Michael Jackson lied: you ARE alone

Happy Christmas, one and all. Sorry I'm late. It's been a strange few days and I am now trying to help my parents use their three-year-old vinyl-to-mp3 USB turntable, unopened until today, but the software that came with it is so appalling that I challenge its designer to use it without wanting to drag the stylus over his own retina after a handful of seconds. As a sample of the aforementioned crapness, how's this: it installs a handy shortcut icon on your desktop but will double clicking it open the programme? No it will not. How about right clicking and selecting 'Open'? No. How to open the programme? It is impossible - unless you uninstall it and reinstall it from the CD-Rom. Then it works. Oh how handy. I am now listening to Judy Collins' Greatest Hits through the tinny bass-free computer speakers for approx. the sixth time as it has taken several attempts to know if we're recording successfully. My mum is doing sudoku on a sofa a few feet away and keeps absent-mindedly breaking into a tremulous warble before abandoning it, saying, 'Oh, this used to be one of my favourites.'

My latest attempt to record Side B started crackling wildly so I stopped the recording after forty minutes, only to find that there was no record of it on their PC. I have now given up, something I don't find easy but which must be done in order to preserve the functional state of my parents' laptop - the alternative is putting it on the floor and then repeatedly jumping up and down on it in my Fitflop boots until it admits, out loud, that it is at least six thousand times less user-friendly than a Mac.

Vinyl-ripping aside, I have now reached the long-longed-for stage of Winterval where my duties are over. On Christmas Eve the three of us went to the Albert Hall for a carol concert, where we were joined by two of my parents' friends who I've not met before. Seven people came for lunch on the Day Itself, making ten in total. Then yesterday we went to a pub on the river to meet another (much larger) family and then walked back to their house for lunch. It's all been lovely and festive and fun and there have been many laughs, particularly from my dad's ecstatic and near-constant use of his new Britain's Got Talent judges' buzzer, but there's always a sense of relief when all the socialising is over and you know you can don your jeans and your unflattering jumper and not be polite to anyone for the next hundred hours.

But every year, the euphoria fades after around nine minutes and I am soon left feeling listless, yet with a list of things to do and a hangover. This year's list includes a) teaching myself how to transfer vinyl to my parents' PC, a fairly bearable task that pales into heaven beside task b), teaching my parents how to transfer vinyl to their PC, which may as well be labelled Inevitable Armageddon. Since I haven't yet managed to complete stage a), I've been spared stage b), but still feel like I've let the side down. Countless others complaining about the shit software online won't console my parents, who've been gestating this project excitedly for a long time, desperately keen to ditch the records to create valuable storage space for their burgeoning collection of old bedside lamps, blankets and Eighties skiwear. I had also allocated these days to: writing, learning how to use my sewing machine, practicing my ukulele and clearing out my Gmail inbox - a selection of chores that wouldn't be misery-inducing, except that my parents are constantly boiling, fanning themselves dramatically and opening the back door to encourage a through draft, so today I have been wearing Rudolph socks, fur-lined boots, jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, cashmere jumper, scarf, beret and fleece, but have still been freezing since dawn and am unable to do anything except lie around under a blanket and moan gently. I mooted returning to my flat but I think my mother is disappointed. I'd be happy to stay longer except I don't really want to.

Like I say, it's been a strange few days. I love Christmas and on the surface, Winterval 2010 has been splendid, but recent changes within have meant that I'm definitely more aware than I used to be of my solitude - and by that I mean that separateness that exists whether you're with close friends in a crowded room or on your own in an empty flat, a fact that wouldn't be changed by the addition of a boyfriend, twins or a short-haired Dachshund. In the past, I've distracted myself with going out, planning future evenings out, chatting on the phone to people about times I've gone out in the past and times I am planning to go out in the future, writing about going out, fancying boys, or telling myself that I wouldn't be alone forever. Now something massive has shifted and I've accepted that my old denial wasn't getting me anywhere. In some ways, we're all on our own - married with babies or not - and I have to like it or lump it rather than search endlessly for distractions. Such a Copernican shift, intangible though it is, is proving a little tricky. Ideally, I'd learn how to see our psychological isolation as a good thing rather than as ultimate proof that life is a crock. Somehow I have to come to terms with it rather than feeling that I'm being massively negative and buzzkillish - but in this, I don't think I'm alone: I can't imagine that I'm the only person who views the fact of their own psychological solitude with a sense of shame, and the fact of others' with pity. Right now, it seems to me cruel that we are genetically social creatures, and that the furtherance of our species relies on us being physically and emotionally connected at the deepest level, but that, from the moment our existence begins to the moment it ends, we are the only people in our heads and will forever be the only person who lives our life. Hunter S. Thompson had sensible things to say on the subject (below) - I just hope I get there soonish. Maybe Christmas isn't the easiest time to learn:

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely - at least, not all the time - but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness."

