Conorthoughts

Knocked out

I'm having a party tonight to celebrate my em, em, 29th birthday. Preparing for and holding one can be a form of self-administered general anaesthetic lasting a day. Hope I've got the dose right.

 

Flatshare ad

(This post is the continuation of a message that is part of a flatshare ad on www.moveflat.co.uk. I ran out of space there.)

perhaps share two or more meals a week plus do some shared shopping. To be together and alone!

I feel that I've already had at least one life and am in the process of constructing a new one. I would be interested in sharing with people who have lived through a change of direction or two in their lives. This is not a must!

My interests?  Ideas, books, politics, art, literature, the arts generally, music, world, classical, and jazz but I’m open to music of all kinds.

I work in financial publishing. I’ve worked mainly in financial journalism in London and in politics in Dublin. I’ve also worked as a writer – a critic – in the art world here. I went back to my studies in my thirties and did a doctorate. It was a great thing to do but has slowed my life down in some ways.

To get a fuller idea of who I am, please click further around my blog!

I would like to be able, if possible, to have a good-sized room. In terms of nearness to town, I am spoilt in Pimlico but would like to live pretty centrally or not too far away, in a pleasant area. Zones 1-2!

Thank you for reading this. That's it for now!

Space

That space when I come back to the flat from a trip away and find myself at two millimetres' distance from my life, allowing me to see it from outside, or from above, the sense the space gives that I can intervene in that life, nudge it, then, two hours later, in fact, already disappearing and nothing done in it, but perhaps this, a sentence running to its end, with enough structure to be the eye in a needle of the self through which other words may be threaded, later.

Breakdown

Like evil, the banality of it.

I went into work this morning , having failed to go in again yesterday  - another blue Monday to join the blue Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays I've been having over the last ten weeks or so -  and said that I needed some time off, as of immediate effect. Agreed. A break. A breakdown. My third, each one smaller than the last (I think). Must have some lunch.

                                                           (To be continued, hopefully)   

Keep it slow

A 'my job' update. Since I last posted on it, it has been going, well, ...

A colleague Yvonne wrote a comment on that post. It had contained a veiled question to her that she answered neither in her comment nor in person. I would still like to know what happens to them.

Yvonne is leaving here very soon for another job. I don't know whether she will be sitting in a corner there. I must ask her. She is off sick today. I'm still sitting in my corner. Keep it slow.

The job has been going, well, ...

I'm writing this at work, during my lunch break of course, a splendidly movable feast.

Trying to talk the other evening about how the job was going with M., one of my more self-absorbed friends who had to get up very early the following morning - I had not overstayed my welcome but it was quite late and I think she wanted to have her nightly bath - she suggested swimming. It works for her. I left shortly after that.         

You know that line about always asking for and listening to your friends' advice?

This morning I woke early - again - and went for a swim. I haven't been for one for at least a year. The menu of lanes was 'Front Crawl', 'Fast & Furious', 'Getting Fast', 'Keep It Slow'. I chose my level, the 'Keep It Slow' lanes at the end. I managed eight lengths, albeit with multiple breaks and bumpings into others.

M's was good advice. Today, for a change, work has been going, well, swimmingly, not that I have got that much done yet but swimming takes many forms, as do productive days.

An adviser to whom I pay fees said to me when we last met that being in work is important because it means you're swimming.

Must go to lunch now. Keep it slow.       

 

Middle

Aristotle recommends a middle way, in the Nichomachean Ethics. I'm too tired to find the book on my shelves to read what the way is about again but will go on here - my fingers are less tired - in search of it. Lots of people recommend a middle way, or they write it.

Hannes Böhringer is a thinker I like who writes it. I am name-dropping tonight. A foreign name counts here as a dropped one, I think. In his book Auf der Suche nach Einfacheit (Looking for Simplicity) - I am showing off now, one can overdo simplicity, showing off a little sometimes is perhaps part of a middle way - Böhringer, who cannot walk without a stick, manages at one point to thread his middle way through the maelström in Edgar Allan Poe's story 'A Descent into the Maelström'. But I better end quickly as my reader is, I sense, at risk of leaving me before I leave her or him.

Quickly and I will award myself a glass of wine uncorked two weeks ago!

Might the quiet corner of the office, about which I wrote yesterday, be a middle way through a

 

                                                                             (To be continued, hopefully)
 

Job

I've been in my job six months and two days now. I am speechless, sentence-less. Well, not quite. I sit in a corner. I must look for another one, a job, that is, rather than a corner, though I have nothing against corners.  A colleague who will be nameless and sits in another corner told me that people in the one I sit in - I am not its only inhabitant - don't ... I must ask her what happens to them.   

Up Late

 

Good morning and thank you for calling the Soulmates message collection line. To collect your replies, we need you to dial in your four digit pin number after the tone.

9966

 

It appears that you have more than one advertisement with us at the moment so please dial in the five digit ad number of the one that you want to check for replies.

 

90784

Welcome to your voice-box. Press 1 to check for new messages, 2 if you would like to change or check your greeting, 3 to browse through new advertisers that we have matched you with, 4 to ...

1

I'm sorry, there are no replies for you at this moment. However, there are fifty advertisers that we have matched you with. If you would like to ...   

"So it goes."

 

Kurt Vonnegut died this week at the age of 84. He was best known for this phrase and for the novel Slaughterhouse Five in which he used it - repeatedly - for the first time. He wrote with humour, black, Vonnegutesque. 

 

Desperate measure

Desperate measure. My therapist says ...  My ex-girlfriend says, writes ...

I need to post something here. I've haven't posted for ages. The Way of the Cross, the way of the word. What would Warburg think of that as a remark? Nothing, probably? Something, perhaps.

What can I post? Anything? Down to the wall. Another Oompah Loompah dog?  Hardly.

Here is my street, Lupus, in Google Maps. Count five (houses) from the left and I'm somewhere down there, beneath two layers of probably still sleeping bodies, looking, on a beautiful April morning, at the trees in the school-yard opposite, one of which you just make out. Damn, it doesn't work! Desperate measure, to be continued.
 

Liven up a bit more

A young reader in Norfolk also seems to think that I need to liven this blog up. He has suggested a photo that I consider to be in unusually bad taste.

Anthropomorphising humans beings is bad enough but I really take exception to anthromorphising animals. And in this case, there is money involved. How low can you go!

However, as I'm short of inspiration - I've have not posted here for weeks - and to keep my younger readers on board (I now have at least three if I include both Beatrix and Fionnuala, neither of whom have visited here for months, I suspect) here is the image that Oisín suggested.