Beyond My Control

Word of the Day

This is another one of those “is it just me?” questions.

I do a lot of writing and typing across a typical day, and every day there seems to be one word that my fingers cannot type correctly for love nor money. I know how to spell it, but it just always comes out wrong. It’s a different word each day and most of the time it’s a word I use all the time, just to make it more confounding.

Today that word is “definition”.*

I come to write this post after sending an email where spell-checker advised me, with its cyber red pen of derision, that I had mistyped that word on no fewer that 5 occasions in the space of 4 paragraphs. And not, I might add, always in the same way.

Is this just a side effect of speedy touch typing, or a mental glitch of some sort? Likely the same one that 7 times out of 10 has me automatically adding an “e” to the end of the word “both” when writing it just because the “h” apparently compels my hand and the pen to over-ride my brain and keep sweeping on into another letter.

Tomorrow it will be a different word.

And I will be equally flummoxed by whatever link or lack thereof between my brain and my fingers causes this typographic fracture.

Do you suffer from writing/typing quirks or, once again, is it just me?

* Which, of course, I typed correctly when writing this post, just, apparently, to piss myself off.

Adventures in Grammar (weeping involved)

As would be apparent to anyone reading this site on a regular basis, I am not a grammar nazi.

I may have a degree in English, but I'm not remotely qualified to take on that role particularly as I couldn't identify a split infinitive or a predicate nominative if my life depended on it.

This is almost solely because the teaching of grammatical terms at my various schools didn't extend beyond "noun", "verb", and "adjective". Seriously. That was it.

To be honest I never felt the lack of a good education in grammar until I was at University in the US and it appeared that all my fellow English majors had had a grammatical crash course in the quarter or two before I arrived and were therefore discussing prepositions and proper nouns in between protesting about the boorish behaviour of frat boys and drinking margaritas. As I had already survived high school (with prizes for writing) and two years of university without being able to identify a present participle (if there is such a thing), by then it was essentially too late. Too late for me to care.

I continued, and will continue, to go entirely by feel. Does that look correct? Does that sound right? Does that feel grammatically at one with the universe? If it doesn't, does it sound cool anyway? Does it convey what I wanted even though it's wrong, wrong, wrong and I know it's wrong but don't care?

Essentially, I read a lot. I write a lot. At home and for work. Reading and writing takes up a good 80% of my work day. So I feel reasonably confident that I can pick a correct sentence from an incorrect one, even if I choose to let the incorrect one slide in my own writing.

And* as a result sometimes I find myself sitting at my desk weeping with despair.

As I did this afternoon. It was a small document, only about five pages. I picked it up to have a quick read and immediately the warning bells went off in my head. The formatting was all over the place. I have learned through painful experience that this is not a good sign for the writing to come. But I would not write it off (ha!). Not even when I saw bullet points appearing randomly in the middle of a document that under no reasonable circumstances should have contained bullet points.

I began to read.

I began to laugh. Why does that heading end with a semi-colon?

I began to IM Remi in my amusement. This heading is in bold but not a heading at all, it's the first sentence of the paragraph and it ends with a comma!

Then came the weeping. "If a party believes that an other party has been breached the Agreement..."

Whoever wrote the damn document had no idea of either grammar or style and apparently couldn't be bothered to proof read either. Or worse, did proof read and thinks that sentence is fine.

I will concede that they provided me with some amusement before making me cry, but I know there is only frustration and possibly more tears to come because now I have to edit the document. With all its bad grammar and horrible, horrible formatting. Which would be an interesting editorial exercise if I didn't have 45 other things to do.

Mind you, it can't possibly be as bad as the one I tackled a couple of weeks ago where all the formatting was done with the space bar. Literally. The author did not know how to use either the Tab key or the indent function and I'm convinced he only used the Return key under threat of death. He also had no clue about the difference between "principal photography" and "principle photography", to the point that he put the wrong one in again in a further edit even though I had pointedly (i.e. in big red mark-up) changed them all the first time around. And in his business, that's completely unforgivable.