NSFW

500

Well knock me down with a post-it note. The clever stats on my Blogger dashboard tell me that this here is my 500th entry on Lost Looking For Fish. Since November 2006, thousands of words have been strung into sentences full of self-obsession, self-regard, self-derision and self-doubt. My teenage diaries catalogue, in fine-ruled page after fine-ruled page, my love for boys, the objects of my affection changing so frequently that I now find it very difficult to understand who is who. At several points I genuinely believed I was in love with two or three different people at once, in many cases having talked to them for less than two or three minutes and certainly never having been alone in a room with them. The extent of my own fickleness is breathtaking. These days I worry about crows' feet, debilitating illness, early menopause and getting behind with Desperate Housewives. I don't know which is worse. Anyway, sincere thanks for being here for the last 500 chapters. This blog is one of my most favourite things in the world and your virtual presence is much valued.

Last night I went to my ukulele class and we learned to play Delilah by Tom Jones. It's all fine except the transition from B7 to E at the beginning of the third line of the verse, when all of us needed to pause for about six seconds to get the next chord. I think it'll be a while before we're ready to lay down our first tracks. Then I went home and watched Three Colours: Blue, the first film in the 1990s trilogy that I must have lied to about seventy people and told them I'd watched before, but I haven't. Apologies if you were fooled. It was excellent: Juliette Binoche was astonishingly good in quite a brutal role. If her nostrils were fractionally smaller, she'd be perfect. Looking forward to the next two instalments.

This morning I was on the tube and miraculously got a seat around London Bridge somewhere. The man next to me was about my age, meticulously dressed in a very dapper grey suit with a bright shirt, and had a neatly-trimmed goatee/moustache combo going on. I felt like he should be a stereotypical gay tailor in the 1980s. In his hand was a large paperback book, about the size of a weighty school textbook. It looked like a textbook too - thick white paper, heavily illustrated with line drawings and colour pictures, and large chunks of text explaining things. Always keen to learn, I looked closer. The pictures were of fantasy creatures. The words were discussing a place called Hive City. I have since looked it up on Wikipedia, and found that Hive City is the capital of a computer game land called Necromunda. And then I found this adorable geek's account of his obsession. And then I found all this fan fiction that people have written, that is published and available on Amazon. And really, isn't humanity amazing? You think you're getting your head round it, I'm just about coming to terms with World of Warcraft and Second Life and accepting them as part of the modern world, but then you realise how many games there are, how much of a contribution they've made to people's lives, formed friendships, started real life romances, ended marriages, caused real life deaths and bankruptcies... It's strange, and I don't have the time or the inclination to get involved, but I love that it exists. Variety FTW.

Woman vs. Machine

Much as I'd like to be a zenful person who never experiences rage, sadly there is no shortage of things that, even if they don't make my blood boil, certainly raise it to an active simmer. And while I normally consider myself to be fairly patient when it comes to the eccentricities of computers, there are a couple of issues that are guaranteed to have me making obscene finger gestures at my monitor. One of them occurred yesterday, when I'd written a lengthy email full of hilarious anecdotes and pithy comment, highlighted one word to edit and pressed backspace to delete it, only my computer didn't register that I'd highlighted a word and took my backspace-pressing to signify that I wanted to go back a page. Of course, when I returned forward, my lovingly-crafted work of minor genius had been lost forever. That certainly was irritating.

But far more frequently, several times a day, I have to suffer a greater injustice when my Bronze Age work computer struggles to keep up with my commands and freezes. Even a relatively simple request, say, saving an Excel spreadsheet, can be too much for my faithless friend. Wiggling the mouse is futile, as is frantically pressing any button. Nothing will expedite its return to normal. But in the meantime, although it is too busy to do my bidding, it can still manage to post a message on screen saying: 'Microsoft Excel [Not Responding]'. Just the sight of those latter two words sends me into a frenzy of rage, usually accompanied by some foul-mouthed tirade better suited to an East-End ganster. Really, which jobsworth Stanford graduate came up with this most irritating of concepts? I know you're not freaking responding you patronising machine, I've been sitting here waiting for something to happen for several seconds! Do you think I haven't noticed that you've done absolutely nothing since I pressed 'save'?! Do you think I haven't realised I can't move my cursor? Or use another programme? Or do anything remotely useful until you've finished having your attack?! Don't waste your precious few spare bytes telling me you're doing zilch! Conserve your energy and expend it on fixing the freaking problem! Do you think I would get away with that as an excuse? If my boss came in and found me incapacitated after a boozy lunch with a Post-It stuck on my head saying 'Not Responding', do you think that would be acceptable? Of course not! So why should we accept this shoddy behaviour from a machine, eh? Eh? Answer me you cretin!

