Close to the Bone

Computer room is still gathering dust. But my personal journal is having a little bit of boom time to itself!

Five days ago I noted a dream in which two little boys of 11 were hanging around in our driveway, up to no good. Livid, I seized them by their collars and frogmarched them halfway up the road, saying I’d call the police if they did the same thing again. But I could tell from their unimpressed expressions that they’d be even more likely to be bad on our property instead of someone else’s. Then Mum came home in her car and started taking bags of food out of the boot. She saw the two boys lingering nearby, and greeted them like old friends. Soon they were chatting away as though nothing had happened.

I had mixed feelings: relief that things had been smoothed over, understanding that Mum’s way was the best way (and that she genuinely liked the boys anyway), but also a feeling of frustration — because I wanted to approach things from her more relaxed angle, but couldn’t. I couldn’t relate to people the way she did — their ways, words and impulses were behind a thick veil. Despite best intentions, all I could express was my frustration (as a stranger rather than a friend and neighbour) and that only made things worse.

Keeping Friends (and knowing when to let go)

After falling out (not for the first time) with a friend who lives far away in a place I’ve never seen, I was pondering the mysteries of friendship. Some people are easier to get along with than others, and it helps when they’re not busy and stressed… but I often wonder if I’m communicating the right things in the right way to the right people, and if my expectations are reasonable or the reverse.

I suppose communication styles and friendships are as individual as people are, and all you can really do is communicate in a way that feels right to you, and hope to connect with someone who has a similar outlook.

I decided to search Google for ‘maintaining friendships’, and the following were the most common tips and cautions:

(1) Be a good listener — prove you have heard by responding thoughtfully and in detail.

(2) There should be some give and take — we don’t want a situation where one friend makes all the plans, starts all the conversations and does all the listening.

(3) Communicate frequently (short but regular emails etc).

(4) Be supportive of your friend’s stance unless he/she is really about to land in trouble; avoid judging and moralizing.

(5) Be honest and genuine — preferably in a pleasant and tactful way!

I never understood people who request ‘brutal honesty’ about their cooking, artwork or whatever… I like honesty, but never brutal. Perhaps such a request is just a polite way of making people feel they don’t need to worry about commenting less than positively… but actually, we do need to do that tactfully.

Being ‘genuine’ includes feeling relaxed and ‘yourself’ in someone else’s company… if you feel you’re constantly on your guard and having to maintain a persona, then that’s not a good friendship to be in.

(6) If someone has a tendency to be hurtful, explosive and unpredictable (to your damage), or leaves most of the effort to you, it is most likely time to move on. But consider whether you’ve given the other person enough of a chance, and whether he/she might be going through a bad time just now — perhaps a bad time that you haven’t been told about. Not everyone communicates the same way, and it can be particularly tricky by email. Some people communicate naturally and well by email, but others don’t see it as a valid way to talk.

(7) Humour is good, and can save a situation from spiralling out of control.

Actually it was me who added Tip 7! Humour as a resource doesn’t seem to surface much in the other lists I’ve read, except (a) as a defensive barrier — it can be frustrating if you feel you’re not seeing the real person, or that you’re not being taken seriously… or (b) as something potentially destructive (sarcasm, thoughtless teasing etc).

This is already on the list, but is important enough to explore: real friends feel ‘at home’ with each other. The other day I found myself emailing a friend I always felt comfortable with… not the one I fell out with, but one I’ve not seen for years as we don’t live in the same country any more. I took it into my head to describe the room I was sitting in, just as it was… saggy curtains, CDs sitting around, an old and out-of-date TV that isn’t used much, computers still on the desk that aren’t even operating. The wallpaper came from a time when I was younger and more enthusiastic; those feelings are all locked up in it. It was something to giggle over or relate to… better than trying to come across as perfect and organized when we both knew that wasn’t me.

There were some singular pieces of advice here and there on the internet. I particularly liked one about how people on the edge of the crowd are likely to be the most loyal, down-to-earth and constant friends. They will have more time for you than someone who is very popular and busy. I’ve generally found that to be true.

Arguments, also, are not to be feared (unless someone is constantly browbeating you). I never sought out arguments, but at the same time never felt that a friend was here to stay until we’d rowed about something and survived it! If the friends we’re with tend to see a row as a reason for them to give their side of it but not hear yours, and especially if they see an argument as an automatic end to the relationship… well, we can find better friends; ones who don’t keep us walking on eggshells.

