May 2004 Archives
If you had a voucher for a free flight on a national carrier to one of the following destinations, which one would you choose, and why?
Like many people who bought Christmas gifts at Virgin last year, this is the dilemma that faces me, and it expires in five months. No free accomodation at any of the destinations except, perhaps, Paris - but that has been done a squillion times over - so the rest of the field is pretty even.
Hmm...
Swimming in icy water on windy day surprisingly uplifting and clearly good for the soul.
May facilitate onset of pneumonia. Or hypothermia. Or both, if lucky.
Some funny things come through my mail box. I don't mean funny ha-ha, the kinds of things that wither and die under the scrutiny of the average dry or verging-on-non-existent sense of humour, but quirky. Which is why I was pleasantly mortified at receiving this absolutley spot-on (I wish) analysis of my MRI from him. By way of reassurance, and thank you for the concern, the scan was merely a common case of "student whoring his goods for money." They needed uncommonly stupid people to lie-in for an hour and a half, and rewarded said deficients with a cup of water and thirty two quid. Yes, £32, which is a little higher than minimum wage.
In other news, work was a non-event today as it was the members' day at the Chelsea Flower Show. Serving Pimms, strawberries, concept gardens and spectacular plants to the green-fingered and nouveau-riche for the 82nd time since 1862, Chelsea is easily the most famous home and garden show on the planet, and this year attracted 157 000 visitors. I didn't have time to meet them all, but did bump into four or five people I knew from London -- which was nice, and not unsurprising since all the gay people who weren't on Compton Street at lunch time seemed to be in the show grounds, flapping their wrists at gargantuan Begonias and specimen orchids -- whilst taking in general gorgeousness and good atmosphere over the course of a largely sunny and warm afternoon.
General gorgeousness and good atmosphere
plus mum and partners in crime
And my reflectionNow back in Cambridge, my feet are comfortably sore, and I have a mammoth strawberry plant sitting in the bay window; one of the exhibitors sold the plant to us then and there, which is utterly illegal since plants can only be removed from the show during the big sell-off that occurs on the last day; I was rather chuffed.
Today's lessons are that smiles are powerful, strawberry juice makes for convincing pavement blood, and bin bags can hide more than just body parts.
Exactly one month ago, I was lying stock still in a resonance chamber while a muffled sledgehammer went off inside my head; that's pretty much all that summarises an MRI. That, and the mild disorientation that comes from lying in a tube that is little larger than the diameter of your head for an hour and a half while magnets and motors noisily do the rounds about your grey matter. You're expected not to move; wiggling the toes is enough to cause movement of the head, so developing an itch, or the inevitable pins and needles, isn't exactly convenient. Like most people, I developed both, but once all feeling was lost in my legs, things became significantly simpler.
And now I have my results back... no abnormalities, just unusually large frontal lobes, which is nature's way of telling me that I can neither be blamed for talking too much, nor be faulted for trying to restore my own brand of order to the immediate Universe. It's nice to have an excuse for being anal.
It's a little humbling to see that all that I am is what is represented above; a mass of tissue that obeys a set of rules imposed by some biological imperative, but whose plasticity in size, shape and operation is sufficiently free as to give rise to all the unique personalities with which we interact.
Is that marvelous, or is that marvelous?
When I'm alone, I don't feel insecure, or feel compelled to worry about anyone else. Being happy becomes less complicated, and comes more easily, which is probably why some of my most poignantly happy moments are borne of my own solitude, with a little atmosphere mixed in to make them memorable.
There are people out there who don't cause catastrophic shifts in that kind of easy field of calm; comfortable people who make the best of any situation, rarely complain in earnest, and who know how to trust. It would be nice to connect with one, but at least I can count a couple amongst my friends; these people make me smile at a moment's thought; would that I could take them into my arms and hold onto them forever.
Someone obviously swallowed more river water this evening than was good for him; that, or it was doped with prozac.
There has been a long period of abstinence for me, but the drought is set to continue for the same reason that it has been in place for the last few weeks... work, of course, but for a change it isn't proving a repetitive cycle of stellar effort and no reward, because for once I'm getting something real to look at; oodles of data with plenty of scope for interpretation, a number of potential follow-on analyses, and best yet, what I'm observing may be significant enough to merit a paper too. The thought of getting that produced before I'm even finished here is just a little bit encouraging, whether or not it actually happens.
