they won’t ruin your life but they can affect it up to a point. It’s telling that, even while saying “you don’t own anything, not even your life,” you have to use the words “your life.” Your life. What other words are you going to use?

Then again, there are things we have no particular need to keep… you liked the dress, but even if you get full use out of it, it will fall apart eventually. When I pointed that out, Mum laughed, and said “like men and their jackets. They can never let go. Even if it’s old and limp and all out at the elbows, with the cupboard full of snazzy new ones, they won’t let you throw it out because ‘that’s my GOOD jacket.’”

Sometimes it’s a case of altering our mindset towards the items that we ‘own’. When we are used to thinking of something as being ‘good’, it can be hard to let it go. Though Mum had a qualification even there: “it might have been a more comfortable jacket than the others.”

Well, I’ve just had to throw out my extra large denim shirt. For years I wore it as a kind of light jacket with the sleeves rolled up, but now it’s worn completely through at collar, elbows and cuffs. I have put it in the rag bag with the other rejected clothes. I gave it a wash first, hung it up to dry, then placed it in the bag last, with a pat and a hug. It’s on its way back to the universe.

Edit Feb 2008: Comments for this entry (copied across from the old blog site):

1. Pacian wrote at Feb 20, 2007 at 16:59:
“In theory the food is free-floating, and if someone comes along and grabs it from you, they have as much right to eat it as you do – but if they grab it from you every time, and never let you have a bite, you will eventually die.”

And yet couldn’t it be argued that by repeatedly grabbing it from you, they are really claiming ownership of it, in a rather underhanded fashion? Or perhaps you’re right, and in this case a more socialist notion of collective property is necessary, and the food should be eaten by whichever of you needs it most…

Because, of course, in the opposite case to your scenario, if you keep all the food that you own to yourself, then those who owned no food would starve instead.

2. Diddums wrote at Feb 21, 2007 at 01:30:
All food for thought…

I’ve been realizing that there’s an assumption that ‘you’ (your spirit) are separate from the universe in all sorts of ways – we are borrowing our bodies from the universe but are not part of it ourselves. I suggest that we are part of the universe (both spirit and body) and therefore own everything just as much as we own nothing. Not sure where that gets us in the food-grabbing dilemma.

3. kateblogs wrote at Feb 22, 2007 at 17:37:
Hmm, yes, I see what you mean. If we are borrowing our bodies from the universe how can we be separate from it? Surely that would mean we are not part of this universe and originate elsewhere and if the writer expects the reader to believe that, he/she is making all sorts of assumptions, not least that the reader shares his/her view of the reality of ‘things’.

4. geosomin wrote at Feb 22, 2007 at 19:13:
I love painting…but hate all the stuff leading up to the color part.

My husband on the other hand is cursed – I watch him paint and it should look good…but it always looks terrible when he paints. So usually he hangs out while I paint and brings me coffee and tries to make me laugh hard enough to fall off the ladder. Makes it more fun for both of us.

Hope the moving/settling is coming along well…

The idea of ownership and “stuff” is always something I struggle with. I like to think I’m not too materialistic, but there are sentimental things that matter to me…on the other hand I firmly believe I own my life…as much as I can. I don’t want to be guilty for having things I like, and yet I don’t want them to ever be the reason I live for. Maybe I’m an optimist and stubborn, but I don’t want someone else dictating what I do or say…I believe in giving and helping, but if you wear yourself out for others is that healthy? It’s when my life is taken over by other things that make it feel as though it isn’t my own that I generally get at odds with things and myself.

5. Diddums wrote at Feb 23, 2007 at 23:37:
It would be interesting to think we are not the centre of the universe, but the universe itself… ‘we are stardust’, or something.

Mum’s ‘let us paint together’ technique is to have me using a roller on the middle parts of the wall while she does the edges and fiddly bits with a small roller and a brush. It doesn’t stop me splodging paint on the new wallpaper, though…

“Maybe I’m an optimist and stubborn, but I don’t want someone else dictating what I do or say…”

That’s exactly why I wouldn’t go on one of those programmes – I’m sure there were several in which people had to declutter their houses, and they were made to get rid of some things they obviously didn’t want to give away. Even worse, there was a ‘crusher’, so when they sold their things, they could keep maybe one thing but the rest had to go in the crusher. Well maybe someone else would have liked those things and just wasn’t at the boot sale…

Someone who was keeping clothes as souvenirs was told to cut squares from them and throw out the rest. I’m quite sure she eventually ditched the entire box because they just wouldn’t have meant anything.

6. Bunnyman wrote at Feb 27, 2007 at 20:59:
I’m for the stardust theory.

Methinks we’re are all made up of tiny pieces of the Universe, even our souls – the breath that brings our fleshy substance to life. One moment we’re here, one moment elsewhere. Like my “good” jacket, one day I’ll wear out and all my pieces will eventually be recycled (hopefully minus lumps).

Mind you, while I’m still here, I too feel possessive about my teeth, More importantly perhaps, so do my gums.

I had been hoping to find volunteers to help me with the painting … I’ll keep looking

7. Diddums wrote at Feb 28, 2007 at 01:45:
Good decision – you really wouldn’t want me painting ‘delicately’ round the window or skirting board. And I was trying to roller the ceiling (that’s a horrible job) and suddenly there was a loud clatter and the roller fell off the stick and thudded down onto the blankets which were protecting the carpet. Mum came over to investigate and put her foot in the paint. Sigh.