Not that I have much pent-up aggression at the moment or anything...

Walk or web?

It is possibly slightly shameful that, when I dropped my laptop onto my bare right foot yesterday morning before work, I was more concerned about whether or not I’d broken my computer than whether or not I would be able to walk without crutches. The pain was excruciating but my priorities lay elsewhere. A brief incident, admittedly, but a frank symbol of my continued internet slavishness.

News just online is that 49% of secondary schools in the UK are rated ‘satisfactory’ or below, with ‘satisfactory’ roughly equal to ‘not good enough’. This raises several hundred questions but the one rattling loudest around my almost-empty skull involves the concept of ‘good’ when it comes to schooling. I have no doubt that my (expensive) education would have fallen into the ‘excellent’ category. In the year that I took my A Levels, we were top of the small schools league table, with something like 98% A-C grades. In addition to the academic sphere, we had excellent drama and music facilities, relatively pleasant surroundings, myriad opportunities and I made several friendships there that may last a lifetime.

But in conversations over the past few years with some schoolmates, we have admitted that our education was not all it was cracked up to be. Yes – most of us left at 18 with top grades and flew into excellent universities. Like racehorses, we had been trained how to pass exams but, when released into the wild, had about as many survival skills as Red Rum in the New Forest. Our general knowledge sucked big time – mine is still a source of almost daily embarrassment. It was only when I took my MA in 05/06 that I learned anything about major political and ideological concepts. Our geography is, almost without exception, appalling. Our historical knowledge concentrated on particular periods defined by the exam syllabi – outside the Second World War and the Trades Union Act I had huge swathes of murky half-knowledge that, over a decade later, is only just starting to brighten. Politically, we had no clue, although it’s possible to argue that we weren’t missing much.

My point, and I’m fully aware that it’s not a new one, is that good grades do not equal a good education. I fear that we suffered because we were girls – because, both at school and at home with our families, we were not expected to have opinions and knowledge in the same way that boys were. This may be massively over-simplistic, but I’m not alone in having these suspicions. Exams should remain a part of education, of course: I’m fully up for the International Baccalaureate which pushes six or seven subjects at 18 rather than three or four – this would help provide a bit more breadth to young adults. But there’s a lot more to life than exams – and until the league tables take other things into account other than grades, the system of judging education will be unhelpful and ultimately negative, breeding more generations of miserable failures versus swots who’ve cribbed exam essay titles to regurgitate at speed – but who couldn’t name the leaders of the three major political parties, or tell you whether Elizabeth I was alive at the same time as Shakespeare without watching a Tom Stoppard film. Which is how I worked it out.

Gym Dangers

On Monday, in what must have been a fairly comical moment in itself, I was on the cross-trainer in the gym. As usual, I had moved beyond the joys of perspiration and was firmly into the phase to which I refer fondly as ‘Drenched’. As Madonna’s Like A Prayer moved into its second verse, I became aware that my energy levels were flagging somewhat and, preferring to blame my sluggishness on the Queen of Pop rather than my own risible fitness levels, decided to fast forward the track. I reached down to the iPod which was nestled in the cross-trainer’s integral cup holder, but – horrors – instead of seamlessly spinning on to the next upbeat number, I managed to become manually tangled in my headphones wire, wrenching my white rectangular friend out of its holster and sending it clattering to the floor between the footrests, as I accelerated towards the angina-inducing peaks of Workout Level 24.

Breathless and pouring sweat in an Amazonian fashion, I cantered onto solid ground as quickly as I could and scooped up my iPod from its final resting place beneath the cross-trainer. Nervous about potential injuries following the not-insubstantial fall, I gingerly replugged in my headphones and was relieved to hear Madge warbling away as before. Resuming my position on the exercise machine, I recommenced my workout – but just a few moments later and without warning, Like A Prayer stopped, mid-middle eight, and no amount of frantic button pressing in any number of desperate combinations would coax it back into action.

Back at home, the hated grumpy file symbol had appeared on my screen and, following the instructions on the Apple website, I attempted to ‘restore’ my iPod. Sadly this option was forbidden to me: my computer informed me that it was experiencing Error 1418 and was unable to proceed. Feeling outwitted and guilty, I began the grieving process for my little aural wonder. And things looked no better when, on Tuesday night, Simon found a website called www.1418hell.com. This explained that my error message was a cumbersome problem suffered by thousands of iPod owners that mean old Apple was refusing to fix. Clearly, the time had come to start saving for a new pod.

