A new perspective on present-giving
This year I shall buy all my friends a butt plug for their respective birthdays.
Take your pick.

This is what I do on Friday nights
A really hard vocabulary test for the literary geek in you
I got 182 out of 200!
I shall now beam with pride in the privacy of my bedroom.

Equilibrium
For the past couple months I have been reading two related blogs – two halves of a relationship which until now was long distance; one blog recounted the tribulations of the first half : her planned move from her own country to England, quitting her job, her life, her everything almost; I followed her blog daily with something like baited breath as she was looking for a place to live, selling her furniture, getting used to the idea of moving countries, moving lives.
I also followed her partner’s blog. Sporting events. Car washing. Shoes shopping. Oh yeah, and now that partner has moved closer – they ran into each other in town, and that was weird.
Hmmmm.
I wish them luck. I do.

I know that if/when I move to be close to my girlfriend, the first thing on her mind won’t be shoe shopping. I don’t think so anyway.

Rillettes de canard
Despite my misanthropic tendency to ignore the doorbell, I opened the door to a delivery man bearing a huge box full of food; my mother seems to think I might either be starving in this gastronomically inferior country, or too poor to be able to afford sustenance, or both. Also we do consider food the best remedy for mild depression, crap weather, colds and flu. It borders on superstition. Whatever ails you, food is the answer. I am hoping to pass down that notion onto my children and my children's children, should I reach financial stability whilst still of childbearing age. I don't want to think about it. But I digress..the fact is that I have been sent a joyfully generous gift of a pyramid of tins and parcels and various delicacies and that I have no-one to share them with. J only really likes pig'ss blood sausage. Girlfriend is eating too many fried carbs as it is - on the other side of the ocean. Other friends live too far away to pop in for dinner. I am condemned to become a fat hermit. Better start now, I guess.

Risk Assessment
The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said today:

"It would be miraculous if, with all the terrorist resources arranged against us, terrorists did not get through, and given that some are prepared to give their own lives, it would be inconceivable that someone does not get through to London."


At work at the end of the day we had a HS (Health and safety) workshop.
Now we know what paperwork to fill in and who to get a seal of approval from to show that we've done everything we could to evaluate risks and prevent hazards (risks and hazards are two very, very different things) in a work environment. We also know where to file the risk assessment forms.

I'm not sure I feel more assured.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

US 'Diversity' program immigrant visas

Applicants will be selected at random by computer from among all qualified entries.
Those selected will be notified by mail between May and July 2004 and will be provided further instructions, including information on fees connected with immigration to the U.S.
Persons not selected will NOT receive any notification. U.S. embassies and consulates will not be able to provide a list of successful applicants.
Spouses and unmarried children under age 21 of successful applicants may also apply for visas to accompany or follow to join the principal applicant.
DV-2005 visas will be issued between October 1, 2004 and September 30, 2005.

Bastards.
They changed the results date.
It was supposed to be March.
I have been checking the mail these past 15 days for nothing.

Missing pieces
If I did jigsaws, I would be one of those people who go crazy if one piece happens to be missing.
My grandmother always claimed that ‘real intellectuals play games. Board games. Chess. They do jigsaws, too.’
I guess I wasn’t planning on being an intellectual, then.
She was only trying to bully me into playing Scrabble on Sunday afternoons. One, two, three games of Scrabble, on the dining room table. She’d smooth over a tablecloth first, so as to not damage the polished wood. Then she’d combine two sets, to make the game more satisfying. Longer. My mother would oblige, out of guilt; I ‘d bring them tea and biscuits, and quickly sneak out if I could. After each game, frustrated with each other and their performance, they’d swear they’d never play again.
Painfully long Sunday afternoons. I preferred doing my homework. I invented extra work if that was the only way on that particular Sunday.
Then my grandmother died and the Scrabble boxes – we had three – fell asleep at the back of the cupboard. I suspect my mother is mostly relieved.

I had a girlfriend who loved jigsaws. When completed, she glued them onto huge pieces of cardboard and, proudly, put them up on the wall. The largest, the most intricate ones she could get – they were like trophies, monuments to her patience and dedication. She said she liked the art. When asked to admire them, I nodded silently, secretly despising the whole process as much as the bad artwork reproductions. I must have changed the conversation to something else, feeling bad for experiencing such contempt. I never envied her the sense of achievement she must have gained from them.

I do mental jigsaws. I’ve been trying to fit together the pieces of recurring dreams I have. Some are starting to fit; others make no sense yet. They come thick and fast, always the same themes, why now? Dreams: a safe place to handle unsafe feelings.
More than ever I am living in my head. No wonder I’m already tired in the morning.

