“Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.” ~ Emily Post

For the last three weeks I’ve been feeling what I’ve been tentatively describing as better. As in, like, actually better. In the head.

Up until now when I’ve realised that I’ve felt better it’s always just been better in relation to how poorly I’ve been. Still agonisingly, demoralisingly far away from actually being well again.

This time I really think I’m getting back to something approaching ‘normal’.

And it seems to have happened over night.

One minute I was hiding out in my flat, flipping out every time the postman came to the door, only venturing out in the dark of night. The next I found myself making a conscious effort to try to reconnect with people, organising lunch dates, making trips to the cinema, and doing my grocery shopping in the middle of the day.

It’s taken me a little by surprise – and it’s still too new for me to start feeling confident that it’s not just a temporary respite – but it’s a point that even as recently as a month ago I thought I’d never reach.

Now this is all, of course, pretty great. But something kind of strange is also happening.

You see, while I’ve been sick, and depressed, and traumatised, I haven’t really been feeling much of anything. I’ve been numb to near enough every feeling besides worry and despair.

But in the last couple of weeks I’ve been feeling lots of things.

Lots of normal things, I think – hunger, boredom, contentment, anticipation, enjoyment, impatience, amusement – that sort of thing.

The problem is that I’m having quite a bit of trouble identifying them individually. And how it is that each particular feeling has arisen. I’ve become so alienated from my feelings, through having been unable to experience them for so long, that I’m having a hard time recognising what they are when I feel them.

Okay, hunger I’m probably okay with.

But otherwise I’m feeling somewhat confused – okay, so I’m good on confusion as well, but for the rest of them I’m at a loss – by my feelings quite a lot of the time.

It doesn’t help that I think I’m experiencing a slightly delayed reaction to things. Presumably because I’m so out of practice at reacting to anything in any way besides excessive panicking. So that something could happen on, say, Sunday, and my emotional reaction to it might not kick in until Thursday.

Which is less than helpful for identification purposes.

I’m hoping that it’s like running, something that you get better and quicker at with practice, and that it’s all just a matter of time before I’m back up to speed.

Although, if I’m being completely honest, acknowledging and processing my feelings has never been something that I’ve been amazingly good. Which I suppose is one of the reasons I’ve been having so much trouble in the first place.

I’ll keep working on it.

In the meantime I now can’t get this song out of my head.

Related Reading:

Abandoning Hope

Who Am I?

The Great Healer

“Don’t make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.” ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

Every week I check out the WordPress Weekly Writing Challenge for inspiration but I almost never end up writing anything for it. This week, however, the challenge is about adding forms to your posts, and there was a suggestion that maybe forms could be used as a way to connect with readers who weren’t necessarily comfortable writing what they had to say in the comments section.

This challenge actually got me to thinking about how this could be a useful thing for us.

I’ve received quite a lot of emails lately from people who wanted to ask me questions about my experiences with treatments, or talking to people about their experiences of mental health problems. There have been more from people who just had something they wanted to say to someone who they thought would get where they were coming from.

And that’s fantastic. I love hearing from you guys, in the comments, by email, on Twitter and Facebook; where ever. I also think it’s really great that people read this blog and feel that I’m someone who’s approachable and that they feel comfortable writing to.

But the writing challenge got me to thinking that a know a lot of people coming here looking for information, and this blog is quite big now; and I thought that it might be an idea to add a Frequently Asked Questions section to help people to find answers to the questions that I get asked a lot, more easily.

Either that, or, I was toying with the idea of running a question and answer style series of posts.

It needs a little more thought. But I realised that I could use a form to collect some feedback on this from you guys.

Do you think this is a good idea? If so is there anything you think I should particularly include? Is there anything you’d like to ask about? Is there anything you’ve been dying to ask me but didn’t feel brave enough to write in the comments?

Or, do you think this a really bad idea? Would you rather I forgot all about and stuck to just writing you whatever thoughts happen to be going through my head on a particular day? If so, I need to hear your input too.

Whaddaya think?

“Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.” ~ Jean-Jacque Rousseau

I am very bothered when I think of all the bad things that I have done in my life.

I haven’t been able to get that line out of my head since I studied the poetry of Simon Armitage in school. Who himself lifted the line from a form probation officers used to use to assess the extent to which their charges had been rehabilitated.

At the time I was exceedingly bothered when I thought of even the slightest little thing I’d ever done that might have turned out not to be such a terribly great idea. So bothered that I continued to feel terrible about scribbling on one of my preschool’s new chairs with a pencil crayon that could easily have been washed off until I was well into university.

It’s what comes of growing up in a household where referring to your classmate Ewa – pronounced Ever – by her name, rather than calling her Heather, provoked the same level of anger over the perception that I was dropping my haitches as a normal mother would reserve for their kid burgling the neighbours’ house.

The problem with that; or, at least, one of the, many, problems with that, is when you eventually get out of that environment and decide that your family are not people who you should have in your life anymore, you find yourself somewhat adrift in the morality department. Once you’ve established that not liking cabbage is a perfectly legitimate lifestyle choice, that people have friends for reasons that have nothing to do with attempting to destroy the fabric of society, and that all the myriad of other perfectly normal things that perfectly normal people just happen to do in the course of going about their perfectly normal days are really no big deal – when it comes to assessing what actually constitutes a big deal you’re left pretty much to your own devices.