Do any of you have ‘do’s and ‘don’t's you would add to that list? How do you keep your friends, even if they live far away, and in what circumstances do you decide to move on?

Deaf Anxieties

I unintentionally missed ‘Blogging Against Disablism’ Day (BADD) 2009 as well as BADD 2008 (May 1). Last year everyone said that BADD 2008 was the best yet, and I couldn’t help thinking, “I drop out, then everybody remarks on the rise in quality!”

You won’t get rid of me that easily, though. I have various ideas rattling around in my head like peas in a drum but never seem to have time to capture them. Also it becomes harder to talk about personal experiences (apart from light, everyday accounts). In any case, I hadn’t forgotten about BADD. My thoughts this year concern anxiety and depression issues amongst the deaf.

I was born deaf (to hearing parents) at a time when children (certainly in the UK) were discouraged from signing. Thus I was brought up orally, wearing hearing aids from around the age of 6. My first hearing aid was a box that clipped to my clothes. If you accidentally caught the wire with your hand, your earpiece would be yanked out of your ear — made you feel awkward.

Of fairly dominant personality as a young child, I tended to be the ringleader in my primary class at deaf school. I wasn’t afraid to voice my thoughts concerning whatever we were discussing or watching, and the rest of the class would say “yes, we agree with Diddums!” It was a sweet class, now that I remember…

At home I regularly challenged my sister (also deaf) even though she was older and stronger. We fought like cat and dog. As time went by, I became quieter and less inclined to argue. I saw that as a positive, more peaceable quality, but took it so far the other way that I began to wonder! I was losing confidence in my own understanding of what was going on, and it’s hard to take a stance and support it when you worry that you missed something important.

Anxiety surfaced quite early, though not enough for panic attacks at school — thankfully, I was free of that particular problem till I was 19. One day, when I was old enough to go shopping without adult supervision, there was a particular album I was after. I went into a store and handed the assistant a note of the record I wanted, and fidgeted while waiting for her to check. They didn’t have the record in stock. I thought I had disguised my nervousness, but at home my friend surprised me by saying to my older sister “she was so flustered!” and waited for laughter. She didn’t get the reaction she hoped for, as my sister said nothing — but I felt bad about being flustered and being caught out in it.

For a while I was convinced the real anxiety started when I was 19, which was when the panic attacks began — but when you look back far enough, you realize the seeds of it were always there.

Take my first day at the local High School… the babble of children in those echoing corridors and gym hall! When my sister introduced me to the deputy head, he asked me a question and I didn’t answer — too transfixed by the seething mass around us. “She’s overwhelmed!” he said.

While still in high school, I remember telling a visitor from the deaf school that I wasn’t happy in groups of people, and she did not seem surprised at all. I was afraid she would tell me to get on with it and not be a silly… but she didn’t. She filled in the blanks for me where I stopped talking, and I went home thinking how maybe she had seen this happen before.

People would advise me, “just ask for a repeat” or “tell people if you didn’t hear,” and I blamed myself for not doing that… but it was hard to interrupt a conversation without being rude, and the conversation would go on and on until someone stopped it to ask me something. ‘Just asking for a repeat’ wasn’t easy either, because sometimes you wouldn’t understand no matter how often it was repeated, and the person doing the repeating would start to go pink with frustration and embarrassment. So you would bow out by pretending that you got it. In the end you didn’t ask for repeats at all unless it was unavoidable… you already knew what would happen, and that you would be asking people to repeat everything all the time.

In the end, being in such a group meant being bored, embarrassed, and thinking a great deal less of myself. It made me feel different because people observing the group would look at you as being the only one not talking and laughing. I would long to be on my own or with a close friend, doing something I wanted to do where I would feel competent and at ease.

The quality of the sounds I heard also seemed to play a part. At university I loathed the dining hall… people shuffled about and scraped their chairs, clattered cutlery, clashed trays and dinner plates; laughed and chattered. It was all too loud; too echoing. I ‘froze’ a few times and was unable to finish my food. Soon my friend began to recognize the signs; I remember her saying, “oh, I know that look! Let’s go.” We worked out the quietest times to eat, which were usually after everybody else had finished.

In my late 20s, waiting outside a cinema in a long queue, I was fine because I was with friends. Then I got tense. The anxiety rose, and rose, and there seemed no reason for it… till a car waiting nearby roared away and left us in peace. That was when I realized it had spent the past five minutes vrooming and revving loudly. It was a busy street and I hadn’t really been paying attention at first, but it seems the noise got to me anyway.

