I have felt for a long time that it is my inability to bullshit, to manipulate the world, that accounts for my failure to actually get anywhere. I once told my Erstwhile Male Best Mate that he was good at bullshitting, and he was quite offended, but it was a compliment in a way. I define bullshit as being able to respond immediately to what someone else has said, whether or not you are perfectly confident of what you are saying – it is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s part of being decisive, and it’s a skill I really envy, because I am so hopelessly crap at it. I hate being in a situation where I have to talk to people spontaneously. I hate saying anything if I’m not 100% confident. Even when it’s something you would think I should know a lot about and have opinions about, I sometimes find it difficult. For example, yesterday someone asked me about the creative writing course I’ve been doing and I didn’t know what to say. I hate that feeling, that ‘What the hell do I say now?’ It’s like the ability to make small talk, to chat to people, whether you know them or not, to put them at their ease (I originally wrote ‘at YOUR ease’, which is probably quite Freudian, as that is really what it’s about, about ME being at MY ease with them. )
Paradoxically, I think I probably come over as over-talkative at times, because I have spent so much time down the years wondering what to say, that I have a tendency, when I can think of something, to go ahead and say it.
More and more with these ‘life skills’ I’m beginning to think, well, this is how I am – do I necessarily want to become better at bullshitting? Can I please just focus on being who I am, and not feeling I have to try and reshape myself?

I was flicking through the despised last chapter of Captain Corelli last night (no, I haven’t got to the end already). Pelagia finds happiness at last, but what about the fifty years of loneliness in between? I suppose when happiness comes along, you’re just glad for it – if you are happy then, it doesn’t really matter so much what went before. I wonder why he wrote it like that? If they had spent all those years together, maybe they would have ended up in their 50s hating each other, or at least, being indifferent to each other. Well, listen to me, speculating about these fictional characters!
I remember my Erstwhile Male Best Mate saying: ‘Dump the bugger, he doesn’t make you happy, and you’re an ace person, you deserve to be happy.’ But it’s not exactly Hubby’s fault that I’m not happy – he does his best, he can’t help it if he doesn’t know how to make me happy, I don’t even know it myself.
What would make me happy? To do something I enjoy which stretches and uses my abilities; to be paid enough for doing it to live comfortably; to be with the man of my dreams. But who has anything approaching all those things? Those are my fantasies, put safely away in the little fantasy box in my head and taken out from time to time. In the mean time, I have health and material comfort and people who care about me, which is more than some people have.
I have been thinking about what attracts me to people, why do I consider some people to be my friends, and I guess it’s partly the fact that they like me. If people are drawn towards me – and apparently some people are – I’m grateful for that and I respond. There is that great big black hole inside me that is never filled, there’s not enough love in the universe to fill it with. So I keep on looking for more and more to put in there, because I can’t fill it by myself.

A tagline on the font page of the newspaper on Thursday caught my eye: ‘Does every woman think she has let her mother down?’ Oh my god, yes – well, I don’t know about anyone else. But I feel I’ve let down everybody who has ever had faith in me.

‘You only live twice, or so it seems/One life for yourself, and one for your dreams…’ Does everybody feel like that, or is it just me? I never expected to still be feeling this way at this age. I guess if I’d looked forward, 30, 20, even 10 years ago I would have assumed that by now I’d have it all sorted. But is that ever going to happen?
Who has a happy life? Are there people who achieve what they want in life and are satisfied with it? I have compartmentalised the things I want from life and put them into a place in my head where I look at them from time to time before getting back to the everyday world.
So here I go again, there is no way out of this dilemma. In my other blog-life, I talk about the fantasies I try to suppress – and actually, they’re pretty tame and pathetic when you look at them. But maybe by giving them an outlet I can settle down and just get on with life.

On Wednesday night I was reading the bit in Captain Corelli (see elsewhere for my sudden weird obsession with Captain C) where Mussolini shoots a cat – nasty! Actually, it’s a clever bit of writing, because if you wanted to put over the sheer evil madness of the man, what better way to do it? Well, it reminded me of a saying that used to be a catchphrase of mine: ‘Why did the cat have to suffer?’
This comes from about ten years ago, when the kids were young enough to watch ‘Sabrina the teenage witch’, and I used to watch it with them, largely for the sake of Salem, the talking cat. Apart from the fact that he looked like a smooth version of my Ninja, it was his attitude that I loved, absolutely feline, you just knew that if cats could talk, those were the things they would say.
Anyway, in one episode, I can’t remember exactly what happened, but at the end Salem said in a typically histrionic, egocentric way: ‘But why did the cat have to suffer?’ As I said, it became a catchphrase of mine for a while – in fact when I reminded my daughter of it she rolled her eyes and said, ‘Mum, you used to say that for years!’
Also about the same time, I had another phrase, which came from the Aladdin cartoon series, there was a parrot (forget its name) which had pretty much the same attitude and role as Salem, in one episode it said: ‘Nobody cares about the parrot!’ I used to throw this one out from time to time, not that anybody took any notice, of course!

