So, yes; I’ve been quiet at these pages for several weeks because I’ve been pregnant, and working under a twofold limitation: the physical self-obsession that this generates and the shadow of our July loss. The first shrank my usual range of narrative topics and the second meant that what remained could not be written about anyway. This may not have been such a bad thing, interest-wise, since I’ve been exhausted, emotional and, as Grinderman has it, “so thin and sick“. You may imagine me as a shadow of my bridal self, waking up with groaning and panic attacks, eating desultory handfuls of dry crackers and lacking, in every way, a sense of perspective or humour. I am grateful for the online honesty of others, particularly Brenda, in this regard; their forerunning of my own experience has offered, if not hope, then something like solidarity.
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Regular readers know of my chronic tinkering with these pages and their ephemera. I would like to survey, briefly, those of you who come here regularly to find out what methods of access bring you to these pages. I am asking this while I consider whether to reset the RSS full-feed back to summary feed, to bring readers to the site itself and its modest amounts of interactivity. However, I don’t wish to do this if it would inflame your anger (knowing, for example, that I prefer to read my feeds in full form).
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What do people mean when they talk about things? (Monty Python 1.12)
I‘m often struck by how quickly the buzz goes off news, which seems to me sometimes to bubble up and evaporate away like gossip, with all the afterburn of suffering that this implies, no less intense for its smaller scale. The dreadful actions at the turn of the century, whereby a near-half-team of rugby league players insinuated themselves, in a fashion I call rape, into the sexual company of a young woman who was with two of their team-mates is just one example. This took place in Sockburn, just around the road from where I live and perhaps for this reason is taking a little longer to leave my mind than it might otherwise.
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One of the pleasures of running Thesis Theme for WordPress is the ease with which adjustments can be made to the appearance of these pages without breaking things behind the scenes. You can get an idea of the range of changes one can make by looking at this recent article, “100 Resources for Thesis WordPress Theme Users“. Indeed there are numerous blogs now dedicated solely to the task of customising the Thesis Theme; a slightly strange indicator of the self-referential times in which we live.
I can’t feign too much distance from this, however, since I’m always making small changes myself based on just such how-to articles. If you had said to me at the beginning of this year that I would become relatively comfortable fossicking amongst php and css, I would have been able to respond only with a polite blink. Yet such an environment seems to suit my applied learning style. I can’t do anything from scratch, code-wise, but I can adapt the suggestions of others and teach myself the odd bit or piece. It’s quite a gratifying hobby and might well be close to something like occupational therapy for a mind such as mine that generally does too much thinking.
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Some swift place-holding is required, lest it seem that these pages are given over solely to reproducing my collaboration with Giovanni, although this might not in itself be a bad thing. I have two further weeks to wait before seeing a specialist about my eardrum, which remains resolutely retracted. I’ve now completed a course of broad spectrum antibiotics to speed the waiting, which experience I liken to being pushed around a bouncy castle by the other kids: not pleasant, but not exactly harmful. Since this course finished my ear has returned to its previous state: poppy, blocky and leaky (like an upset dance-fighter, one might say). All this is slowing me down and putting a light strain on my mental health as well. I shall say more about things more interesting later. Meanwhile, words of greater emotional import can be found on the topic of hearing by Emma Hart.
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Talking About Things
4 June, 2009
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,meta-diarist,O internet
What do people mean when they talk about things? (Monty Python 1.12)
I‘m often struck by how quickly the buzz goes off news, which seems to me sometimes to bubble up and evaporate away like gossip, with all the afterburn of suffering that this implies, no less intense for its smaller scale. The dreadful actions at the turn of the century, whereby a near-half-team of rugby league players insinuated themselves, in a fashion I call rape, into the sexual company of a young woman who was with two of their team-mates is just one example. This took place in Sockburn, just around the road from where I live and perhaps for this reason is taking a little longer to leave my mind than it might otherwise.
[click to continue…]
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