This is for Andrew, who often gets very upset, stressed and frustrated at bad reviews of his books on Amazon (not least because they're often factually incorrect or say nothing but that the viewer has totally missed the point of the book).

The masses are asses, as my American politics teacher used to say. It's always a bad idea to put your self-esteem in the hands of these people.

I can't decide what I like the best.

There's the irate grandmother who thinks that the Narnia books are "nothing more than advertisements for “Turkish Delight,” a candy popular in the U.K. The whole point of buying books for my grandkids was to give them a break from advertising, and here (throughout) are ads for this “Turkish Delight”! How much money is this Mr. Lewis getting from the Cadbury’s chocolate company anyway? This man must be laughing to the bank."

There's a couple I actually agree with (“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs” about Lord of the Rings, and one that really isn't very nice at all about Virginia Woolf, who I feel bad for disliking so because I think it's just due to a terrible English professor I had, but I haven't been able to bring myself to try reading again since.)

There's two Andrew agrees with, “So many other good books…don’t waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed” and he actually applauded after I read the one for On the Road.

“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops” is a very good point, actually.

The person who wrote sentences like "The distinction is entirely illusory" but still thinks no book is any better than another and Harry Potter's better than 1984 baffles me.

I think Steinbeck wouldn't necessarily have minded a review like “While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”

“I’m a Steely Dan fan so naturally I wanted to read the book they thought compelling enough to name their band after an element of” made us both laugh until I thought I might be sick.

And though I haven't read The Sound and the Fury, I have read a lot of books for which “This book is like an ungrateful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return” would seem an apt description.

"So what part of Minnesota are you from then?" Andrew's American friend asked me last night.

What an awesome thing that is to hear. I never get asked that any more, because I so rarely run into anyone who's even heard of Minnesota that I don't usually get to refine my birthplace any more than what part of the country I'm from. And even there the answer I've found most effective is "in the middle, at the top" when people ask where in America I'm from; anything more specific gets blank stares.

My mom is in her church choir, and often sings hymns as she's folding laundry or mopping the floor.

I also sing when I'm doing housework, but not hymns; I'm not religious.

I'm singing Glee Club songs.

I ain't got the time, and if Paddy thinks I'm fine...

I'm hiding under a blanket but it isn't working. I can still hear Andrew.

He's talking about how A Hard Day's Night was filmed at twenty-five frames per second rather than twenty-four frames per second and if you watch it in America the songs are all too high-pitched except for when they're in the TV studio and if you watch it in Britain they all sound fine except they're too slow in the TV studio and...

I'm sure I have a knitting needle around here somewhere I can stick in my ear and waggle around until the noise stops.


* That's supposed to make me feel better, is it?

I can't even tell you how long diffrentcolours has been telling me I should try the six-week introductory meditation course at the Manchester Buddhist Centre. I really can't, because I don't remember, but I reckon it must have started at least by the time I went off work with stress, almost exactly four years ago now. (It might have even been before that, because I remember thinking I couldn't necessarily commit to six Wednesday evenings in a row and that was probably because I was working shifts at the hospital.)

He'd tried it and clearly thought it was a good thing to do, so often when I told him about panic attacks and my anxiety being through the roof, he'd tell me again how good I might find it. I always agreed, but in that kind of way that I think a holiday would be good for me but can't ever plan one.

Then a few weeks ago in the pub, smescrater mentioned this briefly -- he's done it before too, and was talking about trying it again -- and I got all excited in that way you do when something you heard about a lot for a while shows up in another area of your life. But rather than just another data point for the "oh yeah, that'd be a good thing to do" graph, he said a new course started a week on Wednesday and a few days later while I was walking out of a cinema I got a text from ejbigred saying she'd registered me and paid for me (this was in the completely-lacking-home-internet days for me, so it was really sweet of her to sort it out for me). And the next Wednesday, the three of us turned up for the first session, easy as that.

Have I mentioned how much easier and nicer I find it to do stuff when my friends do it too?

#

I know a bit about mindfulness and some basic stuff: I was given leaflets about breathing and relaxation exercises in one of my abortive attempts at CBT and a couple of times helped other stuff run such sessions on the hospital ward where I used to work.

I had about as much knowledge as a person is likely to come across in their ordinary life while still having the minimum possible experience of actually doing it.

The leader of our first meditation class asked us what we were hoping to get out of the six-week course, and one of the things I agreed with the most was something like "having a reason to take time out for myself." I felt like I was paying for not just whatever I might learn, but for the six weeks of Wednesday evenings, with a particular place to go and time to be there. The smell of incense, the big rooms, the wooden floor, the well-worn mats and cushions on which we sit were all worth the price of admission to me, because these accoutrements of meditation in the Buddhist Centre give me the indulgence of not thinking about the stuff I usually think about: what else I should be doing, what will happen next, what should have happened already and didn't...

Andrew said the other week that I'd be a good writer of horror fiction, because my anxiety means my brain is making up dreadful stories all the time. He may have something of a point there...except they wouldn't frighten any readers because they're all very selfish stories: what if I screw this up? What if I lose what's important to me? What perceived fault can I berate myself for now? Time away from these kinds of thoughts is very welcome.

