Fionnghuala's Journal

These really are the first/only thoughts I've had for months...

2008-10-11T18:56:00Z

I was journeying across town though the park on my way home this Saturday evening. Imagine my surprise to find that it really is filled with groups of lurking yoofs! I thought that was just a myth.

Although it was only 6pm, so I was pleased to note that they were starting early. I can't stand a youth that stays in brooding until midnight, and only then goes out partying.

Recently, I've found myself making a lot of cups of tea I don't finish. I usually drink about two thirds of the tea, and then forget about it. I'd like to think this is a sign of how thrusting and work-focused I am. But I fear it's a sign of creeping absent-mindedness that can only end in me not being able to find my arse with both hands. On the other hand, I seem to be surrounded by people who can't find their arse with both hands, so maybe it would be for the best.

Mr Kipling

2008-07-14T14:47:46Z

For those who are offended by the length of my recent post ;)
This film has a strange effect on me. Cake... so beautiful.

Gym machines and fragmented bodies.

2008-07-12T10:55:29Z

As usual, I was at the gym and it made me think of something I want to post about. These days I'm at the whizzy grown-up gym, rather than the down-at-heel university gym. So rather than classes, which I probably prefer and might go back to, I'm on the crazy arsed machines. And the machines have always freaked me out, particularly the aerobic ones; stepper, cross-trainer, treadmill, rowing machine. It's all a bit too much like a hamster wheel. You plug yourself into this high technology object, and it gives you a perfect imitation of doing something real out in the world, but completely distilling it from actually accomplishing anything. Very brain-in-a-jar.

But I kind of like the weights ones. Well, actually, I don't like them. I'm waiting for the day when I'm 'ard enough to ditch the weight machines and go into the free weights room and lift weights like a real man. But I like lifting weights, so I like the principle. Now, I've done a bit of lifting with barbells and stuff in the past, so I'm finding the machines a bit hard to get my head round. The way you have to strain and apply force etc feels more complicated than when it's just you, a bar, weights, and gravity. Although my personal trainer friend tells me actually it's a lot easier to use machines, because all the thinking has been done for you. Idea being that the movement that loads the muscle you want to load (loading muscles is what weight-lifting is all about) has been perfectly abstracted out, so that there's no extra movement or muscle-use recruited besides the one you want to get benefit from the exercise.

So I kind of know all this stuff... but yesterday I made a silly mistake which I think has fucked up my ankle a bit. I was on a machine that imitates a squat. I'd just increased the weight I was doing, and was feeling hardcore. When I got to the final rep, I wasn't as tired as I really should be. So, in a half-second of foolishness, I pushed my legs completely straight, and then effectively pushed off my toes to be standing on tiptoes on the plate, as a kind of triumphant gesture that I could lift the weight a bit higher than I was supposed to. Instantly my achilles tendons were in pain. Because actually this was a fucking heavy weight I was lifting using the big muscles in my thighs, and here I was using some tiny little muscles to make a frivolous gesture, and they couldn't stand the pace.

And this really brought home to me how specific the movements the machines allow are. Part of the deal of this huge, elaborate system of pulleys and plates and pins and gears, which completely isolates a movement for you, is that you can't mess with that. If you start trying to do strange, other movements, you get strange other results. But also, the weights themselves are invisible, and your understanding of them also becomes very abstract. On the machines, the decision about what weight to lift is a matter of sticking a pin into a hole next to a number. To make it heavier all you do is pick a higher number. With free-weights, if you want a heavier weight you have to go over to where they're stored, do a bit of maths to work out which actual weights you can combine to get the value you want, pick them up, perhaps one at a time, perhaps searching for where some fool has discarded them on the floor, carry them over to a bench, find yourself a bar, fiddle with the fiddly thing that attaches the weights to the bar, wrestle the weight onto the bar, invariably in some really awkward position and finding that your wrists are having difficulty manipulating this massive weight at the weird angle necessary to get it into place, get yourself and the bar into the position necessary to start the lifting, which again is probably quite tricky to do as you find yourself using smaller weaker muscles to get into position, and then you have to do all that in reverse when you've finished.

