Mood:  a-ok

Hey Y’All!

As my blogs have gone from once a week to once an epoch, it’s hard for me to detail events with the same detail that I would like...

Lo and I just back from the definition of a ‘much needed’ vacation. 13 days in sunny Toronto. We had an awesome time, with my only regrets being not enough time spent with my brothers, father, nieces and nephew. I also didn’t get to see a few people at all, but they didn’t show up to my party, so n’yeah.

I’m currently listening to Tool’s latest epic, 10,000 Days, where each track seems to last an epoch... but it is an Epoch of Rock! Yeah, Baby. I have never heard an album that made me so desperate -- desperate as for water in the desert, as q is for u -- to make music. Now at their forth album, there’s finally a band that can be compared to Zeppelin.

Anyway, if you don’t have it, go buy that right now. Now since you’ve got it, put it on and keep reading.

I was in town for my man Iram’s and my lady Melanie’s wedding. Iram and Melanie are in my sacred inner circle of bestest buddies, many of whom seem to be getting married, are recently married, or are strongly considering getting married these days. Despite my having been gone now for almost as long as I knew them, I was still invited back to be their best man. It was an awesome experience and a rockin’ wedding. We rocked the dancefloor to the wee hours, and I very much enjoyed the privilege of thanking and describing Iram and Melanie’s greatness as a couple to all their friends and family.

Marriage spreads like a wildfire through social groups; like a tidal wave of acid consuming all in its path. Those in my social group are dropping like flies. I must admit I am even less fettered by the suggestion myself. I found myself talking about marriage with Lo with a sense of comfort that speaks volumes of how far our relationship has come. We are doing really well right now, and despite all our challenges -- geographical (we don’t like where we live, and are moving countries together), social (we don’t got a lot of friends where we live), and linguistic (we don’t share a native language) -- we have built something quite wonderful. Everyone back home loved her (ah-duh...) and she has now met my mom, and Iram’s mom, the last two vital check-points before real marriage discussions could happen.

This is not an announcement of engagement or anything, just that for the first time I can say I am happy talking about the idea of Lo and I in a public and “life-long” sense that I would have been chagey about before. Having two weeks away to really get out of our old environment and spend some quality time together has been awesome.

Those who are announcing engagements are my friends Rox and Mei!
I just got the email in the last 3 days letting me know about that Rox's is “official”! This finally ends a lengthy ‘unofficial’ period which we’re all happy to be through. I don’t know Chris as well as Melanie or Iram, but I know him enough to know that he rocks like Tool. He is intensely nice and fits with Roxanne so well I is almost incestuous. He’s crazy nice.  Mei's beau unfortunately I know even less, but I know she has great taste. 

Congratulations to newlyweds Iram and Melanie and all the imminent-weds!

Love!

Other trip highlights:

• TUBING!! (http://www.skisnowvalley.com/tubing.htm) 
• The Stillwater Spa (http://parktoronto.hyatt.com/hyatt/pure/spas/index.jsp?_requestid=668871)
• Ice Skating at City Hall
• The Imperial Jade, La Pallette and Anna Purna restaurants

Posted by Noz at 9:54 PM BST

Updated: Saturday, March 17, 2007 6:31 PM BST

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Mood:  spacey

Oh Lordy, how things can change

2006-11-28

SO much has happened... as you'd expect in 6 months...

I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want first? Bad news first makes good news seem callous, and good news first makes you end on a downer.

I'll start with the bad news, and hope that you're able to feel what I am - that there's hope around the corner and that respect and valuation of the bad can co-exist with the good.