Yesterday I was on the receiving end of the ‘every woman should be financially independent' comments – yet again.
Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve tried, really I have. I have applied for interesting challenging jobs and I’ve applied for tedious, boring jobs with an equally stunning lack of success. Maybe I should set my sights a bit lower and go for genuinely menial level jobs that anyone can do – but wouldn’t that just be to swap one form of frustration for another? And no doubt I would then be accused of ‘under-selling’ myself.
Which brings me to Barabara Ehrenreich. I overheard bits of what she was saying on ‘Start the Week’ a couple of weeks back, though as usual it was only in passing and I didn’t catch her name. However, there was an interview with her in this week’s New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/People/Religion
What she set out to do was write an account of ‘corporate America’ from the inside, but in order to do that she first needed to get a job. And despite her best efforts, she got nowhere, and ended up writing about the world of the white-collar unemployed, of recruitment advisors, life coaches, image consultants and self help (‘Bait and Switch’).
www.BarbaraEhrenreich.com
What struck me most were her comments about ‘positive thinking’: ‘There is this sense that if you just have a positive attitude you can control your circumstances entirely, which is an idea that has no scientific basis at all.’ Hooray! somebody has said it at last - the emperor isn't wearing any clothes!
As the NS article points out: ‘One of the most insidious effects of this culture is the extent to which it loads shame and self-loathing on the individual. With its teaching that any failures are simply the result of having the wrong attitude (nothing to do with economic downturn, say, or corporate restructuring), it offers an obvious recipe for self-hatred.’
This is the mirror image of the stuff I was posting a couple of months back about apparently ‘successful’ people who torture themselves with guilt because they don’t feel ‘happy’.
If you have material success, you must be happy, and if not, it’s your own fault. And if you don’t have material success, that’s your fault too, because you don’t have the right ‘attitude’. Sounds like the new version of the ‘undeserving poor’.

A lady from Relate called on Tuesday with an appointment for 8:40 on Monday. We had an initial meeting last year, and since then have been on the waiting list for regular sessions. Initially I said yes, then spoke to Hubby, he said he didn’t think we could do it on a regular basis because we have to pick up our daughter from dance class in Northampton and don’t get back till 8:30 at the earliest. I called the lady back, she was not happy, understandably. I said we could do late Tuesdays (she had ‘late Mondays’ down as the only time we could do), but the latest they do on Tuesdays is 7:00 – and I do pilates from 6:30 to 8:00. I said we could do Wednesday evenings after the end of April (at the moment I have show rehearsals on Wednesdays), or Fridays, but they don’t work Fridays (I have meditation on Thursdays, and Parish Council the first Thursday of each month).
It sounds as though we are making excuses, but this is the way our life is. Then I thought, are all my activities part of the problem? But I started doing all these activities because I wasn’t satisfied with the life we had together, the things we did together weren’t enough for me, so I started doing more things on my own. If he wants to do more, that’s up to him. He doesn’t want to do the things I want to do, so why should I drag him along – but on the other hand, why should I have to give them up? I don’t know the answer.