And this is where I start getting all pretentious about it...
So with free weights you have a really visceral, embodied sense of what that weight is. And frankly you then don't mess with them. You don't want that mother-fucker to land on your toe, or suddenly be supported by your lower back or some other delicate part of your body. But the machine removes a lot of that knowledge. Strangely, if it could be possible, it removes the embodiment from the situation. So that your body is completely fragmented into an abstract string of movements, all of which have the illusion that they can be perfectly isolated from one another. And then just one of those fragments is delivered back to you by each machine as you go around. It resembles the idea that your mind can be abstracted off and go into the internet without you, or into a maths book without you. In this case your quads go off and lift some weights without you. The rest of you is left behind, reclining in an ergonomically designed seat to wait for them.

And of course it is an illusion. Actually the rest of your body works as you lift, and there are even handles to grip to keep yourself in position. And you're still plugged into tons of other relations... wondering if other people are watching you, keeping an eye on the person on the machine you want next and planning to dart in as soon as they've finished, the significance of the amount your pressing, and the long-term trajectory of increasing the weight you can lift, the financial and time cost of being in this privileged place, working your gender identity and all that stuff. But it is an illusion that is powerfully constituted through the configuration of these machines, and even played out through the growth of the muscles you're training which are being efficiently worked through the science and engineering knowledge that has produced them.

So... yea... cool.

fionnghuala @ 2008-07-12T11:08:00

2008-07-12T10:08:40Z

I blame Ewan for my recent interest in stupid quizzes:

Your result for The Attachment Style Test...

The Free Agent

14% Anxiety Over Abandonment and 22% Avoidance Of Intimacy

You like to be independent, to play by your own rules. You're not terribly interested in finding a partner and settling down, and it makes you nervous to imagine that someone might depend on you for anything. Were you to find the right partner--someone as independent as you, probably--you'd not be too put out about sharing your adventures with him/her.

Fictional characters with whom you might identify: Han Solo (Star Wars), Beatrice ("Much Ado About Nothing")

Other Attachment Types:
Secure:	The Unicorn	\|	The Cuddleslut	\|	The Free Agent
Preoccupied:	The Cling Wrap	\|	The Squid	\|	The Insect
Fearful:	The Doormat	\|	The Leper	\|	The Exile
Dismissing:	The Hermit	\|	The Stone	\|	The Player
Confused:	The Waffler

Take The Attachment Style Test at HelloQuizzy

fionnghuala @ 2008-06-17T15:34:00

2008-06-17T14:58:54Z

This is something cool:

It's a building shaped as two towers that direct the wind into the centre where there are wind turbines...

Yea, I accidentally walked into a City and Regional Planning talk this afternoon. But hey, check out all these other cool, green buildings!

I wish I had grown up to be an architect. What a nice, sensible, shiny kind of job that would be...

In other news: Gay men and straight women have symmetrical brain hemispheres. The Guardian's write up of this is surprisingly homophobic. The online version doesn't do justice to the strange insert the paper had in it, spinning outrage from gay and lesbian groups to this kind of research as being a bit... outrageous. "These poor scientists are dogged by politics and controversy, etc, etc, etc".

I heard this headline on the news this morning just as I was waking up, and my immediate thought was that gay men and straight women's brains are developed by their shared experience of putting up with men's shit. More brain-building even than Sudoku.

Oh, and these are quite funny, too:
Black People Love Us

Stuff White People Like

The addictiveness of photographs...

2008-06-15T22:58:32Z

I've had a camera on my phone for a little while, and the full potential of having a camera you carry around all the time and have to hand and ready to pounce is only slowly dawning on me. I think it's one of those things that does.... create new conditions of possibility. Mean you can live life and be a person in a slightly different way.

Anyway, I take lots of bollocks photos of things I see and think are cool. And I always think to myself 'This will come in handy later'. But who really knows when? Perhaps for posting on Livejournal... So here we have it, What I've Been Up To Lately (In Pictures):

Gus chatting to the Virtual Reality Man.

Hmmm... lots of my photos seem to involve Signs I Like. This one is a toilet I wasn't allowed to pee in. I took quite a lot of photos of the toilet, too, but you wouldn't be interested in that...