Which is unhelpful. Especially when you’re simultaneously adjusting to having been released from your own, real life version of the Virgin Suicides.

For a while I continued to feel guilty about absolutely everything. There was literally nothing I could do that anyone could give me any harder time about than I did myself.

Until one day I’d had enough of the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, realising that it was unhealthy, and, well, pretty stupid. And decided to cut myself a break, try to develop a normal amount of perspective, and start bumbling along like a normal person.

Which didn’t go entirely well at first. I used to think that I didn’t matter and that no-one cared about me, so it genuinely never occurred to me that people could be affected by my words or actions.

Even now I tend to be great at empathy in the abstract but tend towards a kind of latent solipsism when it comes to actual individual people.

The most important thing that I’ve learnt though is that the wrong thing doesn’t tend to advertise. There’s no big sign that appears in the air that says, ‘Hey, you know if you do this it’s going to seriously screw up your life, right?’. In fact it can disguise itself as something relatively innocuous.

I blame the entertainment industry.

We’re used to seeing dramatic events presented as being, well, dramatic. With tense build ups and emotionally manipulative musical accompaniments.

In real life there’s none of that. In most cases doing the wrong thing is every bit as easy as doing the right thing. The simplicity is deceptive, as we expect anything that’s a big deal to feel like a big deal. For the wrong decision to be a difficult one to make.

Until you’ve been in the position to make a really, truly, awful decision you think that it’s self-evident that you would choose the right course of action. That there would be an actual moment where you would think about what you were doing and make a conscious choice.

In practice these things seldom appear to happen this way. Instead you simply do something, say something, go along with something, because it seems relatively innocuous. Only to be confronted with a sudden, sickening moment of realisation a few days later, while you’re in the middle of doing something else, that leaves you feeling the same way as you’d imagine a crash test dummy would if it were able to feel.

And some times some things really do just happen. Just like that. One minute you’re having a perfectly normal day, and the next minute you’re in the middle of doing some thing completely fricking stupid, without, so far as you can tell, there having been so much as a split-second’s thought or action taking place in between.

And then when you’re through with doing the completely stupid thing that you should never have started, it all feels so fleeting, and insignificant. And it’s so hard to marry the concepts in your head of the nothing that just happened and the huge, crazy big deal that you know that it was supposed to be.

Now, I know that to some people those will sound like really poor excuses. But I’m not offering any excuse, I’m not, after all, confessing to anything. I’m just describing a feeling.

Fortunately I am at least clear that telling people things that will only hurt them to make myself feel better about the bad things that I have done is an automatic no, no.

Or maybe unfortunately. I’m not 100% sure.

I’ve never understood the virtue that some people seem to feel in coming clean about their every sin to those who can only by harmed by the information. But then, I’m pushing thirty; it’s a little late in the day to be learning to develop a reasonable conscience.

Does anybody know where I can buy a talking cricket?

You Might Also Like:

Stories

Nobody Tells Anybody Everything

Agreeing To Disagree

That River In Egypt

Especially if the burger seems to be of an unusually squishy consistency.

Unless you’re really, really, really, REALLY desperate to drop a dress size.

Normal service on this blog will be resumed shortly.

“I have been told by people that I should not be seen clubbing with good-looking women, but I can’t see why not. Why be a pop star otherwise?” ~ James Blunt

On Saturday afternoon I was having coffee with a friend when I happened to run into a friend of another friend. She invited me to a pub she was going to in the evening with some people I knew, and then on to a club.

I went. I only intended to go to the pub, but I got there so late it would have been rude not to onto the club as well.

And it was great. I had a really good time. I danced for four and a half hours straight. I didn’t drink anything but water.

I didn’t freak out, or have a panic attack, or get paranoid by all the drunk people, the loud noise, or the smoke they kept blowing so much of that I couldn’t see.

Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning on turning this blog into a diary of every little thing that I do. It’s just that even a month ago there was no way I could have gone into a night club, never mind spent four and half hours in one; I could as easily have gone to the moon. A month ago I had a three hour melt down because my letting agent turned up an hour an half earlier than she was supposed to.

I haven’t set foot in any kind of club for at least two years. Between my broken brain and my broken body I just couldn’t have.

And on Saturday I went to one and was not only fine, I actually enjoyed myself.

And since I started writing here with a vague idea about helping people with information about being ill and recovering from being ill, it seemed like a mile stone I should mention. It is possible to get better enough to spend the wee small hours of the night in a darkened warehouse with a few of your friends, hundreds of strangers, a DJ, and a smoke machine.

Well, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.

Related Reading:

Who Am I?

Drinking Buddies

The Great Healer

“Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.” ~ Mike Nichols

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to The Imposter from My Life As Imposter. She talked about her life as a British Asian, and how she struggles with the Muslim Guilt Monster over matters of love and sex. Now she’s back to tell us about how her older cousins and other family members reacted to her impending nuptials.

Hello hello.So I had a very strange dream last night. I dreamt that my three eldest cousins and I were thrown into an Olympic sized swimming pool and forced to battle it out in a Gladiators/Celebrity Death Match sort of way. Every time we reached for the rails or the steel steps at the edges of the pool, all the screws unravelled and they came away in our hands.The dream basically ended with everybody banding together, drowning me, and using my body as a stepping stone to clamber out of the pool to safety.

