Life :)

Life :)

Creepy

September 10, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I got home last night there was a large envelope propped up against my letterbox that had come from Egelsbach in Germany, a stone’s throw from Frankfurt Airport if Google Maps is to be believed. Only it wasn’t for me. It was for a (presumably) young woman with the very common German surname Müller. I live at 2/19 Kowhai Street, i.e. the second flat of number 19. (My address isn’t exactly that but it might as well be.) In New Zealand they read 2/19 as “two bar nineteen” which struck me as a little weird the first time I heard it. I’d always called the / symbol a slash, or before web addresses became part of everyday life, a stroke. I never would have thought of calling it a bar. The sender, who I think was Miss Müller’s mother, had written the number 219 with a continental-style one which started with a long diagonal stroke. The postman took the diagonal stroke to be a slash (or “bar”) and the envelope, which contained pictures, ended up with me. I also noted that her mum had written her own surname as Müller with the umlaut (as a horizontal line) but her daughter’s name as Mueller. I trundled off down the road all the way to number 219 and sure enough Fräulein Müller lived there. I guess she was lucky that I’d lived in France where people do funny ones and crossed sevens. (I started writing crossed sevens when I lived there because I had to sit maths exams, and I still do them that way now. My ones are just a straight line though.) By the way, the word “mullered” was (is?) used in the UK to mean either what “munted” does in New Zealand, or extremely drunk.

This morning’s dullness and half-arsed but persistent rain reminded me of England. I met up with a friend at lunchtime (the last time I’ll see him before I go away − it’s getting like that now) and we stood in the cold in Civic Square for part of the low-key but worthwhile anti-TPP rally. Grant Robertson and some other politicians spoke. It’s a shame Robertson, my local MP, didn’t become Labour leader, but it’s good that he has the time and energy to attend events like this. (I know, his sexual orientation would make him less electable in certain parts of the country, even in 2016.) He was probably the most eloquent speaker there.

I had somebody (the sixth person or group) to look at my flat earlier this morning. It helps if I’m there because I can answer questions and build a some kind of rapport (even I can). I expected this place to be snapped up in no time, so the fact that it hasn’t been after nearly a month and that initial frenzy on Trade Me is a bit frustrating. The only people who were keen wanted it for too long and I had nagging doubts about them anyway.

I might − shock, horror − join Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with people when I’m away. If I do join the dark side it’ll only be to post photos and occasional updates of what I’ve been up to.

Update: I have just created a new Facebook account and man it’s creepy. How does their algorithm know that I worked with this person four years ago, and she might, just might, have a connection with Romania? How does it know that I went to an open home five years ago and that guy showed me around? How come it picked him and none of the other real estate agents I dealt with? What made it think that I’d want to “friend” him all these years later? (Your algorithm stuffed up there, didn’t it?) I logged off after five minutes but my creepometer had already hit 9 by then. If Fräulein Müller pops up the next time I visit Facebook…

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

High of 14? Yeah, right

September 8, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was about to write a list of things I’ll miss about Wellington. Top of my list was going to be the weather. Yeah, I know, the weather. In Wellington. When I listen to the 7am weather bulletin, the Wellington forecast is usually bright sunshine with a high of 14. Or torrential horizontal rain and a high of 14. Or nor-westers gusting to 130 k’s and a high of 14. The Cook Strait and rugged landscape otherwise plays havoc with Wellington’s weather patterns, but blissfully, the temperature needle hardly twitches for weeks on end. I was going to say how much I’ll miss that in Romania where the high will deviate a long way from 14 in both directions. But then today happened, the rain, the hail, the snow (yep), the wind that you could hardly stand up in, and as for the high, what high? (That’s what I said in 2009 when I was (mis)diagnosed as being bipolar.)

I gave my last English lesson on Monday. He and his wife have invited me over for dinner next week, which will be the last time I see him, in lieu of a lesson. They’re very pleasant people. He had a good last lesson as we went through three readers. He seemed to be more attentive and I was particularly impressed with his pronunciation of “shelves”.