An ex-doorway into the park. This made me rather sad. Then I realised I could get into the park another way and I wasn't lost after all...

More signs.

And more... this car was parked outside the Welsh Assembly building. I spot more Roleplaying Joke bumper stickers than I feel comfortable with.

Rockin out AND cardigans. That's EVERYTHING. I bet you all wish you'd stayed up till 5am and danced to Squeeze with us !

Two-player Settlers of Catan variation. Worked very well, and gave the tantalising thrill of exploration. Even more exciting if you're not the worldly type that also plays the Seafarers expansion. ;)

Josh looking heartwarming with a small child!

Teh Hat !!!!

Lovely Robots. Imagine my life if my walls were covered in robot stickers.

And finally, I don't think I'm ever gonna tire of this mental image ;)

Hide and Seek

2008-06-10T17:47:10Z

Had hoped as I was posting yesterday about the Hide and Seek festival, that it would filter into my consciousness and I'd realise that not only did I think it would be cool to go, I actually could go, and would get my arse in gear to do it.

Then I noticed that it's the same weekend as my Big Conference, so there's no way I can.

Which means it's also the same weekend as Glastonbury. Which seems a shame as the two have superficially similar remits. So then I started to wonder what this means. Why would avoiding this clash not be important to the organisers?

I guess because there isn't a big feeling that their audience would want to go to both, despite the apparent similar appeal. Two main reasonings I can think of:

1)Glastonbury is over, and is no longer about art and creativity and fun and innovation, but is just a few gigs and other entertainments happening on top of each other.

2)Hide & Seeks audience are not the kind of people who would go to Glastonbury. (1) can be kind of subsumed into this, but more a statement of a kind of geek, gamer maybe intellectual culture being a separate one from whatever Glastonbury represents; perhaps more of a crusty or indy or outdoorsy or even just music-interest culture.

This relates to some stuff I've been thinking today about what geek culture is. I'm imagining some kind of perfect internet user who stands in opposition to the stuff I'm interested in about fluffing it up.

Found Art

2008-06-10T14:47:41Z

Picked up as a comment on this forum: about Starbucks logo

Prostitutes...coffee...as far as I'm concerned, the two have always been synonymous anyways. We, as a "civilized" society need to quit endorsing the sex trade with our purchase of coffee. What do you think is gonna happen with everyone running around, all hoppped up on caffeine. Historically, I found myself indulging in hookers; I doubt there are many of us who are not guilty of the same coffee-fueled indiscretion.

Under the Mask...

2008-06-09T19:59:46Z

Spent most of my weekend going to an interesting day conference in Luton about videogames. The first videogame-thing I've been to since last Summer. Has got me thinking that maybe I should take some steps to include games in my project, or more accurately find one participant who self-identifies as a gamer so I can position myself in that field. Or at least with one foot or even one toe in it. There seems a lot of scope for going around saying 'This is rubbish', in the same way that at the moment I love going around saying 'The internet is rubbish'. I've been seduced a lot more by literary criticism generally, recently (I say that seamlessly assuming that videogame studies is a branch of lit crit, which is an appalling reduction, but the kind of one I like).

Anyway, here are some links to Things I Saw There That Were Cool:

The Passively Multi-player Onling Game - which looks kind of interesting and I'd like to play, but apparently slows Firefox down a lot, and my laptop is already stuggling to make sense of the world.

Chore Wars - An equally hilarious game concept, where you assign XP-amounts to chores in your life, and then compete with your workmates/housemates/etc to level.

Hide and Seek Festival - Games festival at the Southbank at the end of June. Which sounds terribly terribly cool. You have to read this page very cynically to not be attracted to it, I think. Although it was nice to see Tanya Krzywinska, who's a v cool elder screen-media researcher glaring powerully at the playful and stripey guy who presented about this, because he was From Industry. Her angsty behaviour was one of my favourite things about the day.

Wonderland - Gamer blog that includes lot of funky game-related craft stuff. Not that I would be interested in anything like that, obv.

DiGRA - The Digital Games Researcher Association, which ran a conference in Japan this year that all the cool kids went to. The site archives all the papers from their conferences and other things. Which is a lot.