It sounds crazy but this sort of underlying resentment is actually quite common in Asian/Pakistani culture.

The cousins who featured in last night’s dream escapade are 34, 35 and 37 and all unmarried. To me, this really doesn’t matter at all, in fact, I really couldn’t give a shit when or if anyone chooses to marry or not.

But what you have to consider is that culturally, and particularly when it comes to marriage, Pakistanis are old-school and traditional. Not in a cave man sort of way, more in a wafting fans, blushing brides, lovely Jane Austen sort of way.

Everyone is very proper about the whole thing and the engagement is a very formal step one takes when at the appropriate age and generally involves families at a much earlier stage than western courtships. Like the Jews, we tend to marry young (early 20s) and anyone left over after the age 30 is looked upon lovingly and with a great deal of sympathy.

Things aren’t quite as extreme as this in my family as my generation were all born in the UK. Everyone expects them to figure their own shit out and bring home their boyfriend/girlfriend when they want to tie the knot.

But what I find interesting is that some of the old ideology seems to have rubbed off on the women in my family. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m one of the youngest of all my cousins; so apparently this means everyone needs to get depressed and hate me if I marry before them. They have just become so goddamn bitter about it, as though I am robbing them of something. I am therefore avoiding all family events at the moment because I just get the stoniest glares and icy receptions.

One of my aunts (mother to the 34 and 35 year olds) actually grabbed me by the elbow and shoved me out of her way at the last family function. I turned to look at her, horrified, and she immediately started yelling, “I NEVER TOUCHED YOU… WHAT DO YOU MEAN??!!” (bearing in mind I hadn’t spoken yet) until one of her horrible henchman daughters sidled up to her asking what was going on, staring at me surreptitiously  ready to pounce. I quickly had to smile and say, “Oh, nothing, I’m sure it was an accident!” and carried on making small talk with everyone while they secretly plotted my demise.

What the actual fuck? Who does that to their niece? She was fine with me before I was engaged, now it’s like I murdered her puppy then stole her daughters’ ovaries.

What is wrong with these people?? These girls are very attractive women. I’m sure they would have no trouble finding boyfriends……. So why haven’t they ever found boyfriends?? And why do they actively begrudge other people happiness? I have never understood this, “let’s compete and break each other down” mean girl mentality. And it’s an accepted thing to do… be scathing and difficult and outright bitchy and I’m expected to smile and glide through it all like a social ballerina.

Apparently the latest news is that my female cousins refuse to adhere to the dress code at my wedding because they “don’t want to do black tie” and were giving my mum shit about it over dinner one night at my aunt’s house.

Honestly… you can show up in a monkey suit for all I care. Even if you show up in a white dress I doubt I would notice you and your pathetic attempts at being obtuse and trying to get a rise out my family; because I’ll be marrying Bob not thinking about you at all.

Why on earth do they feel the need to actively bate my family with this crap? It’s such bad manners. Keep it to yourself people! Sometimes I just want to stand up and yell this, in true “Bridesmaids” style, at the top of my lungs:

I wonder whether, as progressive as they are, their families are just different to mine. I think my aunts and uncles are very concerned with their children marrying a Muslim person and, perhaps, enforce this fervently. Whereas my mother just wanted us to marry someone that was raised the same way we were. Obviously she would have preferred me to marry a Muslim man for simplicity’s sake, but she couldn’t have been happier about my relationship with Bob and the fact that he’s Jewish. It really doesn’t matter to her, as long as I don’t lose my identity.

I celebrate who I am and where I’m from and Bob does too; and that’s how we want to live our life together.

I am not sure that the girls who drowned me last night would be able to say the same and I therefore think it has bred a great deal of resentment towards my mum’s family.

I honestly think this wedding is going to make things a lot worse in terms of my relationship with my female cousins.

But, in the end, that’s just something I’m going to have to accept…

And smile through….

And gracefully pull the daggers from my back….

Whilst singing a little song.

Like Mary Fucking Poppins.

Fin.

More Guest Posts:

Love, Sex and Organised Religion

Played & Won: How Computer Games Have Affected My Life

More on Family and Relationships:

Mirror of Sanity – How Bad Relationships Make Us Crazy

Are You Qualified To Be A Parent?

“True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that’s what courage is.” ~ Norman Schwarzkopf

For those of you who didn’t see my update about the job interview I went to last week. And are actually interested in how it went.

I set off for the interview a bundle of nerves. Thinking that if I’d managed to mess it up so badly the last time when I was feeling really confident about it, now that I was scared of messing it up again it could only be even worse.

I got there twenty minutes early, just like I did the last time. But I remembered that when I’d done the same last time they’d seemed quite put out, so rather than going in I went to the pub round the corner for a sit down. And a Glenfiddich with one lump of ice. It seemed like the best thing for dissolving the knots in my stomach.

I told myself that I hadn’t got the job and this was just a practice, to try to become less invested in the process.

Then I went back and showed up bang on time.

This time the staff were all really friendly, and even seemed pleased to see me.

Two out of three of the interview panel were different people this time. And I vaguely remembered having met one of them before at an industry thing a few years ago. I remembered that she’d been approachable, which I think helped.

