Clarity

Thinking about it, I need to add a little clarity to the miserable post I've just put up. I know it was miserable. I'm kind of wallowing in it for the night. What can I say? Sometimes you just need to curl up on the couch with a vat of chocolate ice cream (or in this case a jar of Nutella). I think a few explanations are also in order.

First up, I am not moving back to the UK. I am not thinking of moving back to the UK. Not in any serious fashion at any rate. I'm back here in Australia, and I'm generally happy enough being here. There are many advantages to it.

So now that's out of the way, I should probably explain a few things. There may be someone reading this who has read my blog for a while, so they will remember that I had what I can only call a dark period for a while there. The bit where a friend who reads this observed that I sounded like I wanted to slit my wrists. Another friend became very concerned for me and attempted a kind of intervention. I'm not in that place. A large part of my completely wet blanket mood comes from two things; I haven't been getting much sleep lately, for one reason or another (mostly stress related, actually; did I mention that thesis deadline in the last paragraph or so?) and on top of that, I've started cutting back on my sugar and caffeine intake, attempting to get it to ordinary levels, which was one of the contributing factors last time I slid into the blackest of black holes. It's Spring, too, which in Melbourne means pollen clogging the nose, and, in my particular case, the type of headaches that can make you forget to breath, let alone to anything else. Add to that an epic collection of stupid people to deal with at work today (clue: if I'm asking you if you've sent me the latest version of the drawings, because I can't see the difference between this lot and the last lot, you're not getting your plans approved. Just a hint), and you have a vat of misery sitting waiting for me. And there was no Hellcats on TV tonight to jolly me out of it (Pretty cast? Check. Cheerleaders doing the physically impossible? Check. Implausible story lines? Check. poorly acted vehicle for a "triple threat" a la Lindsey Lohan/ Olsen twins movies? Check. God I love that show). And I'm having both a fat day and, given the sudden warmer weather and my need to have actual work clothes, wardrobe shortage issues. I'm not without reasons for being down in the dumps. I've decided to retreat into gloom and doom for the night. I live along, I have that choice and nobody is here to complain if I decide to listen to the Waifs sing about being in London Still on repeat. Or if I chose to blog about it. So sue me, because that's the only way anybody outside this room is going to have any impact on this mood, and by then I'll have moved on.

Oh good. Looks like I've made the transition into nasty piece of work. Tomorrow I shallbe all smiles, even if they're sarcastic, with service returned to normal. No need to confiscate pointy things just yet.

Whatever Anonymous

I have a flatmate in need of an intervention. Maybe both of them do. Either that, or it’s time I got out and got a life. They’re both in extreme states right now, brought about by their own foolish actions. They each have a dependency situation that is coming to a head and will cause them pain in the not too distant future. Their uppers of choice vary, but the result is still the same: they’re both exhausted, and unable to stop themselves from going back for more.

Take L, as the first example. She’s just discovered what I can only call the joys of a night out drinking, at the age of 35. It was never going to end well, really. For 30 years barely a drop of alcohol passed her lips. By all accounts, her mother virtually insisted that she have a drink of some sort at her 21st birthday party; everyone knew better than to expect her to be ‘merry’ by the time her 30th rolled around. Now here we are, five years later, and she has come under the influence of her work friends who are the typical residents of London – verging on liver failure thanks to the lifestyle that is expected of all and sundry in the city and its surrounds. She goes out for dinner during the week, like this week and, because her tolerance is so low and she never learnt the coping tools that the rest of us picked up when we were young enough not to suffer from hang overs, she gets drunk. She never believed me that she was feeling the effects of alcohol, until recently. She still insists, the morning after, that she’s not drunk. She’s just tired, dehydrated, has a headache. But the last couple of sessions have seen her bleary eyed and chugging water. My personal favourite was the night she nearly fell down the stairs, giggling as she saved herself.

Part of the reason it hits her so hard, though, is the reason she needs an intervention. The woman doesn’t sleep. She insists that the smallest thing wakes her up, that it always has. But lately her exhaustion has been so deep that I’ve been able to bang around the flat at 3 a.m. and not disturb her. Her four hours of sleep are deep, but not enough to replenish her. I spent a fortnight of barely sleeping in the lead up to the end of this semester, studying until the wee sma’s, culminating in a memorable night of 2 hours sleep. I still looked more alert and awake than she did. I was the one pulling her back from stepping out in front of cars, in spite of being so exhausted myself that I was mainlining caffeine and hallucinating that walls were rippling. Maybe she has that problem too. Maybe that explains why she walks into the walls to often I've started comparing her to the ball in a pinball machine. I’m tempted to tie her to her bed and force her to sleep, because she won’t stop driving herself and I’m getting the feeling that collapse is imminent.

C has a slightly different problem. Her addiction is to Shoreditch. It’s like a vortex, sucking her in a couple of nights a week. The eye of the storm is her boyfriend, a cheerful Irishman who lives up to the reputation of his countrymen for putting away booze. C, in contrast, is a petite Japanese girl with a lower tolerance for it than even L. I’ve seen her literally legless, before, being carried out of a party with the kind of jelly legs that are usually seen in cartoons when someone has been hit over the head with an anvil. She staggered in at 4 a.m. this morning and woke with red eyes, exhausted. She’s off out again tonight, and probably tomorrow as well. Right now, I think she’s single-handedly keeping Nurofen in business. Just like an alcoholic, she goes to Shoreditch for one or two, planning on hitting just the one bar. She emerges hours later having done the rounds of any number of haunts, but few clear memories of which ones. It’s not even that she’s drinking too much – she’s sworn off mojitos, now – it’s more that she’s also just not sleeping. In her case, the intervention would be removal from her boyfriend, the enabler to end all enablers given that he works in Shoreditch. He leads her into the Twilight Zone of its bars, and they emerge later having lost several hours without knowing where.

Her intervention is coming though, whether she wants it or not. The boy is off to Thailand very soon, and they won’t be seeing each other again until Christmas, when they meet at her family’s place in Indonesia. Her liver will have time to regenerate, if it's given the chance. But December is party month. It won’t have a hope.

And then there’s me. I probably need my own intervention right now. It’s to pry me away from the flat. I’ve got an invitation to the party C will be at tonight. It’s the 30th birthday of a mutual friend. There will be loads of people there, it’s an 80s themed dress up. And I should go. I know I should. But somehow, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm to go and be the sober person in the room. And I can’t bring myself to go and spend my hard earned on booze. I’m becoming a stick in the mud. And what’s worse, I like it. Someone get a crow bar and pry my fingers loose from the door frame. It’s the only way to get me out and about tonight.