I will start with a quick bullet update generally in Chronological order for those who don't care to sift through pages of meandering verbiage. I'll then elaborate below:

• I'm in therapy (finally).
• Lo and I are climbing out of our summer rough patch.
• My Mother returned from her 6 month Homeric voyage into the depths of Peru and the human soul
• I am finally finishing Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
• My father survived a heart-attack last Friday and has subsequently had an angioplasty.<
• I went to Stockholm, Sweden with Lo for a much needed romantic city-break and loved it madly. (detail coming...)
• Work is great in the sense I love it, and feel more satisfaction and sense of accomplishment than I've ever had from a job before. (detail coming...)
• Work is hard and terrible in the sense that we are not making enough money. (detail coming...)
• I got my British citizenship approved!!! (detail coming...)
• My music is going nowhere. (detail coming...)

TheRapist

I tried getting in therapy as a teenager. I'd sit across from a fat, balding, oily-looking man who'd take his shoes off and idly roll them around the floor with his socked feet during our sessions, which consisted basically of him staring at me waiting for me to bare my soul. Somehow it didn't go anywhere. I dropped it after a month or so.

Now, over 10 years later, I'm back in. This time my therapist is a nice woman, and I am the one who takes my shoes off. I had been suffering a lot because I was not able to find a way to communicate, and as well, I've been having trouble because I'm not communicating. Two interrelated but different problems. Therapy has given me a place and time to "just do it". I've never had trouble communicating quite like this before, and I find it even now a struggle to squeeze out my feelings in Blog form. I never really understood before what it was to have trouble expressing one's thoughts and feelings. It sucks. So I've decided to try to fix it.

A (periodically wise) friend of mine described therapy as disassembling the of automobile of one's soul, laying out all the rusty pieces on the shop floor, and methodically cleaning and reassembling them. A more macho metaphor one couldn't think up given a dozen little umbrellas, a dozen jasmine teas, and the whole of the sunniest Sunday in may. Still, I think it's great.

Once a week I go to get an hour with my therapist followed by an hour with my osteopath. I come out pretty well "reset" for another week. I've noticed an immediate difference, and I am more relaxed and optimistic than I've been in months. I've always recommended therapy to all and sundry, but never hit a point where I wanted to and could afford to fit it into my own life. I recommend it even more strongly though. Although, I think a proper 3-day-a-week psychoanalyst would be much better than a 1-hour-a-week counsellor - just take what you can get.

Roughage Patch Kids

Lo and I were going through a very stressful period this summer. Job instability, London Loneliness, our relative economic ruin, and our respective families put a lot of outside stress on two people already living together for the first time in a country foreign to both of them, without a common language between them, and trying to find stable livable jobs. They say London is a very hard city to survive in, and all in all, we've been very lucky. Still, we had our share of trouble this summer.

I can't say we're totally out of the woods, because these things don't happen overnight, and there's still some road ahead of us (aren't clichéd metaphors great when trying to express a lot in a few words?). Basically, for those who were up on the latest trials of life we were experiencing, things are much better. For those who weren't - things are much better. We are happier and more at peace in our relationship with each other, and with our lives, than we have been a very long time.

We seemed to be for a while constantly fighting this uphill battle against our lives. Now it seems we've finally achieved what we wanted: some rest and relaxation.

Lo made gluten-free pancakes this morning for breakfast (which we got around to by 4:30pm) and we are having a lovely quiet Sunday afternoon in our underwear.

Mama Said (There's Much Weight You Will Lift)

My mother has finally returned from South America. Many of you won't know, but one of the various machinations grinding up my life as of late was the situation with my mother and our extended family in Peru. I don't know how much I can, should, or want to write about them here.

Let's summarise: they're dicks.

My mother was trying to rescue my grandmother from elder abuse and theft at the hands of her own children (my mother's siblings), and rescue some aspects of herself that were lost in the machinations of growing up among a bunch of dicks. Elder abuse is something I never thought would impact my life and I count myself lucky it wasn't me in a corrupt South American nation trying to do right by my mother.

Still, I could criticise my mom's handling of the situation, but there's a lot I don't know about it in truth. I do think she could have communicated more (hypocritical as I guess that is) and I could probably get away with suggesting her priorities got out of whack staying 6 months away from the situation burbling in Toronto in her absence (i.e., my father in the hospital and the whole rest of the responsibilities in her life which were left behind).