Perhaps the hearing aids have played a part in my anxiety… amplified noise: formless and unhelpful. It seems to me that I’m more relaxed when I don’t wear them at all. Everything’s silent and people float past as though in a dream. Once I was in a long queue in the bank when my batteries quit; I normally hate queues and banks, but this one time I was almost euphoric. If I can’t understand someone, they have to write it down — the pressure to make reasonable (and correct!) sense of what I hear is somehow not so great.

Where Mum is concerned, it’s amazing how much I absorb of what she is trying to say even when I can’t hear her voice at all. Recently I’ve not been wearing my new digital hearing aids because both filters gradually got damp (stopping them from working) and my clinic hasn’t laid in any spare parts at all. They said they didn’t think they would be needed ‘this soon’. The old analogue hearing aids didn’t have these wretched filters… it was easier to dry them out ourselves. These ones will NOT dry out at all, so I have a bit of a bone to pick with modern hearing aid designers! They may be better hearing aids, but they’re also less usable.

Without hearing aids this past while, I have communicated with my family by writing, lip-reading and gesturing. As we are learning the British Sign Language alphabet, I decided to try it out on Mum, signing the name of her fat cat…. MOLLY. She got it right away, and said “Molly”, pointing at the corner of the house where Molly normally hangs out. “Fatso,” she added affectionately (without writing, signing or repeating it), and went upstairs! I didn’t hear her voice but I knew perfectly well what she said.

Sometimes her message eludes me entirely, but other times I know when she’s said something I wasn’t necessarily expecting. That doesn’t make it a perfect or relaxing way to communicate, and I wish that we had been allowed to learn sign language at school. And not just us…. everybody! I still haven’t learned, partly because my growing anxiety and discomfort in group situations has stopped me from attending courses. That is a vicious circle in itself. I have always felt that communication is more important than how we communicate, though I can’t offer myself as a good example. Doubtless it’s because I don’t have that extra resource that I feel it so strongly.

We borrowed two British Sign Language books and a video from the library. One of them is quite an old book from 1988 — British Sign Language: A Beginner’s Guide by Dorothy Miles. It received two reviews on Amazon UK; neither of the reviewers seem impressed. Personally I enjoyed the potted world history of deaf people in education and society. I had a rough idea of some of it, but didn’t know everything described there. It was a shocker, and I found myself growing angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, as I haven’t read around a lot on the subject yet, and most people have been doing their best by their own lights, but it hit home anyway. I have been affected by some of the policies described in the book, and not in a positive way.

It brings to mind a Dean Koontz book (Seize the Night). My favourite, laid-back, surf-loving character, Bobby

“… didn’t trust those he called ‘people with a plan’, those who believed they knew how to make a better world, which seemed always to involve telling other people what they should do and how they should think.” [1999 paperback, p192].

In our history and present there have been plenty of people with a plan for the deaf, and it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with acceptance. It’s no wonder that many of us end up with problems, emotional and otherwise.

Searching the internet for articles connecting deafness and social anxiety, I came across this piece in The Rebuttal: Deaf Phobias. I was pleased because it says much that I’ve been thinking for years, and up till now I haven’t found all that much on the subject. Mum said, “misery loves company” — but I prefer the line that popped up in a film about C.S. Lewis: ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ I hadn’t thought about it as such… I think of reading as an escape. But it’s true, isn’t it? It’s why I go on the internet and scratch around to see if others are thinking and experiencing the same. There aren’t always answers for our problems; at least, not immediate answers… so it helps simply to know there are others, and that I’m no different from anybody else.

Simple Harmony

For Elizabeth’s writing challenge A Feeling of Harmony.

This is what I think… harmony comes when things are simple.

I had this thought lurking around yesterday when I was looking at the dA site for the first time in months. I had over 970 deviations waiting for me to view them… and this was after I had gone in and tweaked the settings to allow only some to get through to me.

There were comments, notifications, news articles, polls, journal posts (dA blog posts), notices of contests and contest winners. It’s often pleasant to feel surrounded by so much activity and life, but yesterday I couldn’t pause very long on anything. I glanced at about 80 of the deviations, scanned the news, skimmed 50 journals out of 250. Checked off all the notifications and messages. Two of my ‘colourings’ seem to be gaining a little more attention, even ending up in ‘glamour’ collections. Someone said she liked the colours of my last post. I like my last post too, but was impressed she had even looked, as the thumbnail is very dark and contrasty. What’s one dark thumbnail amongst thousands of bright and crisp ones?