And* on that note, I leave it open to you to pull this entry apart and point out all its grammatical failings. To each of which my answer will be: I know, and I chose to break that particular rule deliberately.

* Oops, I started that sentence with an "And". That's a sin, yes? One that I flagrantly partake in every day of the week.

The Demon

Is it possible to be made up entirely of pure, unadulterated procrastination?

At the moment it feels not only possible, but highly likely.

While at work all I want to do is work on my new writing project, but that not being something I can bring myself to actually do during working hours I alternate between slogging through actual work at a very slow pace and aimlessly surfing the web (I can bring myself to do that during working hours, no problem).

While at home, when I can and should be working on my new writing project, I instead fall into a heap and alternate between watching what’s on TV now – which is okay up to a point as season finales currently abound – and watching what’s been on TV in the past thanks to an ever-growing pile of Amazon orders that have been arriving in recent weeks.

Then, at weekends, when I generally have at least one day during which I have “nothing to do”, which would be perfect for sitting down and writing I often find myself regarding that as being “too lazy” and instead going out for a walk, which usually finds me in the city, aimlessly wandering through stores, sometimes buying, sometimes not. I also finally get around to starting to set up my office, because what is a better form of procrastination than setting up the office you don’t yet have, or cleaning up the one that you do?

I’m sure I never used to be a deadline junkie. I was the type of person who finished my essays the day before they were due, not at five on the morning they had to be handed in. I didn’t need the “it’s due in two hours” motivation to get me to work. In fact I preferred to have things out of the way so I could laze without that nagging feeling that I’d failed to do something. But the more I go on, the more I realise that I’m now most definitely a deadline junkie. In work and in non-work. I now thrive on that nagging feeling.

At work I go through periods of deadline-heavy supreme busyness. Most recently this state of being lasted, as a best as I can recall, from about June 2004 until three weeks ago without more than a few days break at a time. The last three weeks have therefore been very strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. They take me eerily back to about April 2004, giving me a feeling of déjà vu.

There is a significant difference though. In the first half of last year we simply weren’t that busy. Now, however, I have plenty of things to keep me busy. I am busy. Despite being a giant ball of slow-moving procrastination, I am in fact working a good eight hours a day (which means that I’m in the office a good eleven hours a day). It’s just that none of the work is particularly deadline driven. Which is complete death to my motivation. Death.

I still get there, I still get it done. It’s just like molasses. And it carries over into my non-working life. And when you add in a cold and summery weather, lethargy is overwhelming. And frustrating, though not frustrating enough and therefore the struggle will no doubt continue until such time as something with a hard deadline lands on my desk at which point I will whinge and moan and get moving.

When it comes to my writing project, Smurfette has already provided the necessary motivation to get moving. Rather than undertaking NaNoWriMo in the completely inconvenient to people with exams month of November, she and some of her writing group have organised to do the 50,000 words in a month dealio in December and I’ve signed up.

Which, of course, absolutely guarantees that not one but half a dozen projects with hard deadlines will land on my desk on December 1. But, ah well, at least I’ll be able to exorcise the procrastination that currently possesses my being.

Desk! Window! Lazy! Beer!

I am writing this at my new desk.

You do not understand how miraculous this is.

When I first came and looked at this apartment and then went home to dream – well, not dream so much as lie awake tossing and turning and making unreasonable plans – as to how I would live here and how I would lay it all out before I had even put a firm offer on the place, let alone actually bought it, I pictured the second bedroom as my home office with many bookshelves and a small desk under the window with a cute lamp and a place where I could sit and write. Sadly, that vision kind of resembled Carrie Bradshaw’s desk under the window with the pink curtains and the cute lamp.

It was part of what made the vibe of this place write, part of why I dove in and foolishly bought without thinking too hard.

That was May 2004. I have lived here since August 2004. Now, finally, I have my small desk under the window. I don’t quite have the cute lamp yet – but I know which one it is and I may even buy it tomorrow. I, of course, still have to go and buy new stationery because a new desk needs new stationery. But I’m sitting under the window at the desk, writing.