But then, at 5am yesterday morning, my previously mute iPod began emitting a series of random beeps. When my consciousness finally came to me around an hour later, I took a look at the screen, realised the unit was low on battery and plugged it in to the mains. And immediately, miraculously, normality was restored. The music of the spheres tinkled merrily above me and as I commuted into work today, Bob Dylan warbling away in my ears, I felt unmistakeably lucky to have survived this example of my own carelessness without the need to fork out for a new machine and grateful to have been handed a(nother) splendid excuse to steer clear of the cross-trainer for the time being.

I carried a watermelon

After another day of no job news and a protracted battle with the date field in an Excel spreadsheeet that a) almost drove me to douse my computer in nail varnish remover and set fire to it and b) was nearly responsible for the tragic and premature end of my relationship, I needed a break.

Fortunately, a suitable distraction had been in the pipeline since mid-September last year, when, with barely-concealed glee, three of us had booked our tickets for Dirty Dancing: The Musical. And last night, after a five month wait peppered with countdown emails bursting with excitement and key quotations, the long-awaited event was now imminent. In retrospect, the hastily-imbibed bottles of white wine at dinner were a virtual pre-requisite for the joyous pantomime we witnessed: as the disappointing Johnny-alike, complete with possible hairpiece, entered the stage for the first time wearing his terrible Raybans and tight black vest, the packed crowd obediently gasped and oohed on cue, while Robbie the-waiter-who-knocked-up-Penny received reliable boos and hisses from start to finish. I am unwilling to advocate alcohol as a necessity but I think it's fair to suggest that any sober audience members would possibly have struggled to get into the spirit of the night in quite the same way.

The acting was delightfully atrocious, exactly what was demanded from the kitsch production. Any Oscar-winning performances would have stuck out like a caveman with a laptop - it's a 'play' (and I use the term in its loosest sense) that cannot be taken seriously and anyone doing vocal warm-ups or spotted backstage getting into character would surely have been smothered to a premature death by other cast members.

There were awkward moments, especially the unexpected addition of an embarrassingly worthy Martin Luther King plot-element, which was accompanied by an agonisingly yowled rendition of We Will Overcome, but the audience waited patiently for these aberrations to pass and the deafening screams as Johnny announced that "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," were the distinctive calls of hen parties on a mission. That's not to say we were exempt from such lewd behaviour: the catcalls, whoops and guffaws that emerged from our area were as vigorous and involved as any in the auditorium - and I must admit that our little red plastic binoculars did not remain in their metal holster for long. Now there was fifty pence well spent.

Gains and Grievances

Today's achievements:

1. I successfully rewrote my CV for the PA/Executive Assistant arena - this involved deleting everything I believe to be impressive about my employment history and flagging up non-events such as typing words per minute and the fact that I can organise a meeting.
2. I finally completed my application for a writing job at the Red Cross that sounds gripping - unfortunately, having finished the online form after a substantial amount of time spent grappling with awful drop-down menus and reams of equal opportunities questions, I spotted the salary in the job description. I had got the idea from somewhere that the salary was around £28K. I was wrong. It is precisely the salary that one would expect from a fascinating job at a charity: a pittance.
3. I checked in at MacFixitForums where Apple geeks share info, and found that my post about slow running programs had been answered. I thus rebuilt Entourage, my email programme - and installed and ran OnyX, a deceptively small programme that rooted out all the space-filling rubble on my system and gave me an extra 1.5 Gb of available space. Very satisfying.
4. I sellotaped the spine of my borrowed copy of Duruflé's Requiem as it was falling to pieces.

Today's gripes:

1. People who are clearly at their desk and who are, in some small way, holding my future in their grasp, but who do not reply immediately to my emails. They should be culled.
2. Part-time job ads that use pro rata payment information: it's misleading and irritating. A new position that I thought sounded extremely appealing was advertised as four days a week, salary £30K pro rata. It all seemed lovely - but then I took a fifth of the salary off, to account for me working four days rather than five, and it emerged that the actual salary would be £24K - not an insubstantial difference. How annoying.
3. Cats that don't run down the stairs fast enough when I'm trying to reach the front door before the postman sprints gleefully away down the street clutching my undelivered package. Loitering on the staircase in front of me is not helpful - particularly when I am in a hurry. Of course, my frame is delicate and fragile, and I am well-known in my family for being fleet of foot, but even so, in a contest between my descending weight and a feline spine, I think we all know who would win.

With the day's achievements outweighing the gripes, I think I can afford myself a virtual high five - although high fiving oneself does smack of desperation and loneliness. Additionally, I must make sure I don't get too cocky - it's only lunchtime and there's still much potential for further events of both negative and positive persuasions. I'll put the high five on hold 'til the flower of Tuesday has unfurled a few more petals. Check back soon for more terrible metaphors and self-indulgent musing.