I stopped long enough to comment on a fractal I really liked.

The profile pages have had some extensive tweaking by dA — I’ve not figured out the options yet, though there was a long news article explaining. I sort of ricochetted down it like a stone across water… trying to pay attention but not terribly involved. I figured I would come to each new thing gradually, and could come back to that page later.

Yes, there was so much there.

There was a journal entry from a fractal artist. She was expressing disappointment, disillusionment and a form of burn-out. She was not giving up or going away entirely, but she was withdrawing. She had to deal with too much and too many people, and hadn’t (she believed) made much headway in her own art, so she was going to disable comments and just upload the occasional item while she focused on her own attempts to improve.

One of her respondents said she’d taken time off herself, and had come back to such a backlog she felt she couldn’t post any work herself till she’s looked at everybody else’s.

Yes, that crossed my mind too. Everywhere, I saw words asking for some form of attention and involvement… do this; try that; view her photographs and his etchings; go to the chat room; join the club; nominate people; submit entries.

I felt sapped of all energy. You want to be involved in all this and to talk to everybody, and one person’s picture deserves as much attention as the next person’s, but it’s physically and mentally impossible. You realize you are at your best when you can pick out a few things and really concentrate on them. That’s when things hum along sweetly, and that, to my mind, is harmony. Peace, focus, natural communication and going with the flow. That will be the environment in which fractal artists don’t end up writing fractious posts about feeling split a thousand ways….

We can’t order this, though… people are like the tide. If we don’t want to be swamped, we have to organize our own boundaries, dams, sandbags etc. We have to choose our own paths. We don’t have to invite all of the water in, which we probably did to start with.

Harmony comes with simplicity… more is less… all that jazz. I’m sorry this post is so disjointed. The irony of it.

Sympathy and Snoopery

I enjoyed Andrea’s blog post You just don’t get it. I seem to respond that way to people’s stories… recently a friend was talking about a parent who died, and so I talked about my parent who died. I remembered the darkness of those days and could share that with her, even though I didn’t know her father. In any case, it seemed better to express myself as “I’m with you” rather than “I’m looking at you from a distance and I’m sorry for you.”

My friend (who has always been chatty) seemed OK with it, but not everyone would want such a response, perhaps.

I realize (from reading around) that people sometimes wonder why a friend always brings the conversation back to him/herself. In some cases that friend is more interested in talking than listening, but in other cases that friend has listened and is using this method to say “I’ve been in your boat and have felt that same muddy water swirling round my ankles. You’re not alone.”

Sometimes I have a problem not unrelated; if I’m telling someone about my day, I’m happy if they reciprocate and tell me about theirs. I feel awkward sometimes about saying “well, what about you?” in case they don’t really want to discuss it. Someone I know gets irritated when one of her friends starts a phonecall with “well, did you have a nice day? Why not? What went wrong?” Her reaction is “I only want to tell you about it if I decide that myself.”

I like to be told about friends’ experiences… but I don’t want to come across as nosy or irritating, so I tell my own stories. Some of my friends seem to understand that my story is just half of the exchange, but others haven’t a clue about it. Some even take it as a request for advice, which can be infuriating!

Just a few days ago, I was reading Intensity by Dean Koontz. In the first few pages are two close friends (female students) chatting, and when one asked a personal question, the other laughingly called it ‘snoopery’. The first friend said she was dodging the question, and the second friend finally answered. I found myself thinking that the first friend, by insisting on a reply, had more courage than I have these days, but then I used to have that kind of friendship with Honey… I would say we were more like sisters, only I don’t know how many sisters have a relationship so relaxed.

It left me wondering what friendship means; if it means different things to different people; how much we are allowed to ask questions or be involved in another person’s life, and which questions we are allowed to ask? If email is seen as a ‘non’ way to talk, just as internet friends aren’t viewed as real? And why one person might be quite secretive about nothing at all, and another person is open about all sorts of things.

I suppose I’ve wandered away from the starting topic, but I enjoyed Andrea’s post because she put into words this thing… how people try to connect in different ways, and don’t always recognize those differences.

Answering a Writing Challenge II

Part II of a writing challenge by Elizabeth at 1sojournal:

I hear: nothing… just a vague rumble. I can feel the house buzzing under my feet; it feels as though a wind is hitting the side of the house and getting underneath the floorboards. But it could be pipes or the water tank… I don’t know.

I removed my hearing aids because my ears were tired. Sometimes they get sore and I have to rest them for a day or two.