There are billboards up all over the city as the mayoral election approaches. There are several prominent ones for Jo Coughlan that are made to look like road signs, and have slogans like “Four lanes to the planes” and “Toot for a second tunnel”. My carpool mate and I were wondering how on earth Ms Coughlan pronounces her surname. There are no fewer than seven common pronunciations of -ough in English, as in tough, though, trough, through, thought, thorough and drought. (Just look how close the first six of those words are to one another.) So what is it? Coo-lun? Cow-lun? Coff-lun? Turns out it’s Cog-lun. Different from all seven of the above. Fan-bloody-tastic. I’m not voting for you Ms Coughlan unless you change the pronunciation of your name. You’ve got plenty of options. (Ms Coughlan is Bill English’s sister-in-law. Her father, Tom, played one game for the All Blacks in the fifties. Tom’s brother, who died a few years ago, was at the same home in Timaru that my grandmother spent her final years; I remember he had enormous hands.) I won’t be voting for Jo anyway because I doubt I’ll get the chance before I go away, and even if I do, prioritising the car ahead of public transport is not where I see Wellington’s future.

Language learning - Life :)

Romanian commentary 10: some seismic vocab

September 3, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was woken at 4:40 this morning by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck off East Cape. I felt a rolling motion that lasted a good 20 to 25 seconds. I didn’t get a lot of sleep after that. My carpool mate didn’t feel a thing and didn’t even know there had been a thing to feel. Gah!

Talking of things, Father’s Day is actually a thing that some people make a thing of. Who would have thought? There was me thinking it was just commercialised crap. If I gave my dad a Father’s Day present he’d think I was taking the piss. And he’d be right.

Brexit is back on the agenda after the parliamentary summer recess. I think the process was (and is still being) appallingly handled. The issue of Britain’s EU membership was too complex to be put to a referendum in the first place, both sides lied (though the Leave side did so more blatantly), and I can’t believe they never had a plan or timetable for leaving the EU.

This morning’s earthquake was the same magnitude as the one that hit Canterbury almost six years ago to the day, and at almost the same time. It generated a mini-tsunami, and came hot on the heels of Wednesday’s pretend “exercise” tsunami. Eastern Romania experiences earthquakes fairly regularly. Thirty years ago on Wednesday 150 lives were lost in a 7.1 quake, and in 1977 almost 1600 were killed in a 7.2 quake, mostly in Bucharest. Here is some earthquake vocabulary that I hope I won’t need:

Earthquake: cutremur
To shake: a zgudui
Shock wave: undă de șoc
Aftershock: replică
Fault line: linie de falie
Depth: adâncime
Damage (noun): pagubă
Destruction: distrugere
Struck: lovit
Earth or land: pământ
Crack (noun): crăpătură
Collapsed: prăbușit

Language teaching - Life :) - My big plan

It’s not normal!

August 30, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

A couple of weekends ago my friend from the tennis club came over for dinner. I don’t often host people who aren’t related to me. He brought some weed but I declined since it was only my second day on Citalopram and it didn’t seem wise to muddy the picture at such an early stage. A pity really; I’d only ever tried marijuana a handful of times, all of them in France back in 2001, and the experience was positive. We talked for a long time and I must have been unusually engaged in the conversation because I didn’t look at my watch. At one point he said, “We’re not conventional people.” Last year I was taken aback when someone suggested that I don’t conform to society’s norms and until I stop playing the fitting-in game I’ll continue to be unhappy. Those words hit me hard: people don’t like to be told they’re not normal. But he was dead right. The fitting-in game wears me out and makes me unhappy, even though I only play it at a basic level by, for instance, attending work functions only if there’d be a particular loss of face if I didn’t show up. And I’ve been playing it for decades, at school, at university, and at work, by attempting to be invisible. By trying to fit in I’m in danger of becoming nothing if I don’t act fast.