And everything went exactly the way it should have in the first interview.

I remembered everything that I’d done, all the things that I do well, all my knowledge about the sector, how things work, what the challenges are. And we basically had a nice chat about working. I think I almost enjoyed myself.

They said they’d call me the next day.

They didn’t.

So I assumed they weren’t interested, and got on with applying for other things.

They called me the next evening and made me a conditional offer. Conditional on all their checks checking out. Which they will.

And in the meantime I’ve got a couple more interviews to go to.

So, the worst case scenario is that I have a new job. A new job that would be really good for me actually. There’ll be shifts and week days off, and so my working schedule won’t be so regimented as it was before. I think that’ll be good for me. And it’s a job that I’m really confident that I can do, and do well. Which should help me get my confidence back.

And the best case scenario is that the other interviews could well and I could find myself with options. Which would be quite nice.

Either way I’m going to be moving to London. I just need to find a place to live where I can keep Natalie Portman.

See Also:

What To Do If You Fluff A Job Interview

Life Redacted

Instead Of Going To China

“I believe that sex is the most beautiful, natural, and wholesome thing that money can buy.” ~ Steve Martin

You remember those spam adverts and pop-ups offering me sex that I told you about the other day? Well, in addition to assuming that their offer presented me with my one and only chance of getting laid, ever – as though they were completely unaware of the millions of other spam companies out there – they were all also working on the basis that there was only one particular kind of sexual encounter that I could possibly be looking for.

They all promised me dirty sex, actually, downright filthy sex in a lot of cases.

And that’s got me to thinking; these spam sites aren’t the only places where ‘really dirty’ is seen as the pinnacle accolade to be given both to the act itself and to an actual, potential, or desired sexual partner.

I haven’t heard a single heterosexual male mention the actress Megan Fox without using the word dirty more than once. And almost everybody I know who’s seen Die Another Day used similar terms to describe Halle Berry.

But I don’t think that word means what y’all seem to think it means.

Sex isn’t ‘dirty’.

Unless you’re really covering each other in mud, or garbage, or something while you’re doing it.

Or coprophilia is your thing. Which I suppose it could be. According to Wikipedia over 17% of people have apparently tried it.

Maybe that is it, maybe everyone who tells me that the sex they had last night was dirty is really trying to come out to me as a coprophiliac – or a urophiliac – and I’m just being colossally insensitive in not sitting them down with a nice cup of tea, reassuring them that I still love them, and letting them talk about it.

And yet somehow I doubt it.

Or maybe there are just a lot of people around with a more straight forward desire for a partner who is lax in their personal hygiene.

Although I rather hope not. I’ve had quite a few men tell me that they imagine that I’d be ‘dirty’ and I shower as often as the next manic depressive.

And it seems unlikely looking at any random sample of the people you hear, ‘I bet s/he’s dirty’, hurled at. It’s just the wrong word.

You don’t look at Christina Aquilera in the video for her single ‘Dirrty’ and think, “Gee, she needs a shower.”

She looks obvious, yes. Also unattractive, tacky, and ridiculous.

But dirty? Not all. Her face is all made up, her hair is styled, and her clothes will have been new on for the filming.

I guess the idea dates back to the time when religion was more influential and oppressive and people allowed the clergy to make them feel ashamed of any sexual activity they engaged in with anything other than reproduction as its motivation or aim.

Unless they were pecattiphiliacs, of course. They get off on doing things that are considered to be sinful.

It was still the wrong word.

And, anyway, the only people I’ve so far come across who still feel that sexual feelings and activities are things to be ashamed of were the, now former, friend who thinks that the staff of sexual health clinics should make their patients feel as bad about being there as possible.

Which I would think would be counter productive to their aim of encouraging people to visit their gynecologist or andrologist as often as they do  their dentist.

And the middle aged, racist, chauvinist gynecologist I saw on one of said visits, who felt that he was entitled to be offended that I’d slept with someone who was half Pakistani, an American, and an Israeli, in that order. Apparently it was against his religion and I should have thought of that before hand.

But the only people who can legitimately describe sexual activity as dirty are those with an OCD thing about germs and saliva.

Otherwise the touching, kissing, licking, or otherwise interlocking of your own body parts with those of another human being(s) in the consensual expression of a mutual feeling of the perfectly naturally occurring emotions of love and/or lust cannot accurately be described with the use of this particular adjective.

Neither can people you happen to find attractive.

Dirty is a meaningless word to use in this context.

And while we’re on the subject, the same goes for X rated. Although conversely.

Anything that you do sexually is X rated.

Anything.

That’s because films and images that depict people actually having sex, rather than just pretending, are deemed to be pornography. And at some point it was decided that we as a society didn’t want children and young teenagers to view pornography.

Not that that appears to have particularly stopped them.

So telling someone that you got lucky last night and that it was X rated is pretty much redundant.

Unless you filmed it. And you plan to make copies and sell it. In which case, yeah, okay, the film classification people will stick an X rating on it.

Otherwise you just sound a bit dense.

I’m not really going anywhere else with this, it’s just what you get for reading the blog of someone who’s pedantic about the wording of things for a living.

You May Also Like:

Alien Language

Love, Sex & Organised Religion

7 Reasons Why Girls Ain’t Easy

“No one likes getting their nails done more than I do.” ~ Serena Williams

I got my nails done. As my doctor prescribed.