Tuesday 21st March 6:35 Am
Just tried Carpe Diem’s meditation on the chakras. I have done it once before, about 5 years ago, with a previous yoga teacher. I couldn’t remember which way round the colours go, but it seems to make sense to start with red and just work through the spectrum. At first I couldn’t get past the base of the spine (I think that’s the first one) because my mind wandered off. I was thinking about an email from Katwoman, and whether I will go on the Wildlife Trust walk this month, and how it’s always the day before the Parish Council so I’m always really busy; and Oxford, and frustration, and how I should probably start the research for the paper now, just in case, and wondering how much notice I’ll get if it does get accepted; and Lady Lucy, and her phone, and how if I lose mine usually it’s switched off or the battery dies before I miss it, and the last time I kept calling it and knew it must be on because it kept ringing, but it wasn’t in the house or garden or car, and it was in Hubby’s car in the car park outside his client’s office. And I was wondering about Lady Lucy’s move, and how she’s feeling, and thinking about camomile and how it’s an acquired taste which I have finally acquired, I drink it at meditation group, not that it helps me sleep, valerian is supposed to be the really effective one, but that never works on me either, but given that valium, temazepam, prozac, dothiepin etc etc, none of them ever do anything for me, maybe it’s not surprising…
Then I thought about what the guy leading the meditation last week said about not trying too hard, and the new lady I was talking to, when I was saying that I used to worry that I wasn’t doing it ‘right’, and the point is there’s no such thing as doing it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, you just do it in the way you can. So I did that, without trying to dwell too long on each, or be too intense, just gently working my way through my body and through the colours. And when I got to the end, I did feel better, as I always do. Who knows if it’s what you do and what you think about or just the simple fact of lying quietly and stilling your mind? You do what you can, and if it helps, that’s great.

Monday 20/3/06
I went to Lady Lucy’s blog today and got upset, why do I always have this feeling of being the lonely outsider? So I sent her a very self-pitying email, yet I have had a text from Afroditi in Greece and an email from Ilze in Latvia today, I shouldn’t be feeling THAT unloved and unwanted.
How am I feeling, really? Tired. Carpe Diem says I should meditate on my chakras. It’s a long time since I did that, and I’m not sure I can remember them - what the hell, though, anything’s worth a try!
I should be meditating more. I read about and think about and talk about and write about meditating – I just don’t actually get on with DOING it. Like I write about writing, but never actually value what I do. I am trying to make sense of my life – making sense of the senseless? But strangely, it does start to make a kind of sense… I don’t know. There are certain recurring themes, persistence being one. They come up again and again, so they appear when I read back what I’ve written. So there is a value in this, because otherwise I might never notice.

Last week I went with two friends to an exhibition of Blake – William, not Peter – at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I think it’s the idea of Blake I’m fascinated by, rather than his work per se. He was a visionary, he saw angels, he invented his own mythology, he conceptualised Britain as the giant Albion.…
Afterwards I was talking to my friend about the situation with my marriage. She was talking about Relate and how Hubby probably needs someone neutral to help him open up. But I think she still doesn’t understand the situation – she assumes the problem is with him and getting him to talk. But the problem is with me not knowing what I want any more, not sure that what I’ve got is what I want. Am I short-changing myself? What I’ve got is not what I want, but are there any feasible alternatives that would be any better? Does the problem lie with what I’ve got or with me wanting something else?
On the way home, I was thinking that I can’t seem to find the attitude that doesn’t want anything else. That ‘emotional numbness’ that’s afraid of even thinking about anything outside this life, that cowardice that wants to hide away and hibernate. When I had that feeling, I still had a general discontent, but not this constant gnawing-away-inside-me longing for something different. And I think that’s probably a good thing. I think recognising and acknowledging this longing is better than trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. But how do I channel it, what do I do about it?
I started thinking, would I be ‘happier’ if I could exorcise Melinda, get her out of my system, so I didn’t want things to be any different from how they are? And I thought about ‘The Kingdom of the Blind’, a short story by HG Wells that I read as a teenager. A sighted man stumbles on a country where all the inhabitants are blind, and starts trying to describe the wonders of the visual world to them. After listening to his ravings for a while, they decide that the strange organs on his face are giving him these bizarre delusions, and that the kindest thing would be to get rid of them, for his own good… and that made me think about Blake and his visions.
It is actually quite prophetic of the whole area of psychiatric medicine, electro-shock therapy, drugs etc. Yes, I’m sure those therapies help some people at some times, but the blanket effect is to wipe out any kind of variation form the norm, like weedkillers destroying wild flowers. Which is how I started thinking about Blake. Yes, he was completely off his trolley – but doesn’t the world need some of that madness sometimes? Where is the line between insanity and genius – is there one?
And do I need a little madness in my life? I can’t cut off that longing part of myself, even though it makes me unhappy. I have to stay with it. Maybe I can’t live that life fully. But should I let it die? I will hold on to it with both hands, wrap myself around it like the kitten wrapping herself around my arm, holding on to it with all four legs, claws and teeth, holding on to it and enveloping it because I daren’t let it go, because I know what that would mean, slipping back into a dull and empty world where there is no hope of joy.