Still, there's a lot of number crunching to be done -- the sort of stuff that would really turn on a biostatistician [alas, no, I'm disappointingly normal] -- and while it hurts, every analysis of variance, product-moment correlation coefficient and error margin I've turned out seems to confirm that I'm finally seeing something significant that I can work with, and that's, well, really bloody cheering.
Of course, all work and no play makes Jack a tired old hermit who clearly doesn't get out enough, so I've been making an effort to keep myself busy outside of the lab, rather than just flopping onto my bed and staring at the ceiling for my evening's entertainment. And what with the amazing weather of late, that has been especially easy; no fewer than three barbecues in the last three days, a couple of trips up and down the river by canoe, punt and even sans véhicule, not to mention weekday lunches spent out in the sunshine.
Spring is springingAll this comes in the week following Frank's visit to the UK with his travelling partner; the weather was fairly mediocre for much of that time, but hosting these lovely chaps for a night in Cambridge, before heading down to London for a big walkabout, was a real pleasure and diversion. We were even joined by this one for a spell, and I think that a pretty good time was had by all, though I'm really speaking for myself here; the previous few weeks were fairly rough, so the chance to escape, and in good company, was all the more special for me.
Crud, my intent to elaborate further has been scuppered by the lateness of the hour and my own tiredness. Alas, to bed. Someone take over please?
Today, the United Kingdom enjoyed a Bank Holiday. Today, I enjoyed work. A fool's take on deductive reasoning would have you believe that were I enjoying a Bank Holiday too, I would be the United Kingdom, but i) the only fool here isn't into playing smartass with his public, and ii) human rights aside, only in some parallel hell dimension could 45 000 people plausibly enter me on a daily basis [assuming a good year for tourism] [and the sex industry] [with which I share no affiliation whatsoever].
Said tourism is off to a great start with the arrival of an old friend, also New York's most depraved, on our turf today -- have a good stay, Frank and Phil -- I promised you bad weather, and so far so good, though this evening, we clearly have sun:
It was while I was suspended upside-down from a capsized canoe this afternoon that I became aware of my increasing distaste for excessive introspectiveness. Of course, excessive anything is only excessive because there's too much of it, and I've recently found myself reminded of just how important balance is to just about everything in my life -- a lack of balance might well account for why I was upside-down in the first place, though I'm happy to point out that that was just a drill.
I enjoy getting out and facing new challenges, whether they amount to taking on novel activities, meeting new people or simply starting down roads that I've never been down before. It is nice to be alone, it is nice to be able to enjoy one's solitude, but it's also nice to belong, or at least feel that you do, and of late, I've come to realise that I've been spending a little too much time on my own planet at the expense of sharing experiences with other people. One of the things that has kept me there is the fact that I've become used to feeling that it isn't my place to experience too much pleasure, let alone my right to let people in to share it with me.
Then there's my difficulty accepting that some people do actually like me, that they're not just being there because they're polite and generous with their time and doing their duty in showing charity to the deficient. I'm rational enough to get past what I see as an ill state in my own way of thinking -- my self regard -- but I have to believe that there have been times when it has held me back, or made me unfairly and needlessly distrustful of people's wonderful genuineness. Am I so afraid of being seen as occasionally naïve when I do misplace my trust? Burned fingers can take bloody ages to heal.
When I first arrived in Cambridge, it didn't take very long to fall in with a number of people who I was able to consider my friends and partners in crime, but just a few short months along the line, I made some mistakes in my personal life. While the decisions I made, or allowed to be made for me, seemed fine at the time, they led to my gentle withdrawal from the circles I was quite comfortably moving in; slowly, the people whose lives I knew plenty about became people who I was just 'familiar with', and then they became people I could only really claim to recognise by face and name alone; friendships devolved into nods and smiles, in passing, on the street. A slow descent into a long and murky winter; on my doorstep, the colourful leaves on the trees withered and fell, and there was no spring.
Now that I'm alone, I see that I should have done things differently; knowing, as I do, that life goes on, I find that encouraging.
