Mood:
cheekyTopic: Noz Update
Tuesday, 30 May 2006
This will be my first NozUpdate for a while that actually makes it onto the internet.
It’s my birthday today. First of all, for all those that sent their love to me by text, email, fax, and whomever it was that sent that strip-a-gram mime, many thanks. For those that didn’t, that is totally cool too.
For months I’ve barely been communicating with those back home, or even those here, but outside my immediate spheres of routine. I have often wanted to communicate – individually, en masse, whatever – but I haven’t. I started a few NozUpdates full of reasons, explanations and the occasional excuse, but they never got posted.
As time went on, I started to feel more and more depressed about the fact I wasn’t communicating. I resolved to pen up a tremendous NozUpdate full of my most lucid illustrations and metaphors that would make everyone understand what I was going through.
Then I decided that wasn’t going to happen. First, it’s been SO long since I’ve had enjoyed the threesome of energy, inspiration and opportunity required to pen such a NozUpdate. Second, fuck it. I am going to write you about what I want to say now, not all the reasons I should have said things across the past few months.
I just got off the phone with Rox and Jeff. It was a bit of a weird moment because I was mid-order in the hotel bar (Hotel Plaza, of the Catalonia chain, on the Plaza Espanya. Very nice. Pool on the roof, well located, and actually not that expensive considering where it is), here in sunny and sumptuous Barcelona. I had so many things in my head that I think I said very little. This is in fact the topic I’m going to address in this Update.
Recently a few relationships I have in my life, of various levels of closeness, have suffered due to lack of communication in the social sense. This has depressed the crap out of me, and I’ve been pushing myself to fix it. It’s not easy. Few relationships can stand long periods of poor communication. Even no communication is often better than poor communication. I’m realising – at a new level, I guess – how much this effects the way our relationships work.
All my life I’ve had the pleasure of deep, constantly developing and frequent-contact relationships with many fantastic people. I’ve had the same friends for more than half my life, and have had the luck of meeting and befriending what I believe to be most of the best people in all the British Isles. Since I started life in the UK, I’ve been keeping in touch the best I could with people back home. I phoned, messengered, blogged, and I tried to let everyone know where I was in my life with as much detail and regularity as I could. They were all still in each other’s vicinity and I was the “odd one out”. Way out. If they chose not to keep up on each other’s lives, that’s their issue, and I’d hoped that they kept me informed of the major happenings in their’s as well.
With my friends here, ironically, it was harder to keep things ticking over. We were in the same country, but because of my various relocations and job changes, I’ve got a social network where few people actually live in the same city. Much like I did in Canada with Downtown Toronto, I try and convince everyone that they should all converge in Central London, because, duh… But shockingly, people seemed compelled to stay in their own city, even if that city quiet obviously is a) too far from London b) sucks.
So, I’ve been trying to manage most of my relationships as long distance relationships, with the exception of my relationship with my girlfriend Lo. Frequent NozUpdate readers will already know Lo by reputation by now, but she’ll be a new entity to newbies. Lo and I had our own communication issues for a while. Confined space, various intense stresses of relocation, employment, finance and us both being incredibly strong-willed means we’ve had an interesting time of it, but things move along in their quirky way, and we keep going because at the end of the day, we’re in love, we are happy and fascinated with each other, and that we are always meandering along together in the direction we want our relationship to go.
This Update could well be about Lo and I, but it’s not.
I’m writing as generally as I can about my latest batch of existential observations.
I was talking about the effect of poor communication in relationships. How does this manifest?
One of the most universal issues here is the handling of "The Update". "The Update" can be an update like this one - cast unto the ages - or it can be simply the answer to the question: “How are you?” I have been talking to people recently and getting a lot of instances of the universal answer, “I’m fine.” Which is alright, if you’re really going to tell me later how you really are and you’re just stalling. But really not knowing what is going on in person’s life, and more importantly, inside a person, is where things get difficult.
I’ve got a friend, right? He’s a wang when it comes to contacting people. We used to be quite close and see each other all the time, so it was easy for him to share with me. I use the term “easy” in the logistical sense only. He’s British, so it was as “easy” as it gets around here. I’ve made some attempts at communication I won’t outline, but basically, I’m not getting a lot of feedback.
I decided to write this Update entry when I hung up the phone with him for the third or fourth time, and Lo asked me, as she had a few times after previous conversations with him, “How is he?” I had to just say “I have no idea. He sounded fine.”
After that it dawned on me that I really knew so little about what was going on in the life of someone to whom I was talking. I wasn’t actually sharing anything. Communication, yes. Quality, no.
I was talking to someone else entirely a while before – another guy I used to live nearer to - and I’d mentioned a girl I thought he’d be interested in meeting, and he said “Dude, I’m going out with my ex girlfriend again. I have been for five months”. This was a big-deal girlfriend for him. They’d had a rocky drawn out break-up and he really was in deep over her. I’d talked to this person in the past five months many times, yet I had no idea. Again, poor communication...
These experiences waved alarm bells in front of my face (you catch that mixed metaphor there? I don’t do those often, but I liked that, so I’m gonna use it). I had to start writing my NozUpdates again. It was a New Year’s resolution to start writing them anyway and do at least one a month, but I didn’t keep it. I’ve varied progress on several of the others. Then I realised that NozUpdates aren’t just amusing vehicles to let the gang around the world know the latest and greatest adventures of Noz, they are the primary way that many people even know what is going on with me at all. They may not be perfect, but they keep me at least more real than I would be as a silent memory, or as a smattering of short and insignificant text or phone conversations, which is all that I’ve been able to manage since my life got turned upside down by leaving Blast Radius last year (uh… to those who missed out – I left Blast Radius last November).
I used to have a seemingly infinite string of plane and train rides around Europe to write my Updates to my heart’s content, and hopefully your hearts’ content. I used to work from home when I was in the UK, so I was able to use all of lunch to do whatever I wanted and all of my day before and after work. I could stay up late because I could afford to sleep in until eight forty-five and still be at work at five to nine.
Now, I get home around seven or seven thirty, after spending the day in Sutton Surrey (FYI, “Sutton (and to lesser degree Surrey generally)”, is to “fun”, as “towel slathered in cold dog shit” is to “face”), try to enjoy what little time I have to spend with Lo or do my own stuff, eat and do household stuff, and then I’m asleep usually in bed around eleven and have to get up at seven. Everyone else calls this “normal”. Which it is, but it is the first time it’s been normal for me. This isn’t an excuse and isn’t even an explanation, because given all this, I know for a fact I could’ve been writing Updates, but wasn’t. Yes, I’m writing this one in my hotel room in Barcelona in my birthday instead of walking around one of the world’s most beautiful cities, or at least swimming in the pool on the roof, but I can and will write these in the UK. What this is, is an analysis and an apology.
I am sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what’s been going on, and not only that, I understand very deeply what it was that I did wrong and why it’s painful and damaging.
To those a bit more distant from the world of Noz who occasionally read my updates out of boredom and never really missed them – they’re back! Now at last the internet can be used for something besides work, maps, and productivity tools, eh? Amazing. What’s next? Electronic social bulletin board systems? Games, even?
Love,
Me
…Now.
This of course begets the questions: So, Noz, What's up? How's work? How was Barcelona? Did you get that raise? I'll get to that...