Gumbaby.com - Blog of a woman doing work that might cross-cut with mine somewhere, about people leaving innapropriate messages online. Apparently these are overwhelmingly women, and relate to not understanding how the site they are on works. Or usability/design issues... but I don't really care about those.

Women in Games conference - A conference that maybe I should think about going to. It's one of those fusion academic and developer things, that you seem to get a lot of in games research and I guess is why there seems to be so much money flying about. Doesn't seem to be a niche where I could submit a paper, probably the only thing I could think to do would be something about barriers from the embodied side to women playing. But I could probably learn a lot of stuff about the relations women have to gaming and by extension computers and online stuff. Or, more accurately, I could learn a lot about how people are approaching those questions and what the popular sets of assumptions are. Which is the kind of thing I learn most days...

Ludica - Women and games research group. Something about searching for possibilities.

8-bit Flickr pool - And finally, some nice pictures.

The big question I have to ask about whether I want to do anything Game Studies, is do I want to hang around with a bunch of geeks forever, painting myself as an outsider because I can't keep up with how many games they play? And, similarly, how much crappy stuff gets written because of the sheer, ridiculous, volume of it.

Snack based observations...

2008-06-03T22:14:18Z

I now understand how a cup of tea can be refreshing in the heat. After hours of trawling through Hay-on-Wye offerings I was both hot and real thirsty, and I knocked back a restorative cup of tea super fast, with the gentle scorching sensation in my throat making me feel cool and soothed. This has never happened to me before, and I don't think I really believed it ever could, despite mrmisanthropy's wild claims.

Today I was nosing about the biscuit section, when I noticed you can now get Oreos in quite respectable sized packets... I have long refused to buy them in those tiny, over-priced snack packs. I snapped them up, thinking they would be a talking point with my American tea-guests. This is a thinly veiled rationalisation, I rarely have American tea-guests, and all grown-ups reject Oreos anyway. Turns out there are things your core sense of self just never stop missing...

ARPAnetz

2008-06-02T23:05:49Z

   Despite all the hype, technoscience is not the Greatest Story
   Ever Told, but it is playing powerfully to large, widely 
   distributed audiences.

- DH

Have just been reading Donna Haraway's thought-provoking thow-away comments (can that woman do no wrong?) about the implications of the internet originating in military contexts, then NSFnet and university contexts, etc, etc. And suddenly I realised, I have heard this ancient history story a million times, but I have no idea about the infrastructure of the internet right now. What computers does it run on? Who do they belong to? How is it funded? How come we hear tons about google and microsoft and gang their hold on the internet, but never anything about this material stuff?

Then I realised you wise lot on my friends list are sure to know the answers to these questions. So I am asking you...

fionnghuala @ 2008-05-29T21:15:00

2008-05-29T21:05:21Z

Have finally returned home, after a week of varied adventures. I'm choosing to gloss the whole thing as 'partying', although some was of the social-theory-orgy variety. Feels like perhaps more than a week. Having failed to go regularly to my spanking new shiny gym has made me realise how busy I've been recently. I begin every new week with a sense that this week I'm exceptionally tired out and Won't Be Able To Fit It All In. So now that I'm back, I'm going to be making a special effort to take it easy for a while.

Which brings me to a topic that has been troubling me for the past year, and particularly for the first half of my par-taying. Is it really so great having a porch on your tent?

Before I had a tent with a porch, I coveted one like mad. I had a brief flirtation a few years ago, but it was one of the few casualties of a very gentle relationship break-up and is long gone. Finally, last year my trusty old two-man (this is of course a lie) finally packed in, and I had to embark on finding a brand new tent. And of course I wanted a porch. And I got one. And I used it for all the Summer season. And I've just come back from sharing what might even have been a four-man (similar lies) which had a porch. And I've finally realised that maybe porches aren't all that.

The main benefits of porches are the obvious place to store your wet shoes and wet clothes and wet everything - if you don't have a porch you need to painstakingly set aside a space for wetness, usually in a crumpled plastic bag that takes up valuable space. But the hidden and most glorious benefit, is that you can pee in your porch while invisible to passers-by.