In April last year I began having appointments with my doctor at least once a week. After the mental health crisis team became involved in my treatment she wasn’t willing to prescribe me more than seven days worth of medication at a time. And even when that eventually increased to fourteen, then twenty-eight days, she still wanted me check in to reassure her that I was still, y’know, around.

After a few months of this my doctor became someone I knew almost as much as she was my doctor. So she started prescribing me more than just medicine and therapy.

One appointment in June she told me that I should get my hair cut and my nails done before I saw her again.

And since then she’s taken whether I’ve kept up with maintaining them as a measure of how well I’m doing.

I guess it was a good idea. Having nice nails to look at made me feel a bit better, and spending half an hour every couple of weeks in the company of a not-especially-talkative nail technician was a good way of building my confidence in being around people.

I have gel nails. I read somewhere that they’re better for your nails than acrylics. And I like the way they do them at the salon I go to. They make them short, and quite thin, and round off the tips, so that most people think that I just have really nice nails of my own until I tell them they’re fake. If they were any bigger they probably wouldn’t suit my hands, I have very slender fingers so clunky or square tipped nails wouldn’t really work for me.

My nails grow quite quickly so I need to get infills every two to three weeks. If I leave it as long as six weeks they tend to start breaking. They can be filled down and even clipped in the meantime so that they don’t become impractically long.

I have them painted with a different colour and nail art each time, the ladies at the nail bar I go to are really good and do me some really pretty and delicate patterns. I get loads of compliments on how nice they look.

I’ve let the gel nails grow off a couple of times since I first started having them done. When I first got Natalie Portman she used to like to chew them, but it seemed like a waste of money to have them done only to have them chipped soon after I got home. Anyway, when they were off my own nails seemed perfectly normal and healthy, and they grew just as well as they had before.

My local salon charged me £30 for a full set, including the nails and the nail art, and then £20 a time for infills. I’ve also tried a salon near my friend’s house in London. They charged £40 for a full set and £30 for the infills. They’re very pretty but I think I’ve decided it’s worth it for the therapeutic value as much as for the actual nails. I’m not sure whether I’d decide to spend that much quite so regularly if the nails were all I was getting out of it.

I’d definitely recommend them to anyone who was thinking about it though.

Further Reading:

Retail Therapy

GUESS What I Bought?

Chanel Fragrance – Allure Sensuelle

“I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.” ~ John Bacon

I like dinosaurs.

I mean, I really like dinosaurs.

I got so excited about dinosaurs when I visited The Natural History Museum while I was high as a kite on back pain medication that some woman asked me if she could leave her five year old son with me for the dinosaur section. As she felt he’d get so much more from the experience if he was accompanied by somehow who was as excited by the whole thing as he was.

Then she went off out the other end of the dinosaur exhibition hall to sit and wait for us.

Some people, man.

But, anyway, I used to really like the BBC television programme Walking With Dinosaurs. Even though some of it was absolutely heart breaking; like the one where the pterodactyl was old, and no one at the mating colony wanted him any more, so he couldn’t get a good enough perch, and so he died. So when I saw that there was a Walking With Dinosaurs arena tour I really wanted to go and see it.

So I did. With a friend.

And we were literally the only people there who weren’t accompanied by at least one six year old child.

Somehow the thought had never occurred to me that this might be a kids thing. The television show was on in the evenings, and talked about dinosaurs in a way that was educational for adults. I just assumed that the arena show would be the same.

I was wrong.

I didn’t learn anything really.

Although I did get to see all the ‘main’ dinosaurs except plesiosaur. I guess I’ll just have to go to Loch Ness for that. (Shut up. You’ll be telling me next there’s no Big Foot.)

The show is introduced and narrated by a paleontologist. Or maybe an actor playing a paleontologist. It’s unclear.

He tells us to turn off our phones or he won’t be responsible if one of the dinosaurs is upset by them ringing and turns nasty. Also, that we won’t be able to get any reception anyway, as mobile phone masts aren’t set to be invented for hundreds of millions of years.

He then introduces us to the super-continent Pangaea, and spends the next couple of hours walking us through the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic periods; explaining how Pangaea broke apart to form the the continents of Gondwara, Laurasia, and Eurasia, the evolution of plants, and introducing us to some of the most well known dinosaurs.

All at an age appropriate level for the six year olds in the audience.

The show is very well put together. The dinosaurs are well made, and the set design is impressive. I particularly liked the way they presented the pterosaur. They turned the back drop into a rolling movie screen, which made the massive model look as though it were flying around its natural habitat.

It was a very good show.

I’m not entirely sure I’d have been as keen to see it had I realised that it was really for children, but I can’t complain now I have done.

The tour is currently continuing around the UK until the end of May, so if you’re interested you may still be able to catch it.

You Might Also Like:

Somebody Has to Play For Manchester United

Which Came First, the Crazy or the Cats?

The English Man Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain

51 Things to Do if You’re Bored

“I hate interviews – but you have to do them.” ~ Jackie Chan

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here this week. I’ve been a bit busy. Mostly being interviewed. And when I haven’t been being interviewed, I’ve been applying to be interviewed. I’ve barely had time to get any sleep in.

