total voice loss shocker!
By alice on January 3, 2008
I can’t actually remember ever having totally lost my voice before. I can hardly even whisper now- after a couple of days of that, the main result is just pressure headache. The only way forward is to give the voice a rest and use a pen and notebook. I do remember last time I did that- after having my wisdom teeth out. You can’t speak when your whole mouth is anaesthetised. You can’t drink or eat either, or you choke. Yeah. Weird.
Anyway, being ill and tired this holiday was already making me more patient than normal- it’s been going on since the 25th- but now I’m a positive model of Zen calm! Years ago, I would have been driven to distraction instead, by the general sensation of being absolutely desperate to get a million and one things done while effectively totally impossible. Nothing like bashing your head on a brick wall for, you know, generally feeling like crap. Poor me. I feel sorry for her now.
(If you think you know what “impossible” means, add small children and multiply by a hundred. Now you’re closer. That scene in “Kill Bill” where Pai Mei makes her run up and down the hill carrying water every day in between bashing her hand on a tree-trunk-sized plank of wood- that’s what it’s like looking after small children. Just saying.)
Not that adults are necessarily that great at handling sudden unexpected disability in themselves and their loved ones, either. Show me someone who would not get fed up and start feeling selfish eventually if expected to do more than their normal load for an unspecificied amount of time starting now, due to someone else’s body parts breaking down, and I will show you a human. That’s why patient manner is as important as bedside manner.
Still, I am pretty pleased with myself for not going nutty this holiday, for being patient (as well as a patient), and most of all for not feeling completely and utterly horrible about getting so little “done”. We could all use more discrimination when it comes to admiring the pointless idiocy that passes so often for “work” these days, not least in our own lives. Just because you got paid for it, enjoyed it, impressed someone or learned some new piece of trivia, does not mean what you sacrificed your day to was necessarily worth more than the next-door neighbour’s gardening. On the other hand, how are you going to evaluate such things anyway?
Interesting question. I may come back to that some other time.
Tags: children, happiness, health, ideaspicture of the day
By alice on January 2, 2008
Cacti, Pedernales Falls State Park.
Tags: country, outings, photos, pictures, Texas, travelnew year’s resolution
By alice on January 2, 2008
My new year’s resolution this year is to do whatever the hell I want from now on.
Having spend the last four decades of my life pretty much totally convinced that every time anything went wrong it was obviously because I am such a selfish horrible person who does whatever the hell they want all the time (don’t ask me where that came from, because it’s rubbish), this is quite an important change of resolutory direction for me. But a good one.
Some of the whatever the hell things I want for this year and will most likely therefore do:
1. more house renovations
2. start next top-secret creative plan
3. explore (a bit) more of America
5. fly less
6. get a new bicycle
7. be more streamlined
8. be nicer to everyone I talk to
9. avoid talking to people I can’t stand
10. read more books, just for fun, because reading is one of the funnest things I know.
But those are not resolutions. Not that there’s anything wrong with deciding to motivate yourself to do something you basically hate which is good for you. Just, we’re not all necessarily coming from that direction.
Anyone else going anti-resolutory this year?
Tags: happiness, ideas, seasonsNew Year’s Day outing
By alice on January 1, 2008
Pedernales Falls State Park , January 1st 2008.
Too cold to swim, but we walked by the river, collected driftwood, threw stones and ate our picnic in the camper van- Borough Market Stilton and home-made mango chutney for a New Year’s Day lunch, then a rather chilly drive home at the heater isn’t working and the sun was going down- kids playing “brain games” on the new Nintendo DS machines. (It seems the age where technology actually gets them multiplying numbers for fun has finally arrived- although they are really meant for oldies- so our youngest’s mental agility works out somewhere around 82 yrs old, and I’m the only one actually younger than my age, which is of course twenty-four. Not.)
Tags: country, outings, photos, pictures, Texashappy new year
By alice on January 1, 2008
Best New Year’s eve ever last night: dressed up in ballgowns (girls only), toasted in on UK time at 6pm, made leftover holiday buffet snack dinner while singing along to Stevie Wonder hits (brilliant), movie- Desperado, Robert Rodriguez’s all-shooting Mexican masterwork, followed by a fire outside listening to all the illegal fireworks in the neighbourhood. Perfect.
I think it’s going to be a really good one. Happy 2008!
Tags: festivalsrevelation in the mall
By alice on December 30, 2007
Was watching a gang of teenage girls and boys hanging out trying to impress each other walking round the mall. They looked pretty nice kids, from how they were dressed, which doesn’t tell you much admittedly but anyway I thought they looked quite nice and laid-back and somewhat interesting, not clones. The playful flirtatious shoving each other around stuff that teenagers do which makes me so so grateful not to have to be one ever ever again. I have no idea how that sounds to you, but maybe it’s just a good idea every day to thank G-d you are not a teenager anymore. Things have changed of course, but when I was one, teenagerdom came somewhere lower down the social scale than “rabid junkie scum”, or so it seemed.