But I've slowly slowly realised that there is a cruel price for all this luxury. The porch creates a buffer between you and the outside world. The best thing about sleeping in a tent, I think, is snuggling up into bed, and then lying with the door wide open looking up at the stars and appreciating the night air. In my tiny little dome tent, the door was a big segment of tent that swept above me and ended well over my head, so there was no barrier at all between me and the night sky. In a porch-tent, the door is too far away to comfortably reach from a settled bed position. And anyway, there's a damp, crumpled plasticy mess between you and the outside. Which kind of breaks the magic and makes the outside feel like something nasty that you need to be insulated from.

Seeing some photos a friend posted on Facebook of this marvellous, freedom-inspiring view, has reminded me how important it is. So I'm starting to wonder if I can fix my skanky old teenage rubbish tent...

Time

2008-05-20T18:44:49Z

Have been thinking a lot about the past and the passage of time for the last few days. My Sam weekend wasn't as whimsical and charming as the last one, but was still good fun in a more low-key, grown-up way. Some accounts put this as my tenth year, which feels like it deserves some marking.

I want to say something profound, or at least thought through about this. But more that I notice time passing and things changing. And being in that space, I appreciate being able to watch all these people just do being alive and have things move slowly and rhythmically.

Funz ?

2008-05-16T11:31:01Z

I am now officially looking forward to the weekend. Actually I have been really really really looking forward to it for approximately three weeks, as the last one was terrific. I can't work out whether it was so great because I was different, or because it was different. I've definitely been a lot more outgoing recently, and that worked so well being there, surrounded by people I know and have.... been through stuff with. In the past I really haven't fully taken advantage of what a great environment it is. And recent years have been clouded by my generalised anxieties, when I obviously wasn't well enough to be there, but was also not well enough to make the decision not to be there.

But it was also an extra-intimate gathering; much tho I love the little n00bs flapping about, there is something seriously special about looking round a crowded room full of people and pretty much every single person being someone you know and care about on some level.

This weekend, however, promises building a fire and telling stories. I am very impressed that this has been planned by C. I thought his special skill was being terribly cute and making ladies of a certain age squeee (although dangerously I think I may be sliding into the 'ladies of a certain age category' - his squee-ing powers seem to be cumulative...) (and to limit it to the ladies is also very closed-minded of me. One of the most laugh-out-loud trying-to-look-supportive moments I've ever experienced was a very heterosexual, very unreflexive 50-yr old man thinking he was feeding back to me about C's work, but actually just telling me over and over again how beautiful he is). Anyway, looks like he's also turning out to be hippie-tastic. Which is definitely all good. I'm hoping there will be puppets, too...

Although saying that, I am major stressing over work. This is because I know I have to leave here at a specific time, and have done some tidying (i.e. and additional task besides the big one I'm doing right not) before I go. That's how terribly terribly bad I am at having Plans.

Gold Farming... Whatcha Reckon ?

2008-05-14T13:05:14Z

Just went to an interesting talk by my supervisor where she mentioned MMOs and gold farmers. I've heard the story before a few times. She's talking about the exploitation of low-paid workers to support the play of richer players in the west. So that the fantasy of mastery can be purchased, while somebody else's labour is obscured.

Suddenly, this made a connection for me with some stuff I've been thinking about gaming and work. Two other examples I've been rolling around in my head for a while gained new meaning. There are:

1) T.L. Taylor, who is fucking cool, has done some ethnographic-y work with Powerlevellers. Basically d00ds who are playing super-efficiently, putting in a lot of hours, to get hold of the best stuff and effectively beat the game. Traditionally researchers found this hard to make sense of because it looks like work. TL just accepts that this is another form of play that people like, and hangs out with them acting impressed about their groovy items.

2) A guy I did some research with about internet use. He gave me some audio-diary stuff of him playing Dungeons and Dragons Online, which I am looking at for how playing is accomplished through emotion. And it boils down to him having no fun while he plays, and experiencing the game a lot like work. He's pissed off that he/his character is spending a lot of resources he can't really afford, pissed off that the people he's teamed with are playing badly, and have designed their characters badly/selfishly, and his main motivation to play is the XP. All he wants to do is drag his character to the next level. So his play resembles work, but unlike TL's, where they are go-getting professional-types, he's doing some kind of not-fun alienating work.