I'm one to always try to understand before criticising. So, I can point-out a fuck-up, but that's not in truth a "critique". I was very hurt knowing that my father and sisters were feeling such a lack of support in their lives, when my Mom gone to fight the good (and/or futile ridiculous) fight in Peru to try to get my grandmother into the protected environment of a nursing home.

There is a natural sense of betrayal in a situation where someone de-prioritises you and things which are plainly important and goes and focusses elsewhere for a while. I am angry and frustrated by the whole situation, but in fact I can't say what I'd have done in her place. No one has ever been abusing or robbing my mother to the point where I felt I had to fly across a continent and sideline my whole life to try to fix the matter.

Basically, it was all a big friggin' mess.

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/thewaterboy/alwaysontherun.htm

Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

I'm finally finishing the summary collection of Freud's lectures. I read the lectures on parapraxes (meaningful errors of the tongue, pen, memory and other such "Freudian slips") like a bajillion frillion times, and never made it through without getting distracted. The problem reading this is that I sort of know it all, so there's a definite feeling of slogging through. I'm now past the halfway mark and getting into interpretation of dreams. This is again nothing new, but reading Freud's specific arguments and examples is a lot more fun than the basic principles of the unconscious and ambivalence.

What's especially interesting is how dated it all is. Freud has to spend about a page introducing the fact that he's going to deal with sexual issues and name specific parts of the anatomy (which he in fact later refers to quite indirectly whenever possible) even though there are "women present". Also references to masturbation and the inherent terror in a child's heart that comes with it (har de har...). I am researching ways to resurrect this guy and have him update everything. In one bit he refers to a boy's fear of "the punishment that masturbation brings" and expects the audience to actually know what he's talking about. What was the punishment for masturbation? Is he talking about hair palms or blindness or one of those things that your dad used to include as punch lines to jokes? In the post-AIDS post-Sex in the City era where masturbation is in fact a form of healthcare, and women discuss their preference for clitoral vs. vagina stimulation in their vibrators, so many of the examples Freud uses seem to be relegated to childhood sexual development. We still have sexual shame, but now we need to take the whole thing up a notch.

Freud analyses a dream and concludes with, "This dream represents the boys homosexual desires towards his uncle" and I'm like, "AND??". When such a suggestion would cause riots in the streets, it's ok to leave it at that and hope you can just get people to digest that much. For me I'm finding reading this stuff really leaves me in the sad situation where I may have to start reading all the case examples before I get to any of the good stuff.

Who's Yo Daddy?

So, as I said, my father had a heart attack last week.

As you probably know, it's very hard for me to be out here with my father living in a hospital. I've been away a long time, but this last year the idea of giving up and coming home has come up many times. What is difficult for me is that it never ceases to be difficult. It's been over a year since the stroke that put my father in a wheelchair and hospital. The year before that he burnt up the house he and my mom lived in. Then this year he has a heart-attack. I am at the point where I am going to be leaving this country soon, and I have to think - where is it that I should be going?

The plan has been, for 5 years now, to leave the UK and go to Spain. Now Lo and I are living together, we share this dream. We've got a budget (yes, Noz has a budget!) and we're working on moving. I've start sending out job applications and we've been looking at apartments in Madrid. But since this heart attack I've had to think what will happen if I go through with it?

10 years ago, my father and I kinda parted ways, like many fathers and sons have when the son starts to develop into a young man. Our relationship was built for a certain dynamic and when I needed it to change, he couldn't adapt. Hell, he was in his 70s when I was teenager. After I left, after the fire, and especially, especially after his stroke, the old bastard realised he'd slipped up and started to reconnect with me. Now I have a father who wants to communicate - who wants to share and connect with his son. Fucking fucker.