Not being normal, in any of the forms that can take, isn’t easy. It means you probably didn’t have many friends at school. It means you almost certainly didn’t make the first rugby team at your high school, with the immediate confidence boost that comes with that and all the connections and job opportunities that are likely to accrue even 20, 30, 40 years later. Jobs of any description will be harder to come by and to maintain. Ditto relationships. It means you’re less likely than average to drive a car, to own your own home, to get married, to procreate. The kids you do have are quite likely to have the same problems you do. The house you do have is likely to be poorly insulated and get little sun. (D is probably not the only vitamin you aren’t getting enough of.) It means you’re less likely to vote than the general population (who cares about me anyway?) and if you do vote, the party you vote for probably won’t win. It means you’re likely to suffer from mental health problems, to have trouble with the law, to commit suicide, and to die at a young age. It means that even in 2016, life is generally a bitch and a short bitch at that.

Luckily I was born with a certain facility for maths and for language. I come from a loving family for whom education and employment matter. I learnt (I hope) to be warm and polite, and how not to offend or annoy people. I went to university (though it was far from easy for me socially), I got a good degree, I embarked on a career, I did all the normal stuff. And so I’ve been insulated from many of the bad things in the second paragraph. But I had no foundation to underpin any of that normal stuff – no sense of home, of purpose, of belonging, of attachment to anything. It was no surprise that it all came crashing down. From the moment I moved in, my apartment, spacious and conveniently located though it is, has felt like a monument to a past life that itself was pretty meaningless. In the last few years the insulation has worn thin, the veneer has cracked. Pretending to be normal, to please my parents or society at large, is no longer working. It’s about time I decided to be me instead. (That’s pretty much what I said when I started this blog last October, but it’s as if I forget.)

I’m glad I went back on Citalopram. I have absolutely no problem with taking antidepressants if they’re going to be of benefit to me.

Last night I gave one of my last English lessons. He still struggles with short words but does better with longer ones. Went and want posed problems but different and important were no bother. When I asked him if he knew find, he said “I’m find, thank you.” (I went through a list of words with two final consonant sounds, to try to get him to actually pronounce the ends of words, but had little success there.) He still recognises whole words only; he correctly identified hand and stand, but couldn’t then correctly pronounce land. The short-words-hard, long-words-easier pattern reminded me of my attempt to learn basic Chinese; lots of similar short words became a murky mess in my mind.

I still haven’t got anybody to rent my apartment. A group of three people were keen but only if I would guarantee their tenancy until February 2018 which I wasn’t prepared to do. That’s my biggest hurdle right now.

Life :) - My big plan

Countdown mode

August 29, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

We have four levels of meetings at work. They have various names like group meetings and team meetings but I always forget which is which so in my head I number them 1 to 4. Level 3, the highest level at which dozing off isn’t an option, is always the most unpleasant for me. Today I attended my last ever Level 3 meeting. As usual, my carpool mate began proceedings with a so-called ice-breaker game. My participation in the game involved having to walk around with my eyes shut making cow noises; it’s come to something that I was relieved that “mooo” was as far as things went. The rest of the meeting was taken up with the subject of empowerment. I kept getting flashbacks to a meeting I attended in 2005 on the very same corporate BS topic. Shit, eleven years and what’s changed? I’m so glad I felt empowered enough to break that cycle.

My mum came up here on Wednesday to “sort me out” and left this afternoon. She was extremely helpful with all the cleaning and packing and sorting. We even hired a Rug Doctor; my carpet was dirtier than I realised. Mum and I got on well. She’s supportive of my move to Romania; it helps that she’s travelled extensively herself. The chances that I get myself a proper job over there, meet a nice domnișoara and have a couple of copii, are rather slimmer than Mum thinks.

We popped over to my cousin’s place last night. Bringing up kids these days seems such a pressure-filled venture that I wonder how parents don’t collapse under the weight of it all. My cousin recently texted me about the logistical nightmare of fitting her boys’ football, hockey, swimming and UWH around homework and a whole-class birthday party. The very thought of inviting everybody in my class to my birthday party would have horrified me when I was eight. Oh, and UWH is underwater hockey. If you’re going to be doing swimming and field hockey, why not combine the two I suppose.