So basically I'm struggling with the idea that play can look and feel like work. And then yesterday it struck me, it can also have an exchange value like work. Grinding for gold to pay for your mount, or XP to get out of a slump level into a shiny, fun level, becomes almost a money-saving exercise (like doing your own DIY, or mending your jacket, or whatever), in a world where you could pay £20 for someone else to do it for you. And does this then impact on the warm-shiny feeling you get to have accomplished it, the knowledge that you could have, and some people definitely will have, bought it?

So now there really isn't a terrible lot of difference between play and labour. TL's latest work is with professional Counter-Strike players, where the difference becomes even more crazy-blurred.

So is play work ? Or, more accurately, in what ways can playing an MMO be work?

There'll be No. Butter. In. Hell !!!

2008-04-02T18:17:20Z

Finally saw Cold Comfort Farm last night, after almost a year of expectations. There were fantastic moments, like realising that Stephen Fry was playing Mr Mybug, and essentially is him in real life. But overall I was a bit disappointed. The humour wasn't relentless enough, and a lot of the low-key charm was pushed a bit, too. Even the no butter in hell line, possibly one of the funniest in the entire universe, was a bit too Made For TV :(

This is a bit of a limp entry. All the cool entries in my head require a bit too much commitment for my current, failing-to-get-any-work-done mode of operation.

PS: Donna Haraway rocks my socks.

fionnghuala @ 2008-03-25T13:41:00

2008-03-25T13:49:25Z

Just settling down to my lunch and am assaulted by the horror of no crisps. A terrible oversight on my part. I pop downstairs to the cafe to make good my mistake. And no cafe. Fuckin Baby Jesus. But of course he's not a baby by this feast day. He's a grown man. A grown man of the kind of potency that can keep my from my crisps !!! YEEEEAAAAAAAAARRRRGGHHHH !!!

I am chuckling in satisfation about this conversation, taking place on a virtual plane not far from here:

On first looking into... Grass Jelly with Milk

knifecollector wrote
at 9:24pm yesterday
what kind of grass...
Milk jelly sounds nice. Wait. That's what blancmange is!

fionnghuala wrote
at 9:26pm yesterday
Literally the kind of grass we take for granted and walk on every day. That's what it tasted like!

Then it was cut into tiny shreds, and suspended in a glass of, quite literally, milk.

fionnghuala wrote
at 9:28pm yesterday
I have also encountered a Milk Jelly on my recent travels. It is a normal jelly made up with a tin of evaporated milk. It's then topped up to a pint, but I can't remember if that's with ordinary milk or just with water. It is fuckin fantastic. Maybe we should make some at the weekend ?

knifecollector wrote
at 9:43pm yesterday
Yes! =D
I loves me some evaporated milk.

Largely estranged father wrote
at 3:39am
Milk jelly was a Dorothy [parent of Largely estranged father] special. It must run in your genes...

Largely estranged father wrote
at 3:39am
Mind you, so was stewed tripe. One can only hope that that particular gene is recessive.

fionnghuala wrote
at 10:52am
Sophie and I love tripe, as it happens. We are part of Gordon Ramsay's tripe revival ;)

knifecollectorwrote
at 12:21pm
Tripe ftw!

The other green drink...

2008-03-24T20:43:16Z

While in Glasgow I pottered to the supermarket to purchase something to sip genteely on during the evening. I thought a warming ginger wine would be ideal for my purposes, and so I set out to look for some. Undeterred by it's placement on the shelves directly next to the Buckfast tonic, and the price slightly higher than the Tesco's-own I am in the habit of drinking, I purchased a bottle of Crabbies Ginger Wine. It was am-a-zing. Far far better than the skanky Green's that is available outside Scotland. I am dreaming of it's comforting layers of spiciness, and authentically green hue still.

I'm off to Dublin in the green, in the green...

2008-03-19T17:48:27Z

Btw, martincutbill, Ulysses 31 is just as fuckin badass as I remember it. The opening credits alone poo all over Transformers.

He angers Posiedon !! He lives in a Space Ship !! He's got an expansive, hippy beard !! He is accompanied by A ROBOTIC COMPANION !! What is not to like?

