delays delays

It's my birthday. I've been in london for 4 months now.

I promised a lot of people that I'd start keeping a blog to keep them updated on what was happening with me. I've been very remiss. Partly because I've been busy, partly because I KNEW that if I started a blog I'd NEVER work and partly because I couldn't think of a cool name for my blog. Silly silly.

But after months of agonising over what to call it, I suddenly came up with the title. And since the term has ended, I have lots of time, and therefore: no excuse. So I'm starting the blog.

I'm writing this blog partly as therapy. I'm a long way from home and from all the things that made up who I was-- am, sorry. I've been having a wonderful time on my own, but sometimes it's very lonely and overwhelming to be by yourself.

[I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.]
(Christopher Boone. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (p.8). Mark Haddon.)

These past few weeks, I've felt like groaning. The Curious Incident was the last book we had to read for our class on British Children's Literature: 1960's onwards. I loved this book, partly because it was so quick to read, partly because a lot of the time, I feel exactly how Christopher Boone feels in that book. Christopher Boone has Asperger's syndrome, by the way. It's a form of autism-- go figure.

We had a long (and bordering on tense) discussion in class about why it was so easy to relate to this book, especially when the premise is that you're seeing the story through the eyes of a mentally challenged boy. And I remembered that brief stint I had as a special education tutor. In our training seminar, they said to us: these kids see exactly the same things that we do, it's just that they don't know know what to make of it all. You need to give them structure and order-- but then again, don't we all need structure and order in our lives?

If you've read the book, it's easy to see it as a slow motion take of how we respond to the world. There's a boy making his way through the city. Considering that his own home can be somewhat disorientating, London might as well be the amazon jungle. Everything is overwhelming because he notices everything. Every car, every post box, he'll count it all. Could be a manic complusion, could be that he just doesn't know what to shut out. It's amazing, when you think about it, just how much WE shut out to make the world bearable. How much we edit while we're taking it in, while we're remembering. In Terry Pratchett's A Hatful of Sky, the Hiver is dangerous because it sees too much and feels too much. Everything the world has to offer is a lot to take in all at once. Hiver is winter in French, and it's winter-time while I'm writing this. Hm, funny.

I don't think all my entries are going to be as morose as this. I do have good days.

It's 2am on December 11. Not my birthday anymore.