I’ve got 14 more days at work and four more weeks in New Zealand. It’s only 39 days until I arrive in Timișoara. I’m now in full-on countdown mode but I’m far less stressed than I was three weeks ago, even if my apartment remains unrented.

Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Bouncing back

August 18, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a difference a week makes. Seven days ago I was in the middle of a meltdown, rolling around on the floor of my apartment, swearing down the phone at some poor bloke in India who was just doing his job, and completely failing in my attempt to just do mine.

Having this time off work has made an enormous positive difference to my mood. Trying to cross items off my to-do list while working full-time was just too much for me. I’d lost sight of what I was even crossing them off for. Now I’ve booked the moving truck, my flat is on TradeMe (it got 600 views in the first 24 hours), and life is manageable once more. I’m breathing properly. I’m walking at my normal pace. I’m sleeping much better. And the Citalopram won’t even have kicked in yet.

Some people at work are clearly energised by being around all those other people. For me it’s all massively de-energising. Making a cup of tea or going to the loo inevitably involves bumping into people, almost literally, and I never know what if anything I’m supposed to say to them. The desk move, which resulted in me seeing those damn people much more often, de-energised me even further. And thanks to the restructure we now have meetings, which are peopley by their very nature, at four levels. Even when I worked at a large insurance company we got by with just three.

There have been plenty of stress factors in 2016 besides work of course. Taking on a flatmate wasn’t my cleverest move. He robbed me of my space, almost a week of sleep, and time to plan my trip and learn the language. Any thoughts of the future were put on hold for those four months; I was operating in pure survival mode. After he moved out we had the Brexit vote which cost me a good deal of money due to the sharp drop in the value of the pound, made me view my country of birth as a harsher, less welcoming place, and put my plans to live in Romania in some doubt. My form on the tennis court has slumped beyond belief, turning an enjoyable afternoon into a chore. It might seem a piffling thing but even having to ditch my car didn’t help me. The old Camry was a bit of a banger but at least it was mine. Having that sense of ownership is really important. Even though I own my apartment, I don’t feel I do.

I got called up to play tennis in a social (but actually reasonably serious) competition last night. As I’ve said before, if you really want to know my mental state at any particular time, put me on a tennis court. In recent months I’ve been flat-footed, dragging myself around the court, forcing myself to play the next point because I haven’t wanted to even be there. Not last night. I made few unforced errors, my concentration was massively improved and I was happy to get involved in long, tactical exchanges which I wouldn’t have had the patience for just a week ago. We won one match and lost one; I’m sure last week we’d have fallen to two heavy defeats. Best of all, I enjoyed it.

I met some friends (a couple) on Monday who I hadn’t seen since late last year. It was 4:30, so I’d normally have been at work. They were out playing Pokémon Go. I invited them in for a cup of tea and they told me how Pokémon had revolutionised their lives, especially hers: she’d had a meltdown that made mine seem like a mere blip on the charts, and has often struggled to venture beyond the four walls of her flat. The Pokémon Go craze has now spread to Romania. In English I hear people say they caught two Pokémon (not Pokémons) but in Romanian the noun is masculine and it has a plural: doi pokemoni. Most imported nouns tend to have the neuter gender, so who decided that pokemon should be masculine and have a plural in -i? It’s all a mystery.

Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Back on the happy pills (I hope)

August 15, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week it all became unmanageable for me. On Wednesday night I was already struggling but picked myself up off the floor to call Barclays in the UK to get a debit card for an account I have over there. I got a female voice-recognition robot. I said “bank card” or something. Ms Robot said “all right then, credit card fraud” and that was obviously serious enough to warrant a real person. Mr Real Person, who from the way he spoke might as well have been a robot anyway, told me that one of my accounts had been cancelled due to inactivity and I’d need to go through a long and complicated process to retrieve the money. I’d have to send this pink form off to some address in Leicester, which he couldn’t pronounce. For whatever reason that sent me off the deep end. It took me a long time to calm down and I didn’t sleep well. This whole year has been a terrible one for sleep.