Something very soothing about Friday mornings… I always take daughter into school because she has a free period first lesson, so I usually go to the shops in the next village, which is nice because it gives me that warm ‘I’m part of a community’ feeling. And Hubby usually works from home and Fridays and yes, I admit it, it IS nice to have him around…sometimes.
This morning I also dropped off my timesheet for the Govs' meeting at the lower school and had a chat to the secretary, then had a wander round and looked at one or two things which had been reported to me with my Parish Clerk hat on, which also helped the community feeling.
Also, as I got in and out of the car between stops, I was listening to Desert Island Discs, today it was Satish Kumar, fascinating bloke. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/desertislanddiscs.shtml
As usual I only heard snatches of the conversation, but at the beginning he was talking about advocating ‘slow’ living – oh, how I agree. But how do you find the balance? When you have too many things to do, you have to find ways of doing some of them faster so that you have enough ‘spare’ time to be able to take time over other things. It’s a paradox.
I think ‘paradox’ and ‘balance’ are my two favourite words at the moment – oh, and ‘fantasy’ of course, but that’s for another blog.
A t least my pissedoffedness from earlier in the week seems to have eased somewhat, I am about a week behind with my postings again, maybe I'll have a blitz this evening, but 'Metropolis' is going to be on Radio 4 at 9:00PM, and I may have to listen to that.

Remember the old rhyme, 'Nobody Loves me, Everybody hates me, I'm going down the garden to eat worms...'?
Today I've got that overwhelming feeling of being seven years old, and being the shy, quiet kid that no one wants to play with... don't know what the hell has brought this on!
I'll rattle the cat food, that should work...

Thursday 16th March 2006, 6:55 PM
Last week at meditation I was complaining about having too much to do. Since then I’ve got rid of a couple of big-ish things (Oxford abstract, writing assignment), but I seem to have got an infinite number of small things now, and the little things are even worse, if anything, because they bounce around in my head and I don’t know which to do first, I just jump from one to another without achieving anything, then I just grind to a halt and find I don’t do anything, not sit and do nothing in a positive way, like relaxing or meditation, just spend all that time and energy with nothing to show for it. This is an old, old complaint.
I want something big and interesting to work on, but I’ve got to get all these little things out of the way first.

Thursday 16th March 2006, 10:37PM
Driving to meditation, I was thinking about having big things to do versus little things, and how I would love to have something so big that it takes over from everything else, which of course made me think about my PhD. And I thought, maybe that has spoilt me, maybe that’s why I can’t settle to anything. And I was thinking about how I start things, full of enthusiasm, and commit myself, and then find I have all these commitments. It’s not just that I only want to do the interesting bits and then get bored when I have to do the boring bits, though I’m sure there’s some of that in there somewhere. It’s more that I really don’t think about and plan for the time commitment. And then I find I don’t have time for the interesting stuff, when you’d think I’d have all the time in the world.
So, when someone says about having things I’d ‘rather’ do, I think, ‘no, no!’, it’s as though I don’t have control. I don’t have control over how I spend my time, although you would think that I should.
So maybe I should start to think about all the ways I spend my time – not right now, though.
At meditation, the chap who was leading it asked us to think about / be aware of /observe our thoughts and emotions at the end of the meditation. What I noticed was that the things I was thinking about that were disturbing me weren’t all the things I have to do but, but Brussels and the Crazy Frog and the other people who were involved in the project.
The other thing he said was: ‘Keep trying, don’t give up.’ Persistence. Seems to be the theme for the year.

Billy Joel:
'You've got your passion, you've got your pride
but don't you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true
When will you realise, Vienna waits for you?’
Vienna (the place I first met the CF and all the other people involved with the project) was waiting for me at this time last year, and I didn’t even know it. But is it still waiting for me? Of course it is. That’s what I have to realise.