I kicked off the week with a second interview down in London. I’d had the first part of the testing/interview process last week.

Now this interview should have been easy. I have years of experience doing the exact same things that I’d be doing in that role if they were to give it to me. The skills needed for the job are all the things that I’m really good at. It really should have been a piece of cake, so I arrived feeling pretty confident about the whole thing.

And then I got in the room with the interview panel.

And then I don’t know what happened.

I got stage fright or something.

It was as though I’d forgotten to speak English properly. Or any language. I just couldn’t seem to string a whole sentence together.

I couldn’t remember any of the work that I’d ever done in my career, or, explain how I’d go about working in a hypothetical scenario.

I don’t think I actually managed to give a complete and coherent answer to a single thing they asked me.

And it wasn’t as though they asked me any difficult questions. I’d rehearsed perfect answers to all of them in my head on the train on the way in.

I could see by the end of it that the interviewers just thought that I’d completely wasted my time and there’s.

I slunk off to the nearest pub and drowned my sorrows in a pint of hoola hoops. An actual pint of hoola hoops, this pub served hoola hoops in pint glasses. And as soon as I sat down I remembered exactly how perfect I would have been for that job, and all of the great examples of why I was going to tell them that they should give it to me.

I could have kicked myself.

Really, really hard.

The next day I looked up the email address for the chair of the interview panel online. I sent her a message thanking her, and the rest of the panel, for their time and the opportunity of the interview. I apologised for having been so nervous that I hadn’t been able to answer their questions as well as they might have hoped. And I explained that I didn’t understand where all the nervousness had come from, because I know that I’m awesome, and that I’d be awesome for that role and in that organisation.

I added a few of the examples that I’d remembered on the way home to justify my claims to awesomeness; and said that while I was by no means asking for special treatment, I would be happy to provide any information that we weren’t able to get to in the interview that might help them in making their decision.

And then thanked the panel once again for the opportunity.

And sent the email.

Then I sat back anticipating a response from the interview lady telling me that it would be unfair to the other candidates to allow me to provide additional information into the process, and anyway, my interview had truly been so awful that they were quite sure that they didn’t want me.

But instead the HR team responded to me with an email scheduling another interview appointment.

I rang them to ask if it was a mistake, but they said no, they want to interview me again.

Apparently the panel decided that I wasn’t ‘appointable’ on the basis of Monday’s interview, but that the director had been impressed by my initiative and self motivation in getting in touch with her straight away. They also seem to think that it shows an impressive amount of self-awareness to have noticed that the world’s worst interview was, well, the world’s worst interview. And they were impressed with the extra information that I had provided.

So I’m getting a second (third?) interview.

And the HR lady says that they never do this.

So, folks, if you ever find yourself in the position of having completely fluffed a job interview:

• Remember that you’re awesome as soon as possible
• Apologise to the panel for the horrible experience you’ve just put you all through, and
• Make it clear that you’re back to your sparkling best form already.

And you might, just, turn the situation around.

Can’t hurt to try now, can it?

UPDATE: I had the re-interview a couple of days ago. And it was great. I don’t know whether it was because I got my act together, because I was telling myself I’d blown it and to just treat this as a practice, or because I had a shot of whiskey in the pub round the corner to calm my nerves before I went in. But it went perfectly, I said all the things I wanted to say and managed to sound knowledgeable and confident.

And I got the job!

Provisionally anyway. They just called me. They need to take up my references and a couple of other things, but if that all checks out okay they’ll be able to give me a start date.

You Might Also Like:

While I Was Lost At Sea

How To Trim Your Waistline AND Your Carbon Footprint, Without Even Thinking About It

Now Is The Time For Plotting A New Course

Living The Dream

Photo source: BBC

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.” ~ Salvador Dali

One day; a year ago this week, I decided it would be a simply fantastic idea to take a lethal sized handful of diazepam, zopiclone, and tramadol tablets. And then some iron tablets, because I’d heard from someone that those are the worst.

The result of this was that I ended up in hospital and then under the care of a psychiatrist. Who prescribed me a different bunch of pills, after which this site is named.

Now, I’m not bringing this up because I want to talk about suicide, or suicidal feelings. I think I’ve pretty much covered that before. No, I’m mentioning it because this seems like a fitting point to look back over the last year, take stock of the things that have happened, and consider how far I may or may not have come.

And I’m recording these reflections in print, or binary code, or whatever, because that seems to be what I do now.

It’s been a very frustrating year.

And I think I have another frustrating year to come.

Progress has been slow, and I’m still very poorly. Much more poorly than I would ever dreamed I could be after being under treatment for nearly a year and a half. And even much more poorly than I’d realised that I was.

Last week my letting agent turned up two hours earlier than she was supposed to and I spent the next three hours having the mother of all panic attacks. This was immediately followed by four hours of flashbacks. I took a pill to try to sleep it off; and proceeded to have a nap filled with nightmares that alternated between physical attacks that had happened to me, and imaginary ones by the friend who’d text me before I fell asleep, and a guy on the other side of the world who I’ve never met but has his picture on his blog.

This has left me worrying about whether I’m up to working again.

Except that I have to be up to working again. Y’know, gotta work to eat, gotta eat to live, and all that kind of thing.