#

Mindfulness is being aware of the present moment non-judgmentally, we were told. Each of these three things -- awareness, keeping your thoughts from straying to the past or future, and avoiding judgment -- can be difficult in its own way, and is good in its own way too.

The one I find myself concentrating on is the lack of judgment. I think I'm pretty good at that when it comes to other people, but anxiety is all about judgment. Anxiety leads me to judge that, say, the people who love me are probably just on the verge of finding out how truly unlovable I am and shunning me accordingly.

But also I'm judgmental about my anxiety: part of my mind steps back and thinks "that doesn't actually make much sense" or "what would I tell a friend who told me they were having such gloomy thoughts?" I try to keep a tight rein on some of my emotions and thoughts because that's how I've learned to keep the anxiety at bay: by distinguishing useless, unhelpful, damaging thoughts and feelings from helpful, useful, healthy ones.

#

I've been hopeless at actually practicing meditation in between classes. At the end of the first week we were told our "homework" was to meditate six days out of the next seven, if only for ten minutes. It seemed eminently doable, but I didn't do it once. I did, though, think a lot about the mindfulness bit as I was going about my day, which is also something we were encouraged to do.

I didn't really want to go on the second Wednesday, a couple of days ago, because I'd had a long day at work and I hadn't seen much of Andrew lately and I just wanted to collapse on the couch and go to bed early. But of course I went (the group seemed dramatically smaller this week, though) and when we were all sitting down we were asked what we learned last week and I was the first person to say something: "Mindfulness!" And from then on I was really happy I'd dragged my sorry ass there that evening.

You know what my favorite thing is? It's when people shout at me when I've given them the wrong money for something I'm trying to pay for.

Only they don't even shout "That's not enough money," they just shout whatever the amount of money is that they've previously told me in a polite voice and which I've tried to give them. I just find it so phenomenally unhelpful. I don't know why people do it: do they think I'm deaf and didn't hear them properly (not that shouting is a good response then anyway! but people do it). Do they think I don't really have enough money? Do they think I'm just trying to waste their time? I don't get it. And they've clearly counted up my change and found it wanting, so why don't they tell me what they know? If they've realized I'm 10p short, what's the harm in telling me, rather than just repeating themselves?

It's on my mind because it happened to me today in the post office, but it happens to me regularly in shops and on buses and in pubs. Today I felt especially stupid because what I had carefully assembled to be the exact change I needed ended up having the fatal flaw of mistaking a 20p piece for a pound coin. I had to sweep up all the change and give the guy a fiver instead; he all but threw my change at me after that.

Especially if I'm busy, distracted or flustered, some combination of my eyes and my brain can completely fail to see that I've mistaken a coin for another coin, or that I've given them only four pound coins when I needed five, or whatever.

So saying "You're missing a pound here" or "you're 20p short" or whatever would be super-helpful to me. Shame, then, that nobody does that. Almost everybody just repeats the price, in a hostile way, and glares at me while I frantically examine the palmful of coins they're thrusting out to show me the evidence of my sin. That's exactly what the post office guy did today.

There were a lot of coins for me to examine before I realized my mortifying mistake. I felt like I'd been pushed off a cliff: all the time spent examining coins I was in freefall, and my only parachute was discovering I'd made a stupid mistake. Which is not knowledge that cushions my fall very much.

As soon as I walked out of the house my nose told me that everyone in the world is having a barbecue.

So now I'm disappointed I'm not.

Turns out the first session of a meditation course and a quick pint while I'm waiting for a lift home is enough to make me so happy that I love the whole world.

So after I mentioned my nuclear-option guaranteed-cheering-up thing the other day, magister told me yesterday he was wondering what his might be.

Mine, remember, is The Thick of It, and that's partly because it's all about people even more miserable and stressed than I am. (It's not exactly schadenfreude -- even when I know the characters are supposed to be unsympathetic, I often sympathize at least a little -- but it is good at keeping my own problems in perspective!)

"I think..." he said, "...Singin' in the Rain. It's so cheerful!"

It is! If I looked anything less than cheerful, it's because I was thinking about how much better I like his answer than mine. I think it says much better things about him than me.

Because I think I'm a pretty sentimental person -- crippingly so, at times. I was excited about seeing the movies we'd just seen because they're full of simple stories and happy endings (which I thought was just what I needed after my hellish week). My heart is not flinty. In the circles in which I find myself, I don't often get to feel even comparatively jaded and cynical.

But Singin' in the Rain to my The Thick of It? I felt chagrined. I've gotta admire that.

Well I know it's definitely our upstairs neighnors who've fucked up our phone and internet because we got a phone call for them at 8:30 this morning.

We won't have our own phone number, or our internet, back until...well nobody knows when, but the current best guess is next Friday. Two full working weeks from when BT cocked it up, against our express wishes.

Being woken up so early (of course I haven't been able to get to sleep since, however tired I am) is especially nice after they woke me up at two in the morning having another of their screaming rows, and making so much noise it sounded like they were throwing bowling balls at each other. Eventually one of them thundered down the stairs, slammed the door behind them so hard I think the house shook, threw rocks at (our) windows, and drove away. The noise didn't stop, because the remaining person paced around so heavily it sounded like the pounding footsteps of a vengeful minor god, up there in the sky planning what misery will befall us next.