Thursday 16th March 2006, 6:25AM
I’ve been awake for an hour. Have been sleeping not quite so badly lately, but I could still do with some more.
School Governors’ meeting last night and my brain was a bit frazzled. Just hope I can do justice to the minutes. Everybody has been so positive about the ones I’ve done, which is good because at the time I felt pretty unconfident. So hopefully I can keep it up.
Spent most of yesterday trying to get as much of the Parish Council crap as possible out of the way. It was all cluttering up my head. I made the decision to skip yoga and get it done. Sometimes I feel myself going over it again and again and again and not getting anywhere. It just has to be tackled head-on. I don’t feel I’ve resolved that many of the little things, I guess because there were a lot of letters that I wrote that I had to run past the chairman, now I still have to print them off and send them. I will have to finish them off today, but I also need to get on with the Govs’ minutes while the meeting is reasonably fresh in my mind.
I didn’t read the Tao meditation book yesterday, and now that I’ve picked it up, I remember that there’s one from the day before that I quite liked, about shouting into the void:
‘Stand at the precipice,/ That existential darkness/And call into the void/It will surely answer.’
‘The precipice represents our dilemma as human beings, the sense that this existence is all too random, all too absurd… The void should not be frightening, rather, it contains all possibilities. Peer into it, call out, not just with your voice but with your whole being. If your cry is deep and sincere, an echo is sure to return. This is the affirmation of our existence, the affirmation that we are on the right path. With that encouragement, we can continue our lives and our exploration. Then the void is not frightening, but a constant companion.’
Hmm, sounds like something else...
From yesterday:
‘Spiritual practice must be uninterrupted. We may be anxious because we see very little happening on a daily basis, but we must be patient until we see what the accumulation of our efforts yields. Self-cultivation means steady, gradual progress. To stop prematurely would be more disastrous than never having started at all.’
That doesn’t sound right to me. It would mean that, once you’ve stopped, there’s no point in starting again, it won’t do any good. So what about persistence? Trying again and again? These gnomic utterances can be a bit self-contradictory.
Then we have today’s:
‘After long self-cultivation, one’s accumulated energy reaches a threshold and then bursts out full, breathing and vibrant. Without the careful building of momentum, this moment of release would never have been possible… Once you have reached this level of stored energy, you will be a different person.’
I do give up too easily, I know that. I have these bursts of enthusiasm, then I give up again because I don’t feel I’m making enough ‘progress’, or because there are so many other demands on my time. But what is ‘progress’? I am torn apart, I am pulled in so many different ways. All my energy is fragmented, it’s not focussed. I want to be able to fix on something, to throw myself into something which will take over my life. But I’m constantly running from one thing to another, constantly trying to keep them all going at once.

Listening to 'Vienna' by Billy Joel on Pndora.com.
What a great song, and I'd forgotten all about it.
'If you're so smart, tell me why are you still so afraid?'
http://www.lyrics007.com/Billy%20Joel%20Lyrics/Vienna%20Lyrics.html
Love it so much I told Pandora to create another new 'radio station' based on it.

Sunday 12th March 2006 10:10PM
I was thinking about something the Goddess of Love said in an email a couple of weeks ago – that people like the Belinda me as well. But I can’t see why anyone likes that me, so I have to assume they only like the Melinda me, or the Cassandra me. But what if, by trying to be Mel, I put people off? (I am thinking of someone specific here.) Maybe she comes over as too intimidating.
I don’t understand. I don’t see how anyone can like Belinda. She’s hopeless. Have I just removed my dislike of myself by putting it all on that one persona, and saying that there are these two other aspects of me that explain why it is that some people seem to like me?
I don’t understand.

Saturday 11th March 2006, 4:30AM
Went to see ‘Starlight Express’ with daughter last night, our joint birthday treat, I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, but it was wonderful. We got to Milton Keynes far too early – hubby said it would take us an hour, so to allow time for getting something to eat we left at 5:40 for 7:30 curtain-up, we were at the Newport Pagnell roundabout by 6:10, got some petrol and went looking for a Little Chef that I was sure I remembered being round there somewhere… ended up back at McDonalds about 6:40, there was a queue, got out at 7:00, drove to the theatre, tried to find a parking place, couldn’t believe how packed the car park was, got stressed, daughter accused me of giving her a ‘well dodgy look’ and started shouting at me, I can’t help my face, I was trying not to get stressed but having her shouting at me didn’t help… we were in the ladies (another quueue, naturally) when the 3 minute bell went…
Anyway, it was terrific. OK, the plot was terribly corny and the music wasn’t brilliant, but it was great fun. I could go and see it again, any time. Tried to take comfort from the plot – ‘if you believe in yourself, you can achieve whatever you want’ – yeah right. As if.
And I have to go down to London again today, another tedious meeting about organising this damn conference. Which is a pain in the bum. And I’m broke. And I’m lying here awake and I wish I was asleep because I have to get up in three hours to get the train. But I’ll get there. It’s just one of those temporary hiccups along the way. Temporary, but recurring, that is. But I’ll get there.