Who would you call in your hour of need?
My mother embarked onto early retirement about a month ago and thought hard about what to do with all that free time. Along a couple of art classes and a course of philosophy lectures, she applied to be a volunteer at SOS Amitié – that would be France’s equivalent to The Samaritans. The commonly held idea is that they always need people, answering phones for 4 hour shifts. Who calls them, I wondered? Even in my most dire hour of need I would never even think of dialling their number. Some people must call, though.
During the interview, she was asked how she was handling her son’s death – it hasn’t even been a year yet, and what she was hoping to be able to offer. She replied that she thought her own experience would give her answers for those who call before they jump. She was also asked how she thought other people saw her. Her answer was, typically – I don’t know. What kind of a question is that? I don’t care. Why should I care?
Then she had to go home and wait to be contacted.

Not too surprisingly, when the letter came on Saturday morning, it expressed a polite rejection. She can’t help wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that her interviewer was a guy she’d been on a date with and who’d never called her back.

AAA
My last dream this morning, just before I woke up in tangled bed sheets, my tshirt pulled up to my neck, involved a series of vibrators with failing batteries. I can’t think of anything more frustrating right now. If I don’t get some quality time during the day, I might well snap.

Carnage, manipulation, Saladin.
I sat transfixed, staring at the front page of the Friday morning’s Times and its picture of the exploded Madrid trains.
My immediate reaction was to cry quietly; people around me were busy going about their day, safe in their microcosm, safe in London, it must be safe, since the press mentions no special security measures, makes hardly any link with what is inevitably going to happen here, sooner or later. There is very little thinking going on in the news; emotion has taken over. It has taken over so much that I find myself shying away from the deliberate show of the carnage; just like on 9/11 I was disgusted at being manipulated into being moved. Moved I would have been anyway, who wouldn’t at the thought of people losing their loved ones in such horror; only, I do not need to have images of blood-streaked faces and bodies blown to bits to be convinced and moved. I do not want to read articles beginning with ‘And this morning when Maria kissed her husband Ramon good bye, little did she know that she would never see him again’. The British press, and this includes the ‘serious’ papers, are at it again. Make the masses shed tears and their job will be done; then maybe we won’t notice that they’ve forgotten to reflect on the meaning of it. Empathy is all very well, and I do believe that any human being will feel the horror and disgust and incomprehension in their bones, deep into their soul; I just don’t want to be told what to feel. What I want to know is this: why was the Spanish government to hasty to condemn the ETA as responsible for the bombing of the Madrid trains? Why did Aznar encourage his ministers to defend that theory, when all the evidence suggests otherwise, when the ETA have denied any implication? Is it so much more difficult to accept the notion that al-Qaeda wants to strike the countries that supported Bush and his warmongers? On top of it all, just a little perspective will tell us that Osama and his gang have more than one reason for wanting to settle old accounts with the kingdom of Spain; the little Spanish history I know tells me that, from a Muslim point of view, the conflict between Islam and the West goes back at least half a millennium, to the south of Spain and its bloody religious past. When I came home last night, I reached from a book I have on Andalusia to try refresh my memory, so forgive me if I’m about to be all pedantic. To cut short 800 years of history, Islam extended its kingdom to the south of Spain, the place that the Moors called al-Andalus – Andalucia, then lost it when King Ferdinand conquered Granada and kicked out the Moors, back to where they’d come from. The loss of the kingdom is, obviously, emotively engraved in the collective memory of Islam. Bin Laden’s immediate foe is America, the despised modern crusader, but the search for historical revenge in the blinkered mind of al-Qaeda leads much further back. With our foreshortened historical memories in the West, we see the War on Terror through a prism of recent events: Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. But maybe Islamic memory stretches to a more distant horizon: to the Christian flag unfurling over the Alhambra, the refurbishing of the beautiful Mosque of Cordoba into a Catholic church, and the Crusades that preceded it.
The end of Andalusia as a Muslim kingdom was, indeed, a tragedy, but not for the simple, self-serving reasons espoused by bin Laden and his like. It was more than the humiliation of Muslims, the forced conversions, the victimisation. It was also the end of an era of progress and art and peaceful cohabitation. For centuries Islamic Spain had been a beacon of tolerance, commerce and learning, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews had lived, if not always in harmony, then certainly with mutual dependence and extraordinary patience. It is hard to imagine a society further removed from the brutal, repressive fundamentalism of al-Qaeda. Muslim al-Andalus was, in many ways, the polar opposite to the arid, anti-curious intolerance of, say, the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. Here was a society rooted in ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance, which was eventually destroyed by fundamentalisms, Christian and Muslim, but the rich history of al-Andalus remains as proof that Islam is not some fundamentalist behemoth bent on repression and intolerance, whatever its more extreme manifestations may be today.
I guess that judging Islam by bin Laden is as idiotic as judging Christianity by the murderous standards of the Crusaders. The problem is that bin Laden thinks he is the modern day Saladin, the martyr, enlightened, mythical man of the Muslim kingdom, and don’t we know what crazy people who think themselves reincarnations of myths are able to do.
A little perspective helps think more clearly. But now I still want to catch the news on BBC2. I don’t always know how to handle the image-consumer within me. Maybe it helps me feel a part of something. I don't know.