When I broke up with my boyfriend I spent a long time (an embarrassingly long, painful time) feeling like it was almost pointless to cook for one: what was the point of watching a film alone or sweeping the floor when it was only me walking on it? I am now going through a similar thing with alcohol. What is the point of picnics without booze? Am I just supposed to meet a friend but not 'for a drink'?
Aimless, jittery and jonesing. Any small thing going wrong is upsetting me disproportionately. I lost a brooch, I shrunk a jumper in the tumble dryer, there has been a delay in getting my benefits: each of these things has made me cry this week. Things like this aren't meant to happen when I'm not drinking. And this morning - it's Good Friday so we've got the day off from the treatment centre - I decided to treat myself by going into Oxford Street and getting some new make-up.
The brisk French woman in House of Fraser offered to give me a faceful and, although I hated the way she had done herself up, I agreed. I nodded and smiled when she showed me my grotesque grease-paint ballerina reflection, then rushed to another concession and was scrapping at it with tissues and cleanser before bursting into tears in the middle of the department store like a spoiled madwoman. I may have been sober for more than a month but it appears that I am in no way stable. Everything in this un-anesthetised reality is raw and sensitive.
It's suddenly summer in the city - and a bank holiday - and when I passed the corner of London Fields where all the posing cool kids hang out I got what they call in AA 'euphoric recall'. But I have to remember that the good times there, the impromtu picnics (that didn't involve much food - more Cava and poppers), only really happened in 2006, 2007. By 2008 and 2010 it tended to be just me, some cans of Kronenberg, my notebook and a mobile phone I began to hate for not beeping.
I am building my defences and, each time I don't take a drink when I feel like it, am strengthening the healthy synapses in my brain. Gradually reprogramming myself. I wanted to buy some make-up because I'm already noticing that my skin in clearer and my eyes brighter. And after a long time being single I did gradually begin to feel whole again. I didn't develop this addiction in a day, or even a month, and it will not disappear quickly either.
INFINITE JEST: Pages 312-350 (a lot read while waiting in Poplar Job Centre).
It is hard to write a blog at the same time as reading DFW's brilliance and insight on similar issues. I've destroyed the pages on the workings of Boston AA with my biro underlinings and stars and exclamation marks. There's too much that quotable here: I urge anyone to read it.
- A section on the fantastically complicated game 'Eschaton' played by the kids at the tennis academy. This game is another example of something in Infinite Jest that could be read as a microcosm of the book as a whole* (see also the J. Incandenza's film): the book is a fractal composed of similar small parts constantly multiplying outwards. (There's a theory, more on which at a later stage, that the structure of the book is a Sierpinski triangle).
- The above ideas are ripe material for what Hal Incandenza calls "marijuana thinking", when he gets "lost in a paralytic thought-helix". This is the main reason I've always hated smoking weed - the thoughts can't be stopped or captured.
- An endnote that includes mathematical equations, graphs and statistical puns (on 'mean value' hoho).
- Loving Infinite Jest at the moment!
* "Its [Eschaton's] elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it's almost additively compelling, and shocks the tall."
Artwatch. This is the picture on tennis coach Schitt's wall:
Laura Mercier tinted moisturizer. Seriously. It's a joy to put on after 5 hours of broken sleep - somehow sheer enough not to show that you've rubbed it in with your fingers while the baby chewed your damp bathtowel, but opaque enough to cover the worst of the bags and wrinkles. AND then, with a whufff of powder, stays put and does a decent job for a workday.
ReplyDeleteI don't generally wear makeup, but when I need to convince myself I'm not *that* tired, or when I'm just tired of looking tired, that stuff's the biz. Love it.
I have some LM blusher = The Shit. I also ended up buying some foundation from the French woman - not quite sure what happened, I was temporarily bamboozled.
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