Friday 10th March 2006 7:00AM
Last night at meditation I was complaining about having too much to do, and as we left, the leader said to me: ‘I hope you find the energy to finish all the things you have to do’, but it’s not so much the energy as the TIME.
I sent off the abstract for the conference in Oxford yesterday. I told Lady Lucy, and she said she was pleased and said: ‘I always work better to a deadline’, which is what everyone says and is understandable in a way but isn’t really the issue at the moment. The issue is, given how over-stretched I am already, and how badly I’m dealing with it, does it make sense for me to take on something else? And if it’s accepted, this will be BIG, I will have to spend a lot of time on it, to get back into the research again. Which is never simple after a long break. I can’t just say: ‘I’ll take a couple of months to work on this’ because there are too many other things that come up in the meantime.
Spent most of yesterday afternoon setting up a database for conference bookings and a ring binder to store the physical forms. It was a worthwhile thing that needed doing, and I enjoyed doing it, it was a good challenge, and I can see ways it could be done better another time.. (but I’m NOT going to do it another time!)
So what about today? Creative writing – the plan is done, but the extract needs to be cut down from 2000 to 1500 words (it started at 3000!). The thing with writing – this applies to the abstracts as well – is that it’s not just a case of sitting down, starting and getting to the end – not like, say, typing up minutes or setting up the database I was doing yesterday. You have a first go, then you leave it, you keep coming back, reviewing and redrafting, there has to be a fallow time in between, so it takes several iterations. So I can’t just leave it till the last minute, it has to be mulled over and revisited. Then there are the repeated jobs that crop up, like the PC minutes or the cleaning (which still hasn’t been done). Then there are the urgent jobs that come up. Sounds like I’m devising my own time management system!

Wednesday 8th March 2006, 8:00AM

I have a friend who, for as long as I’ve known her, has complained about the job she has been doing for over 15 years. It’s too stressful; she has too much to do; no one else in her office pulls their weight; everything falls on her shoulders; she’s always having to bring work home; she’s always ill. A couple of years ago a part-timer was brought in to help her, but ‘she never did anything, she took away the interesting stuff and left the boring stuff; it was a relief when she went’.
Before Christmas, my friend was seriously ill and had to take a month off work (largely because she carried on working when she first fell ill and hence got much worse). Since then, her employers have been trying to help her – but – ‘they’re making it less stressful, but now I don’t enjoy it so much, I prefer working under pressure…’
Last week she was offered another job (she has been looking for another job as long I’ve known her), but she turned it down because: ‘ The people in the office were so old and fusty, the work was so boring, I couldn’t have worked there, it would have killed me…’

Tuesday 7th March 4:20 AM
There are so many things I can do, as in, ‘am capable of doing’, so much I have to offer, but how do I sell my services? I am still running around chasing my tail. This is how my life is. The only way through is just to keep going, to try and clear the little crap out of the way one bit at a time. There will never be a time when everything is done. I actually haven’t done last week’s upstairs cleaning yet, never mind yesterday’s downstairs cleaning. I actually don’t see how that is going to get done. And I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to cook tomorrow, or Thursday, or what we’re going to do about eating on Friday, when we go to see Starlight Express.

Tuesday 7th March 4:20 AM
One of the things I’m finding particularly difficult at the moment is having so many things running concurrently, in parallel. I don’t mean ‘multi tasking’ exactly, because that tends to be taken to mean carrying out multiple activities simultaneously, whereas what I’m thinking of is having so many different strands of work going on at the same time. I’m sure that happens in lots of jobs, but I’m also sure that in most cases they are much more closely related to one another.
What I like to do, the way I work best, is to really get my teeth into something, to have something that more or less takes over my life. At the moment I have to keep running from one to another, keeping all the plates spinning in the air (I remember coming across that metaphor in my first job, a couple or three decades ago). I wish there was one big project I could get my teeth into, which could take over my life, and I could feel I was really working towards something. Or would that be too monotonous?
How do I compartmentalise my life, to allocate the right amount of time to all of them? Maybe I do do a reasonable job of that. It feels as though I’m running from one to the next. But this week I have so many things that need to be done and also fitted around other things (like getting the car MOTed). Today, I succeeded in circulating the agenda and all the attachments for the Govs next week; reading Carlo’s research proposal; and also making a good start on the PC minutes. And posting Lady Lucy’s birthday present. And I even mended my slippers.