If Mum comes in behind me and wants my attention, she will stamp on the floor or thump the desk so that I feel the vibrations.

I regret: breaking things. Hurting feelings. Mishearing or misunderstanding things, or expressing myself poorly, especially when it leads to missed opportunities.

I always: support myself when going downstairs. When you live with cats, it’s sensible to be prepared!

I cry: as privately as possible. I hate funerals for that reason… I will never go to anyone’s funeral ever again if I can avoid it… but I will find my own way of remembering people. I read about those who fear people won’t come to their own funerals, and I don’t understand at all. I wouldn’t care. I will have escaped!

I don’t always: know what’s going on. In fact that’s such an understatement it’s almost funny. You miss cues and information about what everyone is doing and where they’re going. You wait for people to say goodbye to each other so that you can say goodbye too at the right moment. You wave when everyone surges forwards, only for the conversation to continue… or for those people to reappear (seemingly as arranged) at the next place. Then people finally leave, rushing off just as you’re looking the other way.

I fight: when I’m angry.

I write: more than I speak.

You Talking to Me?

I was reminded again yesterday how difficult I find it to speak to someone when there’s no eye contact. It’s partly that I seem to have a mental block against addressing someone till they stop and look at me; other times I’m not sure whether they’re speaking to me or to someone else.

I was in a health food shop, looking for peanuts, but it was just my luck that they had one of those enormous storage trolleys set up beside the peanut rack (why, on a working, shopping middle-of-the-week day??) I was trying to look round it, and one of the two shop assistants came up next to me and faced me, talking (or rather gabbling), but when I turned to see if she was speaking to me, she was busying herself with some work, and her eyes were down. I still didn’t know if she was talking to me, or to the other girl, who was just round the corner and out of sight.

It wasn’t as though she was saying “can I help?” and waiting for an answer, as the words kept coming.

Mysterious. Maybe I should have pulled a Robert De Niro. His line in Taxi Driver is apparently:

“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

That’s probably the only time you’ll ever see the f word on my blog. It doesn’t mean I don’t use or think it… do you think they wrote that line for me?

The next thing I did was go to Currys to look at the PCs and laptops. My interest in buying one was fast dwindling, but I thought I might as well see what was there and how they looked. They must have been having a slow day, as two different salespeople came up and I had to say twice, “thanks, just looking.”

The thing I noticed about that was I didn’t hear them speaking, though I sensed them hovering. I looked round and their words floated away like bubbles… I always marvel that people can converse that way with each other at all; there is no sound! Not like the girl in the peanut shop, perhaps; I could hear her gabbling but not what she was gabbling. Perhaps the acoustics of the two shops are different; Currys was carpeted and dim; the peanuts shop is bright with hard flooring.

The thing about going out is that there’s always someone somewhere either speaking to you or to someone standing next to you. First you have to determine that someone is there, speaking; next you have to figure out whom they’re addressing, then (if it’s you) what it’s about. I get quite nervy in some shops; always looking over my shoulder to make sure there isn’t someone saying “excuse me!” – and when the shop assistants are yelling across the floor at each other, or scatting loudly about on high heels, I’m always keeping half an eye on that as well. Are they speaking to me; do they need me to move so I can get past…? I bet I give the appearance of a shoplifter checking to see if I’m being watched, but I’m just looking to see if you’re talking to me.

Yam Artiklit

Years ago I figured one way to increase my confidence (and reduce panic) would be to improve my speech, so the doctor put me in for some speech and voice therapy. The speech therapist told me I spoke too quickly and failed to give full value to each sound.

The voice therapist (a different lady from the speech therapist) said I had a lovely voice but was too quiet. Folks with hearing loss are thought of as having loud voices because they can’t hear themselves, but I’m completely the opposite. Maybe if you start off with good hearing you know what your own voice should sound like to you, and as your hearing fades, you increase your volume. I never knew what my voice should sound like to me, and it always sounds too loud, even when I’m (apparently) whispering.

Once I muttered something under my breath about someone who was still about half a street away, and he glared at me incredulously, as though he’d heard… so now I’m confused! Maybe it depends on individuals, and on which way the wind is blowing, and if I’m muttering something under my breath, it’s obviously something I really *mean* and so it might come out with more force than something less heartfelt…

It’s annoying not knowing for sure, but I wonder if anybody does actually know, whatever they think they know.

Do you know I can’t say ‘it’ right, unless I’m really concentrating on it? Even in my imagination, I say things like “you’re not showin ick.”
Ick’s frustratin. I yexpex am gablin again, and ick’s probly the mistake ah’ve alwus made. Am suppose to gif foo vayoo to ma wods.