Of telephones and wikipediaz...

2008-03-16T21:40:11Z

Was having a luvverly chat with my little bro on the phone, while sitting in front of the computer. On a barely conscious level I was fiddling about online, and before I knew what was happening I / we had dug up a few gems from our childhood. Which no one else in the universe will have heard of.

My personal fav is good old fortycoats:

Check his absolutely lush supplies of sweets...

But Bosco also deserves a word. He lived in a little tiny house that was... inside a table?

Comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb

2008-03-11T16:17:50Z

While I'm in the posting mood, a self-help-tastic exercise I stumbled across this morning, that actually does sound pretty helpful. It's part of a series, so concepts like 'The Trusting Universe' and 'Law of Attraction' are defined elsewhere...

Exercises

1. In the center of a page, draw a circle and within it write down one life dream that you would love to achieve--the bigger and more "unrealistic" this one seems, the better! Then surround it with all the reasons why it "probably won't happen," why it's too big or all those little voices that shoot down the idea. Empty your brain and fill the page with all the beliefs you have that stop this dream from becoming a reality.

b. Now it's time to play "The Trusting Universe's Advocate." At the center of another sheet draw another circle and insert the same life dream. Answer, from the perspective of a Universe that totally trusts you to achieve this goal, why this dream "probably will happen," why it's completely attainable and all the beliefs that make this dream possible, do-able and even easy--imagine you are really a voice of the Trusting Universe, trying to convince a human being why something is in fact a possibility. As you do this, cross out each limiting belief on the first page. If you get really stuck, flip the original statement into the positive.

c. Read each page of beliefs aloud, starting with the first one. After you have finished, take notice for a moment how you are feeling--how you feel in your body, in your mind, in your life. Then do the same with the second. How do you feel after you read the trust-based beliefs? Remember from the Law of Attraction, the more you can live into the feeling that the universe supports you, the more you'll attract this way of being into your living reality.

d. Pin the second page up somewhere where you can see it often. Read these trust-based beliefs aloud at least once per day.

So difficult in the thinking about, so easy in the doing

2008-03-11T15:25:05Z

Over the past couple of weeks, I have often been in a situation where I think "There's no way I can do that. I know what's going on, and my completely knowledgeable assessment is that it's never gonna happen." But then in the end it does.

I noticed it this afternoon, when I was in a Yogalates class. (For those who are following my adventures - yes, I've found another good teacher! W00t!). We were doing some quite simple postures, and deepening each one five separate times. One particular pose I thought "I'm crap at this one, it's already starting to hurt and I know I'm not going to get any more stretch out of this". But, inevitably, after a few minutes I could. After a few seconds I probably could. Not tons of course - I do know something about which bits of me are tight. So although my judgment had some relation to what did happen, I was actually completely surprised. Surprised by how, with almost no effort, something that seems impossible one minute, can be not only possible, but even easy-breezey the next.

I've felt the same way recently about some teaching I did last week. Teaching stats, which I can bluff pretty good, but don't know that well. Once you get into bluffing stats... you notice that everyone else is, too. HMm... perhaps I'm selling myself short when I say I 'bluff' it. I know a lot more than most people do, but not as much as I do about social constructionism. Not as much as someone who was living the stuff. And, of course, I don't believe a fuckin word of it, so that will always hold me back somewhere down the line. So I was given some handouts and bits from last year. Obviously written by someone who knows nothing about stats. And I didn't have time to rewrite them, but they were dreadful. My heart sank as I looked through them and knew that I could never teach this with a straight face, and that it would take hours to rewrite the whole thing - probably longer than doing it from scratch.

But I read through these shit materials every day for about three days, and didn't do much other work on it. And by the final day, I had planned the sessions, and all I had to do was copy them out onto the overheads. And actually the experience of revising some stats, and then teaching them, was all rather cool and a post for another day.

A similar thing has happened in recent developments with the Imaginary Girlfriend, which have been quite transformative for me. At first I thought that I couldn't let go of her and that to do so would be impossibly painful, but it got easier almost straight away - just like the yoga posture. In fact a tremendous amount better, because tons of other things in my life have become much more together in a catalysing effect. But what I find scary about this, is that I wasn't able to predict it would happen. I really really believed that it would be a hard hard slog.