As may be apparent, I’m that sad kind of person who has to do everything right when it starts because otherwise I hardly ever get around to it. Which is why the desk took so long. The desk isn’t anything special, it’s just from Ikea, and yet it took me over a year to get it because, well, first, crushing debt, and second, I’m a lazy arse. Which is why I still haven’t got my washing machine fixed, and why I’m looking at ornaments sitting on the bookshelves still wrapped in newspaper from when I moved them last year, and why I still have very few things hanging on the walls.

Also why while I’m writing this at my new desk, I will have to move the computer into the living room to hook it up to the modem to post because my Airport card stupidly died while I was on holidays – in August – and I still haven’t got around to taking the computer in to get looked at, or bought the baby screwdriver that would allow me to pull the card out of the computer and put it back in in the tried and true “if it crashes just restart it” method of fixing things.

But, desk!

(Can you tell that I have spent much of my horse-race public holiday drinking beer? Surely, you can’t.)

Things I'm Not Posting About

This is one of those nothing to see here, but I am still alive posts.

Usually such posts come with an “I’m so busy at work” or “I have a rampant social life because I’m soooo popular” type excuse.

This time, neither of those is accurate. With the end of financial year last week, and the assistance of a trainee this week, work is comparatively under control (I’m sure that won’t last, particularly not now that I’ve typed it out loud). And after a few months of being unusually busy socially, in the last three weekends that’s slowed right down. For the first two weekends that was great, but this weekend I started to get a bit bored, which resulted in Sunday lunch in the pub with Nathan and Smurfette, but nothing to write to the internet about.

Despite the boredom, I didn’t even get the computer out over the weekend, let alone turn it on. Nor did I really watch TV – I was interested in Live 8 but not enough to put up with the way channel 9 showed it here.

Which brings me to the actual reason why I haven’t posted. There have been numerous entries I have been tempted to write, but they all seem to involve politics.

Aside from the occasional incoherent rant at Alexander Downer when I can’t control myself, the general rule around this blog has been the dinner table classic of “don’t mention politics or religion”.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have opinions on these things. Particularly in relation to politics I have a few rather fixed opinions, and a whole range of other issues in which I am interested, if not quite as informed as I feel I need to be in order to write about them. I minored in politics at university, I am a news junkie, election campaigns interest rather than annoy me, I have friends who are policy advisors and speech writers. I am interested in politics and the political process, especially the communications aspect of it.

But I don’t want to write about it here. First, while it can be interesting, it’s not really fun. Second, it seems to me that while the personal is political, politics works much better in a predominantly political blog rather than a principally personal one (was I pushing the p’s there, perhaps I was). Third, as mentioned above, while I’m pretty well informed, I’m not nearly as informed as I’d want to be before I started spouting my opinions in a public forum.

The political landscape here in Aus changed significantly last week with the government taking control of the Senate. Live 8, G8 and everything that goes with that has been going on. Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement (and yes, I’m not American and we don’t follow their legal system, but I have lived there in the past, and I find their politics just as interesting and often influential as ours or Europe’s). I have been thinking about all these things. I have been considering my views. I have been feeling hugely frustrated by the situation here in particular. I just haven’t been, and won’t be writing about them.

So, in short: not dead, not especially over-worked or over-partied, just thinking, not posting.

And we should be returning to the regularly scheduled rambling around here any time now. (And that might involve more ranting about network scheduling practices, speaking of scheduling. Stupid, stupid arrogant channel 7 trying to stretch out the end of the season of Desperate Housewives and cash in on the audience at the same time. Way to piss off the viewers that you didn’t even have six months ago.)

Cotton

Today is the second anniversary of Beyond My Control.

Sure, it's only been at Typepad since last December, but there was a year and a half at Diaryland before that.

That I remember this on the actual day is a complete fluke.