I’ve always written better than I speak and was top of my English class at school (a large university-rated class). I was ahead of my primary class when we were learning to read. When I told a disability counsellor at the job centre that I was good at English, she looked incredulous at first, then sniggered over something clumsy I said… she must have been in a bad mood that day, as she didn’t trouble to hide her thoughts. Or maybe she thought if I was that bad at speaking I was probably stupid and didn’t know what people were thinking. Or maybe she assumes everybody is stupid and can’t read her thoughts. No, she was just in a bad mood. I should stop being such a drama queen!

I’ve been pondering over the word …. uh, would you believe, it’s gone right out of my head! (Bangs head on desk). What word?

Ah… ‘articulate’! People say proudly, “I am bright and articulate.” I’ve seen job adverts for ‘intelligent and articulate applicants’. I searched the internet to see if anybody used the word ‘articulate’ to cover writing as well as speech. There are instances of it, but mostly it refers to speech.

I’m a fluent writer but not an articulate speaker – except sometimes when I’m angry; then my words seem to flow out of me with great conciseness and force. It’s amazing. Most of the time I don’t really want to talk, like when I dreamed about refusing to talk to an executive. Part of the reason I didn’t want to talk to him was because I don’t like talking and probably wouldn’t express myself clearly. I lose arguments even when I’m right… some people never cotton onto that, even when I’m right more often than not in any dealings I have with them. It’s like being voted off The Weakest Link for all the wrong reasons. Funny how that pervades my dreams, more so now than when I was younger. When I was younger I dreamed that I could hear someone whispering, or that I could eavesdrop from another room, and it didn’t seem strange till I woke up next morning. Nowadays my dream conversations are full of frustration and angst.

Well I’ve got this far and I don’t know how to end my post! I’ll just go to bed I think… sweet dreams.

Anxious in the Local Shoppie

My local Spar has a short stretch of Poland in the corner. None of the goods on that rack are labelled in English, though I was able to figure out from a Spar tab that one of the items was a bottle of banana and carrot juice. Somehow they didn’t tell me about the apple.

I wanted it, and an uneasy feeling stirred in me – would I be allowed to buy it, seeing as I wasn’t Polish??

Mentally I slapped my wrist – well, of course! I worry about the silliest things. If you dig deep enough in my mind, you will probably discover a squeaky voice insisting that though they would be prepared to sell me the banan marchew jabłko sok, it would only be in exchange for foreign currency. I would stand panicking beside the till, saying “but all my money is British,” and everyone would look at me as though I had crawled out of a sock.

I deal with a constant mass of squirming worries because of the need to consider before I get to the counter what the potential problems are. Experience has taught me that it’s worth calculating the various scenarios which could have arisen (sometimes in the last few minutes) which I might not have known about due to being deaf. It can be of surprising benefit to allow my imagination to run riot.

If I arrive at the counter unprepared, I’m quite likely to be stuck in a bog of befuddlement with people waving their hands and speaking gibberish (yes, I know it’s my own language), holding up the queue while I receive the ‘crawled out of a sock’ stares I mentioned earlier. Another reason why I avoid all queues (or at least long queues) if at all possible.

Forgive the wild-eyed rambling.

If I like the juice, I might try a packet of Polish biscuits next time – if they’ll let me.

Bloggers Under the Microscope

Found this on Blogs by Women: Are Bloggers Lacking Coping Skills?

The article draws our attention to recently published research on why people blog. If blogging is considered a coping skill in itself, isn’t that a bit of a contradiction? I wonder why something like that might be labelled merely a coping skill, whereas being the life and soul of the party is not? I have always said ‘how’ people communicate is never the issue.

I don’t deny that people do lack proper support and social networks; the larger the population and the more impersonal the system, the worse that whole situation becomes.

I see blogs as being educative; they open a door to a world I would never have known about if I hadn’t looked into it, even if I could have called myself one of the best balanced individuals in the world. Can one be truly balanced without having tried the various things within reach? Would someone who never read or blogged be considered better balanced because he/she loved to go out every night? Perhaps a balanced extrovert is not the same as a balanced introvert.

I feel myself on the verge of this whole ‘introverts versus extroverts’ thing again… I’m still hunting for an article on the continued survival of introverts, one that I enjoyed very much, but this one will fill the gap: Introverts of the World, Unite!

PS: I seem to have developed a nervous twitch since last night…