It's one thing to keep living in the UK, especially with the crushing debt that keeps me here. But when I've got the money, and the will and way to move to another country, if I move to Spain and then 6 months later my dad dies - what then? He gets off easy! I have to deal with it for the rest of my life! I am now for the first time thinking - maybe I have to go home. If I don't, then I miss out on whatever years my father has left.

A good talk with Lo, my boss and my Mom sorted all this out. Work is willing to allow me to work from Canada a few weeks a quarter, and just airing it all with my mom always helps.

Swedish Meatballs - Stockholm, Sweden

http://scandinaviancooking.com/articles/swedish_meatballs.htm

See, if it weren't for this blog, would you have ever known there was a ScandanavianCooking.com?

Sweden was fantastic, but it wasn't until I was on the way home writing this up that I realised we COMPLETELY forgot to go get some meatballs!

More coming soon…

I'm a Brit!

Coming soon…

Work is great

Coming soon…

Work is hard and terrible

Coming soon…

My music is going nowhere

Posted by Noz at 1:57 PM GMT

Updated: Friday, December 15, 2006 2:04 PM GMT

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Mood:  don't ask

2006-08-18

I can hear you out there.

Before I go to sleep, I can hear the voices.  From all around the globe they whir and fizzle through the air like tiny terrorist rockets converging on me.

Whispers...

"Noz is SUCH a dick." 

"...Never returns my emails"

"He doesn't even blog anymore..."

And you're right.  And I am.

I'm afraid that there's this horrible backlog of crap inside me right now that doesn't let anything out.  My family and work life are in such a state that I'm basically an emotional cripple these days.   Before, I'd escape into blogging, writting, music, dancing, etc....  That's just not working for me lately, and I'm trying to figure out what and how to go on.

I'm still here.  I wanted you to know that.  I wanted you to know that you, my loved ones from all over, with your little intercontinental ballastics, help keep me going.  You help me, and Lo, who bears the burden of me, to go on. 

It's the knowledge that all my tsunamis of guilt and sub-strata agonising are an epic work of nihilist fiction.  You remind me that I am capable of an infinite amount of silliness, and that the average level of cool, kind, great, decent, and invigoratingness in the people who read my blogs is such that I by proxy am still pretty a-ok. Lo reads my blogs too and she's pretty wicked.

Lo however, poor thing, has to live with me.  And has to live here in this place where she is like a fish thrown in the dusty ground of the scortching Sahara. The rest of you lot can selectively remember the good, and forget the bad.  Lucky people.  

Think a fond thought for us both and please continue to be as great as you always all were.

Posted by Noz at 10:27 AM BST

Updated: Friday, September 21, 2007 12:19 PM BST

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Mood:  down

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Hello Nozfans,

I’ve been neglecting you as of late. I’m sorry about this. It’s been a very difficult last few months for me. I’d have to flip through my blogs to even remember how I was doing before about 6 weeks ago, but in retrospect, I see it as the rosy days of my youth compared to the last few weeks.

I didn’t blog about it at the time because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but my father had a serious stroke earlier this summer and I spent a week in Toronto visiting him and my family. It was a difficult week, and has been a very difficult period since around that time. I still don’t know exactly what to feel – there’s a potent impotence of being the one remote in a situation like this. I can’t really do much other than ask any of my friends in Toronto who can, to please drop by the hospital to visit him when you are able. What he is really lacking is human contact that isn’t a nurse or a doctor, or a rehab person. His persona has returned and is snared in a broken shell, and it is very frustrating for him. He’s been very appreciative of Roxanne’s visits, and I think that if anyone of the home-crew can go by to just say hi, even for 15 minutes, it would brighten his day significantly.