So, does it feel like more than two years or less than two years? Hmm. No, two years feels about right.

Due to it being a fluke that I remembered while I was online, I don't have a lot to say about it because I haven't had a chance to consider the implications, if any. I suspect there are none. But it felt right to at least mark the day.

Happy Anniversary to this site!

Limbo-ing under the Tightrope with TED

Okay, having recovered slightly from Friday’s foray into “so this is what they mean by going into shock”, I am now in a very interesting position.

As a result of the thing I can’t talk about – to be known from now on as TED (for no particular reason other than it’s easier to type that TTICTA and it’s not going away any time soon, so it needs a nickname) – life is going to be in a very strange state of limbo for the foreseeable future.

I’m now walking an emotional and existential tightrope between “What’s the fucking point of anything?” and “Make the most of everything while you have it”. And, due to the aforementioned state of limbo, on which side I am going to fall is unlikely to be apparent for a long time to come. So I am left teetering (on a tightrope, in limbo position, judging by the mixed metaphors) between total deflation and glorious liberation.

And, remarkably, despite that lack of stability, that’s actually not a bad place to be.

For one thing I no longer have any motivation to be good and reduce spending and save my money. One might go so far as to say that it’s actually in my interests to spend like there’s no tomorrow.*

So, I’m thinking, iPod. I deserve it. Sure it would always be known as the TED iPod, but I think that’s a small price to pay to be able to either escape or wallow in TED just by plugging some white headphones into my ears and submersing myself in happy or depressing music from my substantial library as the mood strikes me. Plus, gadgety distraction.

For another thing, I have taken the dramatic decision to go with the “I am more than usually stressed and going through a difficult period, therefore I’m going to channel the stress towards loosing weight and getting fit” option, as opposed to the easier “I am more than usually stressed and going through a difficult period, therefore I’m going to wallow and eat as much chocolate as I damn well please” option. This decision has surprised me even more than it’s likely to surprise anyone else. To the point where on my way home on Friday I was so confident that I was naturally disposed to option 2 that along with three bottles of wine (what? they were on sale), I bought a family sized block of chocolate that I fully intended to eat in one sitting.

Three days later it’s still sitting, unopened, on the kitchen bench.

The same cannot be said for the wine. Though I didn’t drink as much of that as I thought I would either.

Finally, I am also pushed to get writing again. TED has provided me with a veritable gold mine of emotion to dig into and scatter on to the fictional page. And motivation to get moving with something other than my recently all-consuming job.

So there’s good in the bad. There’s good in the limbo.

There’s also shit in the limbo, but nothing at all that I can do about it, so I’m not going to wallow, I’m just going to get on with it.

As usual.

With an iPod.

* At this point I would like to reiterate that there is a tomorrow. I am not dying. Not even sick (not that I know about anyway).

Saturday Night's All Right

It's Saturday night and I am having a perfect evening.

I think there are two types of perfect Saturday nights.

There's the out with friends/good date Saturday night. And then there's the type of evening I'm having tonight.

Currently I'm sitting in yoga pants and a t-shirt, drinking my second bloody mary in a room lit by about a dozen candles, importing another stack of CDs on to iTunes, watching Iron Chef where they're doing a turkey battle, and doing some writing.

Really, if one is going to spend a Saturday night at home alone, what could be better?

PS - I just avoided having to break up my evening by needing to rush to the emergency room for a tetanus shot because a button from the dining room chair I'm sitting on (manufactured on 1 September 1970, so the stamp on the bottom of the chair tells me, and a wedding present to my parents in October 1970, so they really got the dining suite brand new) popped out and I almost sat on the rusty nail that's supposed to hold the button into the chair. That I didn't sit on the nail is truly remarkable given that in the last couple of days I have stabbed myself with a staple sticking out of a file and grazed the fleshy underside of my upper arm by catching it on the edge of an open drawer. So, working on both the "Uli is capable of wounding herself in remarkably stupid ways" and the "these things come in threes" theories of life, I was pretty much due to sit on the nail.