It’s also hit me hard in the last few weeks to realise how far I’ve drifted from people who I’d previously assumed I’d always be close to. Mainly because I’ve been so wrapped up in trying to sort my mind and life out that I just haven’t given all that much thought to anyone who hasn’t made a point of keeping themselves on my radar.

Friendship is an active relationship. In most cases it just doesn’t work like that. People have moved on.

And to think that shortly before this all started I’d been feeling satisfied about having reached a point in my life where I’d have to work pretty hard at messing it up.

I explained last week that I don’t think looking forward to a brighter future would be all that helpful at this point. So I decided it was time to try what they tell you not to do, and look back instead. Because in my frustration at the extent of my problems now, it’s easy to forget how much progress I’ve actually made, and horrendously bad things were a year ago.

A year ago I was having panic attacks every time the flat squeaked, or there was an unexpected noise outside. That was taking up more than three hours a day, never mind in a week.

I couldn’t go outside to pick up my prescriptions or buy groceries because of my anxiety, and the risk that someone might – shock, horror – try to say something to me.

In fact most of the time I couldn’t bring myself to leave my bed.

Last Thursday I made it all the way to London, specifically to talk to somebody. About a job. This time last year I didn’t even think about going to work for over four months.

A year ago I experienced thoughts of harming myself, of not wanting to be alive, and an overwhelming dread that it’s hard to do justice to in words at the thought of having to live out the natural life span of a human being. This became so bad that before the medical mental health people stepped in, I had friends, and even strangers on Twitter, staying awake all night and keeping an eye on me to make sure that I was still there and hadn’t actually killed myself yet.

People don’t need to do that any more. And that’s the most important thing really.

I guess the friends thing is just something I’m going to have to get over.

It takes time, usually a long time, for anybody to recover from any kind of life threatening illness. And that’s what’s going on here. So, once again, I need to work on cutting myself some slack and not being so impatient, I guess.

Related Reading:

Who Am I?

What’s In A Name?

Living the Dream

Life Is Like A Set Of Spinning Plates

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being–neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.” ~ Malcolm X

My lovely friend The Imposter has a new blog. Well, it’s not all that new; she started it eighteen months ago, and then she took a year long break. But now she’s back, and you can find her over at My Life As An Imposter.

She writes about her life growing up in the UK as the daughter of Pakistani parents, and about her impending marriage to her Jewish fiancé, Bob.

The Imposter describes her blog as - ”Less ‘cuddles and a cup of tea on the couch with Oprah’ more, ‘a pinch on the bum from a drunk nun.’”

I say that her stories are warm, witty, and insightful, and that her blog is well worth a read. Not just for those who’ve grown up straddling two different cultures, but for anybody who has ever felt that they didn’t quite ‘fit in’ – particularly amongst their family.

This post is just a taster of what you can find on My Life As An Imposter.

Love, Sex and Organised Religion

It’s a very strange thing to have to straddle two completely different sides of yourself. I was born in the UK but was raised a Muslim. I can identify with Asian culture as well as the culture and traditions of the religion I was raised in but; I enjoy a good whiskey, smoke like a chimney, I collect really shit songs on vinyl like Bruce Willis’ timeless classic “Respect Yourself”, I love to knit, I make a killer steak and kidney pie, oh, and my fiancé is Jewish.

I suppose you could say I am as western as they come but I am still so proud of my cultural heritage. However, being 1st generation Pakistani and growing up in 80s-90s Britain was a real shit sandwich.

The constant racial abuse hurled at you when you were walking down the street was astounding and, thankfully, something that rarely happens to me today. In times when teachers didn’t care to learn the correct pronunciation of your name and children were not encouraged to celebrate their differences at school, one was left rather flummoxed when it came to marrying these two completely opposing sides of yourself and somehow magically producing a well rounded, balanced individual. Particularly when the thing that made you different was the focus of so much negativity.

I am grateful to my parents for sending me to a private school. In those days, it was one of the only ways in which the children I knew were given a bower to rest under and had a shot at developing and flourishing in their own time without the aggressive influence of racial abuse. I’m not saying it didn’t exist, but it was simply not tolerated and, thereby , never developed into something you just had to accept as part of being your lot in life.

I owe every ounce of incredibly inflated sense of self esteem to the schools my parents put me in – they fostered growth and expression and taught me never to apologise for who I am. They gave me time to figure out what my religious and cultural identity meant to me and allowed me to develop my own feelings about it that weren’t marred by negative experiences.

But it doesn’t work out this way for everyone, I see so many members of my wider family who still seems to implacably uncomfortable in their own skin, even in their 20s and 30s because they are still attempting that precarious juggling act between religion and their Pakistani culture and then, are trying desperately to fit in with western society too. Which brings us to the star of the show:

THE MUSLIM GUILT MONSTER

 (For those of you that don’t know, it’s kind of like the Catholic guilt monster, but with more sandals).

Take the opposite sex…. Often in my life I have found myself at a crossroads where I have had to think long and hard about what I feel is the right thing to do and it rarely satisfies all three sides of my religious and cultural identity. It is no lie that I am a far cry from the blushing Asian introvert but unfortunately, this tends to make you go from nought to whore in 5 seconds in the eyes of the Muslim community.