I nearly stayed at home on Thursday but figured I should keep things as normal as possible. I lasted about an hour at work. My carpool mate drove me home in my car. I was lucky enough to get an appointment with the doctor that afternoon, and I’m back on Citalopram again. That’s the SSRI I took for 7½ years (minus a short gap in the middle) after suffering panic attacks in 2001. The doctor also told me to take the next six days off work.

Wednesday night and Thursday morning had been coming for a while. It was an awful episode and I’m still recovering from it.

The highlight of Friday was dumping several thousand pages of actuarial notes in the recycling bin. I kept just one file for some sort of posterity. I also took some stuff to the tip. Yesterday I saw two friends, one in Petone and one here. They were both very supportive of me. Last night my friend from the tennis club came over. We played table tennis (though not actually a game; he would have thrashed me) and then tried to play squash. We’d hardly got going when I took a tumble and saw stars. I felt quite wobbly and disoriented, as if it wasn’t just the fall but everything else. We got dinner from the Basin Noodle House just before it closed, and chatted for a couple of hours. At 10:05 I looked at my watch and I realised I hadn’t checked the time for 90 minutes. Sometimes I go a whole night without managing that. He talked about his family in Singapore. His father, now a retired lawyer in his early eighties, sounds like a complete bastard.

Today I played bad tennis but won an award for my nine successive straight-set singles wins that now feel like ancient history. I’ve now got an engraved trophy, which is nice − I don’t get trophies every day, but I’ll only be able to keep it for a month. After that I popped over to my cousin’s place, and I’ve always enjoyed that.

After a really shitty week, I’ve managed to get exercise, sunshine and contact with people who I actually enjoy being in contact with. I could hardly have hoped for a better weekend and I’m now much calmer. I’ve now got a whole week to tackle my to-do list.

Life :) - My big plan - Other sports

Shut that door!

August 9, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Before I flew down south I emailed my boss asking for a year’s unpaid leave. Today I got the big NO and on balance I’m glad. My dad always says I should never shut doors, and normally I agree with him, but you know what, I really do want to shut the door on this long chapter of my life. I want to shut the door on nothing happening being the best thing that can happen. I want to shut the door on bluffing and guessing and prevaricating and procrastinating. I want to shut the door on getting through every day in pure survival mode. I want to slam the goddamn door on feeling that I’m a failure and being ashamed of who I am.

My boss would have been fine with the unpaid leave – he seems to like me for some reason – but senior management didn’t approve it. Really I haven’t been performing or looking like I fit in for some months and that’s why my leave wasn’t approved – they wouldn’t want me back. And heck, if I’m going to bloody Romania, I’m not exactly screaming that I want to be there. I’m trying to imagine how the conversation between my boss and his manager two levels above (grandboss? and therefore my great-grandboss?) actually went. Nothing like my boss told me it did, I’m sure.

Today was a shit of a day at work. I felt so depressed, just as I did for much of the long weekend in spite of the beautiful winter scenery and of course seeing my parents who are so good to me. I think I’ll need to take another day off work to knock some items off my to-do list. At least my English lesson tonight went well. I helped him with his CV and we talked about school. He lived in a village and didn’t receive any formal state education after the age of eight. His wife’s experience was quite different: she went to school into her teens and learnt some English.

This morning Natalie Rooney of Timaru won New Zealand’s first medal of these Olympics, a silver in one of the shooting events.