Part of this positive effect, is that I feel better in myself than I have for years. Regular readers of this journal will know I've had some hard times recently, and that I've often written about small amounts of progress towards getting better. But at the moment things are changing in leaps and bounds, and I feel like my old self. One of the effects of this is that I think I am way better than all of you - something I distinctly remember feeling in the distant past, but I thought would never return. Of course I had the decency to keep quiet about it in those days, so you probably didn't realise.

As I become re-acquainted with this different me, I notice that she's not exactly the same as Old Me. There has been some progress, notably I think I take myself less seriously now than I used to. I am sure Old Me was a lot more perceptive and had better judgement than the Crap Me of recent times. So I wonder if she knew about this effect with the not-knowing how you'll feel later, and if I've forgotten it in the meantime. She certainly used to bandy about the corrupted Robert Pirsig quote above quite a bit.

"An embroiderer can become a sociologist, but usually she keeps quiet about it"

2008-03-03T12:51:08Z

This morning I am feeling strangely serene, perhaps too serene to do any proper work. This might be because the picturesque flurry of hail that accompanied me on my journey into college is making it very dark in here. With an enormous, useless window from floor to ceiling in the corner of this office, it feels a bit like a cave. I often feel like I could scurry up to the window, hang out of it for a moment, and then lightly jump down to the quiet side-road a floor below and get on with my business. The light right now, far more appropriate for going-home-time than mid-day increases the effect.

Or maybe I'm feeling serene because this weekend is The Big One, and even though I've felt quite efficient in organising it, filling in nicely arranged spreadsheets, making good use of my pen-drive, and delegating wildly, I still haven't actually had a sense of the big picture. Only this morning I'm remembering a big slew of jobs that I haven't yet thought about. So the serenity might be more accurately described as a quiet, cheerful numbness enveloping me to protect me from The Truth.

The weekend just gone was also terribly lovely, and full of those 'HMm... I really should write about this in my LJ moments'. But one thing I heartily promised to write about was a pleasing Rite Of Passage. My little brother giving me, in quick succession, two excellent and life-enhancing pieces of advice. One of them was about managing my relationship, and the second one was about cooking fried eggs. Both terribly important and sweeping areas of knowledge, so you can imagine how proud I am of his progress into being a Proper Human Being.

This reminds me, in character and import, of The Day I Had More Physical Stamina Than My Mother. Rather upsetting for both of us at the time. But kind of in a good way, I suppose.

Which only leaves me to say: angstoutlet, I'm still kind of sorry to hear your news. Am thinkin about you, and don't forget you are under orders to call me the moment you feel any less okay about it all.

I don't see what anyone can see... in anyone else.

2008-02-20T19:10:14Z

On a related note, when I am asking someone to do something I often say: Would you like to..., when I mean I would like you to.... Of course this is more of a problem in I'm In Charge contexts, where it's really my call to decide what people do and hand out the jobs, and if anyone defies me it will end up being tons more work for me and everyone else.

Very recently, I've been experimenting with Would you be up fer..., but that works better in contexts where it's something in the future: "Would you be up fer doing this presentation next month", rather than "Would you be up fer filling this large container with water and carrying it up that hill right now."

Hmm...

(1) Would you like to fill this large container with water and carry it up that hill?
(2) I would like you to fill this large container with water and carry it up that hill!

(1) is literally never going to be true, is it....

Am I the only person who concerns myself with such issues?

On a largely unrelated note, I saw Juno last night. It did an excellent job of being alright. But is definitely a better film for those who are a bit obsessed with the Moldy Peaches . The bit where two awkward teens start to sing me and dickymint's 'our song' to each other brought a, quite literal, tear to my eye.

Welcome...

2008-02-14T21:19:57Z

In other news, I have been trying to replace the phrase 'feel free', as in 'feel free to pop round later if you change your mind', with 'you're welcome' as in 'you're welcome to pop round later if you change your mind'.

I fear 'feel free' might be a terrible Americanism I've picked up somewhere, and that even if it isn't it's strangely lacking in the creation of freedom, and definitely not the encouraging warmth of a 'welcome'.