Monday 6th March 2006 7:30PM
It’s all the little shit, isn’t it, nothing earth-shattering or major, but it takes up all the time and energy and it’s frustrating and it stops you from being able to smell the flowers (or even, do the hoovering, so the house doesn’t feel so much like a tip). It’s just the way it goes. I couldn’t book the car in for its MOT at the Mazda dealers but I needed the rear light bulb replaced, and Hubby couldn’t get it out, so I took it to the dealers because they said they could do it while I waited, but actually it took over an hour, an hour that I spent sitting around (at least I had plenty to read). I have got it booked in somewhere else for its MOT tomorrow, that will be ‘while you wait’ so I will have to sit around again. But I think I’ve got the printer working OK. And I’ve paid my credit card bill. And tomorrow morning, I will start on the Parish Council minutes with a fresh mind – before I have to take the car for its MOT at 2:00PM. And circulate the School Governors’ agenda – I think it’s nearly there. And do the abstract for Oxford, and the creative writing assignment… Then next week there’ll be the School Governors’ meeting, and the minutes from that. And daughter’s birthday. We’re going to Milton Keynes on Friday to see ‘Starlight Express’. Now I’m going to sit and read. Couldn’t think what music to play, yesterday it was Neil Young, ‘Harvest’, can’t cope with that. Have to find something else. So, it‘s Santana. Yes, I’m rambling. Ought to do some meditation really. Seal is singing on this track. I love his voice. Maybe I should play one of his albums.

Monday 6th March 2006 10:00PM
I had a go at meditating, using my monthly meditation book – I’ve never got further than March, and I’ve only read that once before, a couple of years ago! I meditated for 15-20 minutes, and I did actually feel better afterwards – I ALWAYS feel better, yet it’s such a battle to find the time – actually, the same is true of blogging as well, I have to find the time, but it’s just not that easy…
Read my Taoist meditation for today afterwards, and it seems quite appropriate (though I prefer to think I’m looking for ‘self knowledge’ rather than ‘spirituality’):
‘Spiritual cultivation is a daily activity… progress is often so subtle that we may feel the effort futile, and it is hard to get up each morning and try again with the same enthusiasm. Yet this is precisely what we must do.’
‘…No person has ever leapt to heaven in one bound. Spirituality is achieved by steady climbing, like a difficult journey to a mountain temple. The number of steps is in the thousands; the way is steep. It takes a long time to get there, and we must content ourselves with the panoramas along the way and think that the view at the summit will be best of all. If we fall, we must pick ourselves up and get back on the trail again. Success is measured not by spectacular events but by daily devotion. This iron will, this deep sincerity maintains our ascent’.
So, I keep putting one foot in front of the other, in spite of it all. When I get time (!) I will go back to posting things on my blogs again. That is what works for me. I won’t worry about not being ‘one of the gang’, I will just do what is right for me.

Monday 6th March 2006 3:00AM
Am I going to start blogging again? Probably. I'll give it another go. Actually, I don't give up easily. I can think of lots of good reasons for not doing something, then I just stick at it and do it anyway.
I think the initial interest in my blog may have been due to the ‘soap’ aspect, people being fascinated by my dilemma and wanting to know what I would do. Then I let them down by taking the boring easy way out.

Sunday 5th March 2006 10:20 PM
Everybody’s life is part of somebody else’s lives – that is what it means to be human. Or so John Donne said – or, at least, that is how I interpret what he said. We are all bit parts in each other’s dramas. But at the same time, we are the protagonists of our own dramas.
What brought this on? Daughter's combats didn’t get washed and she needs them for dancing tomorrow. She put them in the basket after the first load had been done yesterday, I brought them down then did the whites, thinking we would do another load later, but didn't bother in the end because there wouldn’t be time to dry them. For me, it was a minor consideration, for her a major one, I let her down.
I started thinking, why is my life so driven by other people’s requirements and demands, then, well, I suppose that’s true of everybody to some extent. Except for people who consciously cut themselves off from other people. We are inextricably linked together, in intricate webs of dependence (can’t read my writing there, it could be ‘intricate’ or ‘intimate’ –both make sense, but I think intricate works better.) Hence Donne. Or even Barbra Streisand ('people who need people...').
At the petrol station today, someone pulled up so close behind us that there was no way we could get out of his way. So we had to wait for the man at the pump in front to finish before we could go. So the person behind us had to wait too. With thought and consideration (and a sense of responsibility!) he could have made it easier for us and hence for himself as well. Only he didn’t. There's a kind of parable in there somewhere.