I can’t really bring myself to write much about my feelings about my father’s situation. I’ll avoid the question – hey, I’ve been in Britain 5 years, I’ve learned all the tricks – by talking around the issue: It’s a very difficult situation for my family. Logistically and emotionally we’re pushed to work together in ways that, like most families, we’re not especially good at. I myself am thinking often that I have for 10 years been avoiding any emotional interaction with my father, due to the rift that grew between us in my adolescence, and now, when I would like to connect with him, I find I no longer know how. The funny part is that I knew this would happen, but at the time, I didn’t think I would care so much.

Basically my Dad’s always been a big nut-job, and now he’s a nut-job that is suffering, and that’s very different. Also, the fact he’s being regularly medicated means that he’s in many psychological ways, being restored to being the man he was before the diabetes made him such a morose cantankerous old curmudgeon. He’s interactive and funny again, and tragically, has a certain vibrance that he’d been lacking, but it’s a vibrance that’s confined to a bed or if he’s lucky, a wheelchair.

I’m torn by the fact that this man, who so disappointed, failed, and in my mind, betrayed me as a father, is now in need, and I am driven to help and support him. After 10 years of anger, and 5 years of ambivalence, now I’m trying to reconnect with feelings of love. The ironic bit is that he doesn’t seem to have a clue that this rift has existed. My family is similarly torn by varying levels of drive and availability. Everyone feels justified in their position, and in these situations there’s little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and so everyone has a constant sense of righteous indignation combined with bitterness, tempered with the underlying reality that our individual concerns and squabbling have to be set aside occasionally to check on my dad in the hospital. It’s a bit of a mess really, so it’s both frustrating and relieving to be five or six timezones away from the whole situation. I’m left to feel guilty that I’m not able to do more, and guilty that I’m happy about not being able to do more.

I guess I talked a bit about my feelings. I’ve learned the theory of the stiff upper lip, but I’m pretty shit at maintaining it. Gotsta keep keepin’ it real, I guess.

Work continues to suck like a cavernous shotgun wound to the chest. They have finally, after nearly 18 months, gotten around to calculating our commission payments for 2005. (God knows what happened with 2004). Lo and behold, they’ve figured out that not only do I get no commission, I owe them several thousand dollars. How this happened I won’t detail here, but I want to add it to the stack of hideous travesties perpetrated at this monkey-house chicken-shit outfit. I’m starting to realize that it’s simply the case that no one agrees with what I think, and to “define my own destiny” as it were, I would have to “step up to the plate” on a lot of “challenges”.

Frankly, I’m freaking tired of stepping up to the plate. I have been pushing through ridiculous workloads, laughable objectives, and clueless management for a very very long time, and I just don’t care to help anymore. I’m tired of fighting against a company just to get the chance to help it. Everyone I talk to fundamentally disagrees with me, but says that if I set aside even more of my evenings and weekends to put together the business context and supporting arguments, then they’ll at least hear me out. Fuck it. I’m exhausted, bitter, disgustingly underpaid and undervalued, unsupported in an infrastructure or personnel investment sense, and constantly treated as if I’m lucky to even be employed. Screw that. Whatever happens, send me an email. I’ll be in the john masturbating to gay porn. Business Develop that, bitch.

What’s freaky is that I thought it was a departmental thing, but since I’ve started to be more vocal about my frustrations, it seems I’m a carbon copy whiner. Everyone I speak to, regardless of role, has all the same complaints: no one listens to me, those who do can’t get any momentum behind their words, and the companies internal workings are a shambles so pathetic, if there was a license to employ people, it would be revoked. And through it all there’s this atmosphere that if you’re not happy you A) are a trouble maker spreading lies and will get your boss in trouble with their boss, so shut up B) are a greedy lazy failure of an employee, and want get paid seven figures to lay in the sun all day masturbating to gay porn C) are an ungrateful bastard who just doesn’t ‘get’ why you’re lucky and should seek professional help to remedy your inherent stupidity. It’s like everyone has their fingers in their ears and is playing the Flintstones theme song on 11 while great employees resign and projects spiral into disaster so that they don’t look like ‘a downer’.

If it weren’t for the staggeringly wicked teams that we all work in, I think everyone would’ve just walked. We love each other, hate our company. Such a waste of personnel bursting with potential the world has truly never seen. It disgusts me to the deepest recesses of my soul.

What keeps me here is the relationships I’ve developed with my coworkers and the various partners around Europe. Internally, we are a great team, and I love the people I work with. Externally, we have people I’ve developed both personal and professional relationships with, and furthermore, to whom I have made promises. I have said “We’re going to do X and Y - together” and now they expect me to keep my word. I take that very seriously. I see it as an obligation that I’m not quick to walk away from and I am to a great extent honour-bound to work through our internal “challenges” to make good on what I’ve promised to deliver. They have earned a hell of a lot more of my loyalty than my company has. They have invested in me.

Thank god very few people from work read my blogs…

And my teeth are rotting out of my head! I’ve needed a root canal for a month, and it’s so painful that I am having constant headaches and have to take painkillers just to sleep and get through the days. I went to the dentist in Canada, he said he couldn't do anything that day because I was leaving. I went to the dentist as soon as I could when I returned from Canada, and they opened up the worst of the three endangered teeth, told me the problem, and then said they couldn’t do anything until the next time I came to see them. That was a week ago. It’s going to be another week at least before I can get it looked at, as I’m in on the road in Germany all week immediately after I leave the Netherlands.

And I don’t do any music anymore... I will, but I haven't in ages.

And then there’s my back, which caused my mother to swoon with woe over msn describing my “curved spine”, “hunched shoulders”, and “hanging rib cage”. “What’s it all about?” Jesus Christ. There’s nothing I need more as I rush on towards thirty and spend my 5000th day bent in front of a computer screen than to be described as if I’m the hunchback of Notre Dame. Everything except Lo is going to hell in a hand-basket, and I’m supposed to find additional time in my gapless schedule to search out and then take Pilates classes in Amsterdam, Welwyn, London and Paris. Christ. Everyone wants me to do everything all at once, and with a bright smile on my face while I do it.

My saving grace, if somehow still stressful: Elodie is now less than two weeks from moving to the UK on an indefinite basis. This is great. This is also scary. I want to be more excited for us, and I want to be upbeat and supportive, but everything else in my life is so difficult right now, that it’s hard for me to have the attitude I’d like. I am excited, and I’m of course scared to crap at the same time. Elodie is able to be a lot less anxious than I am, and she’s lucky. I am in a sense the passive one in all this. I am committed to our plans, and I am looking forward to living them out, but in the end, she’s quitting her job, has left her house, and is couch-surfing so that she can come live with me in my country, where she would never otherwise live. That’s hard to live with without feeling fear and guilt. Lo’s sweetness, patience and support is making it easier, and really, I think if it was anyone else in the world, I’d have given this whole thing up long ago. Wish us luck. With finding a job, and a home, and moving, and taxes, and all the rest, we’re in for a lot in the next few months. We’re very lucky to have found each other, and I think with the strength in our relationship, we will do fine. We balance each other’s insanity nicely. That’s everything that I could want in a partner.

It's been very hard for her for me to be so totally embroiled in my own dramas when we're just two weeks from moving in together. When you're at a distance, when things are bad it is the most stressful. I have been absent and distant and not as supportive as I would've like to be these last weeks. It's an awful thing to love someone but be too weak to show it. I'm trying to give my share into things, but I have been failing. Although periodically she can lay a guilt trip so good sometimes I think she's a closet jew, I can only thank her for putting up with me. In the end, when we really need each other, we come through.

My Dad is at the Baycrest Hospital
Floor 3W
Room 28, bed D
Hiis telephone number is
416 785 2500 extension 3876 (better to call him after 8 in the evening as he usually is away from his bed

Posted by Noz at 12:01 AM BST

Updated: Saturday, September 17, 2005 7:50 PM BST

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