So then I noticed this 20/30-something couple buying those expensive cinnamon pretzel things you only seem to be able to get in malls because they have such weird food in there, it’s a bit like being in a motorway service station (UK) in the sense that you are trapped and have to pay what they say for food you would never normally eat (I am not a big fan of malls, but sometimes needs must). They both had long hippy hair, he had a beer belly starting, and they didn’t “fit in” to the (slowly dying?) breed of all-pink all-blonde corporate-American-Gym-obssessed-society, at all. Probably they just watch movies and smoke pot every night. But they were definitely harmless and nice to each other.
And then it hit me: no guilt. If you can make it through being a teenager to some kind of adulthood where you take care of yourself, someone cares about you, and you do nobody else any harm, that’s all you need to do. It doesn’t matter if you grow a beer belly, and it definitely doesn’t matter if you watch movies instead of teaching English to African orphans. You’re still better than someone who does the same as you (and maybe they do have a bigger house, but that certainly doesn’t score them any soul-points) but who dumps nasty evil crap on other people on the internet every day, and there’s certainly a lot of those around. You’re still better than someone who vents their anger on whoever dares come by. A lot more people do that than admit it to themselves, of course, in all kinds of cramped and itchy ways. If you can just be honest, real, gentle and nice, then you’re doing great really.
Tags: happiness, ideas, people, randomthe humiliations of illness-related dependency
By alice on December 28, 2007
So I asked Husband to brush my sickbed-tangled hair, which he very kindly did.
Me to Daughter: Did he make me look terrible?
Daughter: Well, have you heard of this guy on The X Factor called Rhydian?
In case you haven’t, here he is. I’m long, red-brown and wavy; he’s short, quiffed and white. Too sick to try and figure that one out right now.
Tags: anecdotes, family, healthin sickness and in health
By alice on December 28, 2007
I’ve been really sick with a fever and chest infection since Christmas day. Poor me. It was the same story last time I was in England, though not as bad. Warm climates are definitely better for bronchial illnesses.
When you’re ill, it’s hard not to get miserable. On the other hand, if I didn’t have my family to look after me, I probably would have had to call an ambulance and stay in the hospital to recover. Families must save a lot of healthcare bills every year on that score.
So as well as feeling like hell, I also feel extra amazingly grateful and blessed for my remarkable, unusual, bi-national, cross-continental, supertalented and wonderfully blended family this year. Although I’ve got to admit it took and still takes a mind-boggling amount of effort, mostly of the soul-stretching kind (sometimes not unpainful). But perhaps we humans actually function best by living that way.
And if that made you want to throw up, this is the wrong place to look for sympathy right now. Come back when I’m better.
Tags: family, happiness, healthhappy seasonals
By alice on December 25, 2007
Here’s my favourite Christmas carol.
Have a nice day!
Tags: festivals, music, videosdreams versus happiness
By alice on December 20, 2007
This wonderful article (link from Hugh) about middle age and giving up your dreams got me thinking.
What are most of our dreams? To climb a mountain, own an island, appear on Letterman, become president?
They are our personal ambitions, things that mean a lot to us, which many or most other people would probably also regard as admirable or worthy. But the rest of the world will not blink if we fail; someone else will do it. The rest of the world, on the whole, will be happy with us if we support ourselves, stay out of trouble and make some small contribution to the general morale, helping someone out somewhere when we are needed. If we have children and bring them up to be decent citizens, that’s good for the rest of the world too; someone has to run this place when we are gone.
It’s also a very American thing, this dream ideal. On the one hand it can inspire you through life, keep you going, make sure you don’t give up and become a cynical old Englishman in a pub telling everyone who cares to listen just why they should be as miserable as him. On the other hand however, it can delude you into a terrible apathy whereby tomorrow will always come so it doesn’t really matter much what you do today, certainly not what you do with the next doghnut, and anyway there’s always that big lottery win just around the corner. I’m not going to diss it, but I don’t think it’s a given that big dreams are necessarily great things for everyone. There are plenty of successful people who didn’t grow up thinking one day, I will be CEO of a great big insurance company/ own a furniture chain store/ run fifteen nursing homes.
On the other hand, there are things you are never going to do unless someone in your life pays for them. I still haven’t been on the trans-Siberian express. And there are things you could do anytime because they are free. I’d like to lose a few pounds from my waistline now (if the doughnuts don’t get you here, the queso will).
But the things that make me most happy are usually unexpected as well as very mundane. Yesterday I painted giant Spongebob jellyfish on Son’s bedroom wall, which is so obviously the most satisfying and exciting thing anyone could possibly ever do, I feel quite ashamed for mentioning it here and making you all feel bad for missing out. My life is not a continuous stream of blissful little pieces, but it seems to me so obvious that happy comes from little things, I can’t really see the point of dreams. What Penelope says (as ever)- if you are in touch with who you are, you are doing what you love, no matter what, because you love it. So it’s preposterous that we need to get paid to do what we love because we do that stuff anyway.
Dreams are things we think we would love if we could do them. What we love is real and possible right now. But we can all probably do more of what we love, so that’s going to my focus for 2008, which will be here as soon as all this festivity stuff is over.
(I’ll be flying to London later today, back on Monday, happy weekend all).
Tags: happiness, health, ideas, money, psychology, values
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