Went to a meeting last week of the editorial committee – I am assistant editor of the newsletter of a national women’s organisation. Both the editor and the designer announced yesterday that they’re planning to retire next year (gives you a fair idea about this organisation when I say I’ve been referred to as ‘our YOUNG lady’!) The editor said that she thought it would be appropriate to send me on a Desk Top Publishing course, so I could take over the design work. When she mentioned this to me privately a year ago, when I joined the committee, I was very enthusiastic (though Hubby put a damper on it by saying: ‘They want you to do for nothing what they currently have to pay someone to do.) But I have taken on so much other stuff over the last year, the thought of doing the editor’s and the designers’ jobs threw me into a panic – though of course, they were saying: ‘You’d have lots of help and support, you could divide the job up the way you want to…’
The whole area of graphic design, DTP and website design is something I’ve been interested in for ages. Though I’m self-taught, it seems to me that it’s an area that should be relatively simple to get started in as a small business, except that I haven’t got a clue about how to market myself. I was chatting to the designer on the bus afterwards. She was sniffy about my idea of doing business cards, greeting cards, posters etc, but she said ‘You’re worth your weight in gold because you can write good copy’. So all I have to do is find someone prepared to give me 12 stone of gold. Any ideas as to how I set about doing that?

Friday 3/3/06 4:00AM

Didn’t get home from the Parish Council meeting till nearly 11, didn’t get to sleep till gone midnight, and here I am wake again at 4 and I need to get up and go to London in the morning. Crap.
The PC meeting was a bit of a shambles as usual. I hadn’t picked up the minutes I printed off for the LAST THREE MEETINGS, which still have to be signed. Someone took exception to my report in the parish magazine. Got there half an hour early to try and get everything straight in my head, and the local borough councillor turned up, first time I’d met her, she went on and on about people I don’t know, made me feel like an idiot.
There are so many little things that crop up - I wrote a log of them down this month and put them into the agenda, I still missed something, I can’t hold them all in my head - I spent ages yesterday trying to get it all straight in my head before the meeting but still cocked it up.
I was just so tired and stressed by the end of the meeting and today I have to go to London for an editorial committee meeting.
Got an email from Lady Lucy saying, since when have I been too busy/stressed to whinge at her? Sent a reply saying the whole blog thing was taking up too much time and seems completely pointless when no one is interested in it except her, so I might as well just email her directly.
Who would want to read me moaning on about all the pathetically stupid things going on in my life? I said to Lady Lucy, ‘I’m following the old advice, if you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything.’ The ‘Melinda’ part of me isn’t around enough to have very much to say – nor is Cassandra, come to that. I can’t turn all my personae on and off like a tap. I can’t decide to ‘be’ one of these people and they appear, they are all aspects of me, but which one of them is dominant at any one time depends on how I am feeling. If I am feeling like crap, then there is nothing for Mel to say, I can’t make her have something to say. And most of what she says is rubbish anyway.
I wrote all that really positive stuff when I woke up on Wednesday, but then yesterday I woke up feeling like crap again.
Lady Lucy had a go at me a few weeks ago about whingeing and faffing, so if all I can think of to write about is whingeing and faffing, what am I supposed to do? Life traveller said, ‘if nothing interesting ever happens again, write about the uninteresting things in an interesting way’ - but I don’t choose to write in an ‘interesting’ way, I just say what is in my head, and this is how it comes out, I don’t know if it is going to be interesting or not. But my suspicion is that at the moment it’s not. If I start to think about whether it’s interesting or not, I end up not doing anything. I don’t really have that much control over it all, except just to say, I don’t think I’ll do this any more, because I don’t have the time or the energy.

OK, as it's sunday afternoon I guess I can spend an hour or two typing up some of the crap from my notebooks...

Monday, 27/2/06 8:45AM

One of my self-hypnosis tapes says: ‘Never worry, but you can be concerned’. Can someone please explain the distinction?
My daily Tao meditation book says: ‘when you act, you … must leave no shadow. In other words, what you do must leave no messiness, no left-over consequences, nothing that will haunt you later. That is one of the ways in which you avoid creating more bad situations for yourself. Your every movement is traceless’.
Can someone please explain how it is possible to act without consequences? Thinking about this, I was wondering if it meant ‘don’t worry about the consequences’, but reading it again, that seems to be the opposite of what it’s saying.