Life :)

Cold snap (and a taste of things to come)

August 7, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I flew into Timaru on Thursday on one of the new, well old, 50-seater planes. Only 14 of us were on it. My parents picked me up and took me to their new place in Moeraki. It’s got sea views and all-day sun with two decks. Mum reckons its value has already gone up by 20 grand or something. They both love the North Otago coastline and it is beautiful there. We awoke on Friday to a blanket of snow. Along the coast to the Kaik we saw dozens of seals but no suggestion of a yellow-eyed penguin. Yesterday we walked to the famous boulders which according to Wikipedia have a bimodal distribution – big ones, little ones, and very few in-between ones. You could see the occasional boulder spawning from the cliff face. There were also some interesting rock formations. When we got back we watched some of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. I always find it interesting when teams walk on out of English-language order. And the Portuguese language, especially Brazilian Portuguese, is gorgeous. It rivals Romanian for me. I’m not all that bothered about the Olympics themselves this time though, and I don’t think I’m alone there. I watched some of the coverage today (my parents have all those Sky pop-up channels) and found footage of Rio street life more interesting than any of the basketball or hockey.

I’m now in Geraldine, in the biggest of my parents’ four properties. I’m surprised by how keen Mum is to sell it. There’s always a lot of property talk whenever I come down this way. I hate it.

We’re in the midst of a decidedly cold snap. Inland here in Geraldine there’s even more snow on the ground than there was in Moeraki. After a lovely crisp cloudless day it’s currently minus 2 degrees. It’ll be more like minus 6 when I catch my 6:55 plane in the morning. Good practice for what I’ll have to contend with in a few months.

Life :) - Other sports

The Mendoza Line

July 30, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Most of the time when you watch baseball it feels like nothing is happening. That’s because it’s hard to hit a baseball travelling at 90 mph or more. You haven’t got a plank to hit it with like you do in cricket, and unlike in cricket, when you do hit the ball (unless you hit it into foul territory but let’s not complicate things here), you have to run 90 feet to first base without being tagged or caught, either of which means you’re out. And if you rack up three strikes, which usually occur as a result of not hitting the ball, you’re out too. In short, due to the shape of the bat and the structure of the game, baseball is stacked heavily against the batter. An average Major League batter will get on base safely only about 26% of the time (this headline statistic in baseball is written as a decimal, .260, and pronounced “two-sixty”). Anything over .300 means you’re pretty handy with a bat in your hand; above .320 and you’re a superstar. Of course for somebody to outperform the overall average, someone else needs to underperform, and someone who did consistently underperform went by the name of Mario Mendoza. The bespectacled Mendoza was an effective defensive player in the late seventies but not too great with the bat. For a few seasons his average hovered around the .200 mark, and when some wag said to another player in the midst of a form slump, “you’ll be sinking below the Mendoza Line if you’re not careful”, the name caught on. The Mendoza Line was (and still is) the threshold separating the mediocre batters from the truly awful. The other significance of the line is that once you drop below it you’re so bad at batting that the rest of your game can’t possibly make up for it. Mendoza finished his career with a .215 average but by that stage the name, meaning a .200 average, had stuck.

The term Mendoza Line is still used in the US, in baseball and in other contexts, such as politics and box-office takings. It can come into play even when there’s isn’t a number involved. When I recently read about the term I thought about my work history. In my insurance work, some of my colleagues weren’t all that nice, and failure to connect with them was in some ways understandable and acceptable. In my current job the people are much more pleasant, yet I still can’t build connections in a way that will help me progress there. If I can’t manage it in this job, I’ll probably never manage it in any team environment anywhere. I’ve now dipped below the line which I’ve spent so much time trying to stay above. It’s about time I put my bat away and played something else.

I should say that I do get on with my work colleagues, at least those in my immediate vicinity, just as I get on with most people. That’s a big part of how I’ve managed to get jobs and not get fired. But building a relationship is something rather different. (I’d say I did build a relationship with the woman I met in Auckland recently. Her and maybe my current carpool mate, and that’s it.)

Yesterday I saw a Pokémon figure in the shape of a pig on my colleague’s phone. I asked if it was a Porkemon. I also had my last performance review with the company. Maybe it was my last anywhere.