There is no respectable line drawn in the proverbial sand when it comes to a woman’s reputation in both Muslim and Pakistani culture, you are either pure or ruined. And it seems that I would fall into the latter category. Even though I am a gentleman’s daughter, had a top notch education, don’t take drugs, don’t sleep around and have, in fact, only slept with three men, all of whom I was in committed relationships with and one of which I am marrying this year. All of this means I am doomed.

I’m not going to lie, it’s a difficult pill to swallow. It’s hard to find something pure and beautiful with someone you care about and then feel as though expressing that with them physically is debase and wrong. It seemed to me to be the most natural thing in the world.

So, one day, I decided to stop feeling like garbage about wanting to be Pakistani, British and Muslim and I just took the best bits of each of the different sides of my culture and fused them together in some unholy amalgam called “I have no idea what I’m doing”.

But that’s the whole point.. there isn’t really a precedent for this. I grew so tired of people telling me what is right and wrong for my own life, so I decided to stop pleasing people and stop feeling as though I ought to apologise for who I am.. because I rather like me…. Me does charity work and bakes cakes for people and likes to help others and smiles at strangers. I am a good person and I just got so tired of feeling horrendous. I was raised at a cultural crossroads and it was time to respect each strand of that, because it was responsible for who I had become.

All I knew was, I didn’t want to end up like one of my 30 year old friends who has been with his girlfriend for years and is currently buying a house with her and still hasn’t told Mummy and Daddy that they are even a couple.

I just think it’s insanity. What does that say about you that you can’t even stand by your own life choices and be proud of who you’ve decided to make a home with?

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the myriad of problems dropping a bombshell like that on very traditional parents will cause, but you can’t half arse this stuff. If you are in, you are all in… and, yes, it’s confusing and there aren’t really any rules, but no one can tell you aren’t a proper Muslim if you have sex before marriage either because, guess what??? Your faith is your own fucking business and you can be connected to your God any way you see fit. I don’t believe my God will send me to hell for loving another person, for making a life with them and being happy.

But, it took me a long time to get there. I remember when I first started having sex with my first serious boyfriend, I was so wrought with guilt, I ended up in a Catholic Church of all places (as I assumed I wouldn’t find a sympathetic ear if I took this problem to a Mosque). In any case, this genius idea didn’t end well either. I was sat down by a lovely, benevolent Irish nun who gave me a biscuit and a nice cup of tea and then told me I was going to BURN IN HELL.

Not Ideal.

Fin.

More Guest Posts:

Played & Won: How Computer Games Have Affected My Life

The Essentials

More on Sex, Dating & Relationships:

Ever After

Imperfect Happiness

“Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.” ~ Steve Wright

It’ll be good for us to get out for a quick walk, she said. We’ll just have a wander round the reservoir, she said. It’ll only be four miles, she said.

We ended up here.

Well, do you see a reservoir?

The ‘walk’ started off sedately enough. We parked up and went for a stroll along a nice, well-trodden, bridle-path, stopping every three minutes to take pictures of the pretty scenery.

No, it’s just you. You have a dirty mind.

This occupied us for about an hour or so, but, then we reached the point where the bridleway joined back on to the road. So we needed to choose a new path.

So we, reasonably enough, followed a sign saying ‘Public Footpath’.

Which in hindsight may have been an error.

And the first sign that this may have been the case came just five metres in, when, just after we’d confronted The Limbo Tree, we found ourselves edging along a rock face to avoid falling into the stream… I mean, violently surging river.

The Limbo Tree

Proper public footpaths do, as a general rule, tend to have actual paths.

Then we had to climb quite a bit. Up a rocky trail, following in the footprints of some dog who appeared have been that way before.

And, somehow, instead of coming to the reservoir, we ended up on the moor.

A moor with a big fence across the middle. And instructions.

But we weren’t lost, because there was a sign…

Look, we’re not lost, there’s a sign!

We followed the arrow pointing upwards, since it was the only one that pointed in the direction of a passable way.

We thought if we carried on the short way up to the top of the hill we’d be able to see where we were and find our way.

Only, as we carried on, so did the hill. It kept growing.

Every time we though we were just getting to the top of it, another top appeared higher up and further away. It was though someone was watching us, and every time we were almost at the top of the peak, they dropped another bit in and laughed at us.

And then we lost the path entirely.

And yet, somehow, we weren’t particularly worried.

We eventually found another, proper, path, that looked as though it might lead us back to civilisation.

That ran along beside a snowy river.

We also found a thing.

And a touching, memorial bench.

“For Minnie Smith and her son Donald, who so enjoyed this view.”

And the Smiths didn’t have half bad taste in views.

But we really knew we were getting closer to where we wanted to be when we came across some horses.

And a farm-house.

And some sheep.

And we did eventually find the reservoir.

And the road back to the car.

These guys were beside it.

“What are you doing?”

“Huh, not feeding me.”

“Well, in that case, I’m not interested. I’ll be getting back to my grass then.”

And set off home about five hours later than we’d originally planned.

Stopping on the way for a nice cup of tea. And a fantastic country pub lunch of pork, mashed potato, and vegetables, inside a huge Yorkshire pudding, and covered in gravy. Followed by a banana split.

None of which I remembered to take pictures of, but then again, this post is probably quite long enough already.

You Might Also Like:

One Night In Bangkok

Weekend Review

51 Things To Do If You’re Bored

Reblogged from A Manic World: