Life :)

Life :) - My big plan

Countdown mode

August 29, 2016 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

What’s the frequency?

July 27, 2016 by 0 Comments

It wasn’t a bad day at work. That’s because almost nothing happened. Last week’s desk move is still having an effect on me. Until last Wednesday hardly anybody walked past my desk, because you sort of couldn’t, but now people walk either in front of or behind me at a rate of 55 an hour. Yes, I did a traffic count today from 10 to 10:30 and from 2 to 2:30. This isn’t the first time I’ve counted things at work. I once had a boss who dropped 59 F-bombs in a single day and a colleague who had a DAFA (daily audible fart average) of just over three. I even used to count loo rolls or beer bottles when I overlooked a Pak ‘n’ Save loading bay. All this counting, and the fact that people walking past me at work bothers me enough to measure their frequency, might be a sign that I’m ever so slightly autistic.

On that note, I saw Life, Animated last night at the Paramount. It told the story of Owen, a now 25-year-old autistic man who as a child could only communicate by channelling Disney films, every one of which he’d memorised line-by-line, and who as an adult is going out into the big bad non-Disney world. It was a fantastic film that at times moved me to tears. He hero-worshipped his older brother who at one point tried to talk about sex to him. How do I do that, his big brother wondered. Through Disney porn?! This comment was met with much laughter in the cinema. Although the story was heartwarming I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of other Owens out there who don’t have a Pulitzer Prize-winning father, who might not even come from a loving family, and who certainly won’t get a fraction of the help he did. We were privileged to have the director, Roger Ross Williams, present for a Q&A session.

On Monday I gave another English lesson. My lesson plans rapidly went out the window, not that I minded. Quite the opposite in fact, as I helped my student and his wife buy a car seat for their small daughter on TradeMe. I did get him to talk about the start of his Monday (he said he woke up at 9:30 − lucky him) and because so many verbs with irregular past tenses cropped up I talked a bit about those as well as the regular -ed verbs.

Today is my brother’s 35th birthday. Only 15 months separate us. He and his girlfriend recently bought a house in Poole on the south coast of England. I got to see bits of the inside of their house on FaceTime. They’ve got a cat called Major Tom. (Great name. They’d better not mess with him.) I saw all the “new home” cards on their bench. It would have been nice to have had such cards when I moved into this place. It would be nice to have a cat too, but the body corp rules prohibit them. For that matter it could be nice to have a girlfriend.

I filled in for a social tennis team tonight and got obliterated in both doubles matches, even though my three service games were free of double faults.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Moving day

July 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

I was half-way up the stairs to our office on Wednesday morning when I remembered it was desk move day. The move was a two-hour operation involving physically moving desks. It was effectively a team-building event, and as always happens, the teamy people took over. I ended up in a fairly prominent position with far more foot traffic than before and far less privacy. Luckily I won’t be in that position very long. I have a cousin in Auckland whose workplace enforces daily desk moves. You’re not allowed to sit at the same workstation two days running. That sounds bloody terrifying.

In last Monday’s English lesson we focused on the letter F, or rather the f sound. I explained, with accompanying words and pictures, that the f sound can be written as f, ff, ph or gh. I think I said that ph is always pronounced f, hoping that he wouldn’t be wandering haphazardly through Clapham any time soon, or getting anything upholstered. That would be quite an upheaval. As for the gh combo, I tried to emphasise that f is far from the only pronunciation, without actually mentioning the numerous (and infamous) other possibilities. I think I failed badly. He first attempted to pronounce laugh something like “large”. When I then said the word correctly, he responded with “laffjjj”, and likewise “coffjjj” for cough. I think I got there in the end. Tomorrow I’ll concentrate on final consonant blends; he has a habit of omitting final sounds in speech. As I was driving home from the lesson, the guy who runs the marimba workshop happened to be giving a radio interview. I had two lessons with him. He was talking about an African instrument called an mbira. I thought it was interesting that we have to say an mbira rather than a mbira.

I haven’t mentioned Brexit for a while. Theresa May will be OK, I hope. She looks a safe pair of hands at least. The other contenders all seemed dangerous in their own ways. Still, May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary is questionable to put it mildly. My biggest concern is a lack of effective opposition to the government. Labour are deeply divided. There is now a gaping hole in British politics which a new positive progressive party (like Podemos in Spain) should be able to fill, but alas the electoral system makes the emergence of a new party extremely difficult. Perhaps the best news for me is that Article 50 is now unlikely to be triggered before Christmas, but I wouldn’t assume anything in the current environment. I was reading an article about the Erasmus scheme, the EU student exchange programme that I took advantage of in 2000-01 when I studied in Lyon. Brexit puts UK access to the scheme in doubt beyond 2017. Yet another opportunity potentially lost.

I don’t want to write about Donald Trump because it’s too depressing and too scary. So much fear and hatred. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Trump a 42% chance of becoming president, and those guys know what they’re talking about. That 42% includes a 6% possibility that Trump wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote. We could be looking at a horrifyingly supercharged version of 2000.

I’ve now booked four of my five trains from the UK to Romania. They will hopefully get me as far as Budapest (quite an adventure in itself), and when I’m there I should be able to get a remarkably inexpensive train to Timișoara.

Life :)

Auckland – Part 3

July 19, 2016 by 0 Comments

We had our team meeting at work this morning. They always do the go-round-in-a-circle what-are-you-up-to-this-week lark. A new bloke arrived in our team a month ago. He talked at length about all the juicy stuff he’s already getting involved in. He’s pretty switched on and I can tell he isn’t bluffing. Should we both still be there in three years’ time (completely hypothetically of course), he’ll be 26, I’ll be 39, and he’ll probably be my boss. When it came to my turn I felt embarrassed that nothing had changed from last week, and relieved that I’d only be embarrassed eight more times.

Back to Auckland. On Saturday I took the train to Papakura to see Bazza, a bloke I used to play tennis with. My experiences with this guy on the tennis court were memorable, not always for the right reasons, and I’ve often wondered whether I should write a book about them. He’d just been to an auction for a two-bedroomed brick house opposite that was described in the blurb as being “in dire need of a makeover”. Bazza said that was pretty accurate. It went for $515,000. To call the Auckland housing situation a crisis is no exaggeration. Bazza talked a lot while I tried to watch live coverage of the coup in Turkey on his TV. He watches a lot of TV. He had eight partly used loo rolls in his bathroom – I don’t know if that was more or less than the last time I visited; they might even have been the same ones – and the door was still wedged wide open. He reckons his own house has doubled in value since he moved in seven years ago.

That afternoon I attended the monthly autism group. This was a group I first went to in 2009. I’d read a bit about the condition and figured I wouldn’t mind working in that general area; it was bound to be far more satisfying than anything in the financial sector. I thought that these meetings might give me a foot in the door. As it happened I got on quite well with some of the people there – better than with most so-called neurotypical people – and it was upsetting for me to leave those people behind when I moved to Wellington. As usual they started the session by getting people to talk for up to two minutes on a specific topic. This time the topic was films and documentaries. When it was my turn I expected to be either interrupted or ignored, and as I tried to talk about Searching for Sugar Man I was both. There were some familiar faces to me and a few unfamiliar ones. It was great to meet up with Jen, who basically runs the group and wrote a book on Asperger’s some years ago, and Richard, an old friend from when I lived in Auckland.

I checked out of the hostel on Sunday and took the ferry to Devonport, the last place I lived before moving to Wellington five-and-a-bit years ago. I quite liked the North Shore when I lived there, but on a bus ride through that part of town all I could see was money. I caught up with somebody who lives on an estate near Albany where all the streets are named after birds, and who now seems to be a full-time conspiracy theorist, believing that MH370 and MH17 were the same aircraft. I have no problem with his beliefs, but he didn’t really need to share the ins and outs (or ups and downs) of them with me when I was there. Saying that, he’s a generous guy who dropped me off in town and would have happily taken me to the airport if I hadn’t had a return bus ticket.

Pokémon Go. It’s all go, that’s for sure. I’m positive about it: anything that gets people out and seeing places they wouldn’t otherwise gets my vote. It’s not too dissimilar to a phase I recently went through of photographing street art: I walked down side streets I might otherwise have ignored. The unsettling thing about the game, for me at least, is the speed of its dissemination. I asked my carpool mate about that last Monday. But … but … how does everyone know about it after just four days? In the sixties it took Paul Simon four days to hitchhike from Saginaw to Pittsburgh, which isn’t very far on my wall map, and now it takes that long for millions of people to get hooked on a game. Just how? He simply said “Facebook”. With Facebook and Twitter, four days is the new four months.

Life :)

Auckland – Part 2

July 18, 2016 by 0 Comments

My trip to Auckland was a success. I met everybody I hoped to and a few people I didn’t expect to. As I mentioned in my previous post, Thursday’s catch-up really brought home to me that I need to be myself in spite of all the pressure from society to be someone else.

On Friday morning I met up with an ex-colleague of mine, the only ex-colleague I’m still in touch with. She now works as an actuarial contractor in the city. She still has two exams to go and the road to qualification is even steeper now that she has bigger priorities in the shape of a 2½-year-old daughter. Her first few years after arriving in New Zealand in 2005 were tumultuous to put it mildly, but things appear to have settled down. Her reaction to my move to Romania was extremely positive. She seemed genuinely happy for me.

Later on Friday I caught up with a lady who used to work for Autism NZ in Wellington; she was one of the first people I met here outside work and my cousin’s family. She ran a successful fortnightly meeting for people at the milder end of the spectrum. The attendance at these groups was relatively small, conversation bounced around madly between completely unrelated topics, and nobody seemed to mind (if anything these wild changes of tack were encouraged). We even had the occasional show-and-tell, such as the time somebody brought in the output of a 3-D printer: bread tags as I recall (this was couple of years before the first 3-D-printed gun). Although I was undiagnosed, these meetings gave me a safe but engaging environment every other Monday. Alas, the facilitator moved to Auckland in early 2012 and everything else about the group, including the clientele, changed too. The ex-facilitator, who I would certainly now call a friend, picked me up from New Lynn station; as we walked from the station to her car we were greeted by a so-called cloud sculpture overhead, but I can’t ever remember seeing a cloud in the shape of a cock and balls. Apparently it even lights up at night. It reminded me of a work request I got recently for a plan of all the services in an unusually-shaped area highlighted in fat marker pen. Two presses of the zoom-in button later I had an I-wish-sized appendage stretching across my screen. Changing the subject, I had lunch at my friend’s place. Their house and garden look amazing without being in any way ostentatious. It was the attention to detail that got me. I wonder if interior (and exterior) design is something you either have talent for or you don’t. She clearly does, and has put in considerable time and effort on top. Her sister-in-law was also there − she was off sick − and the three of us had a good chat.

I then saw Fuocoammare, a documentary film set on the island of Lampedusa, some distance from the main island of Sicily. Many African immigrants make their way to Lampedusa by boat, and sadly thousands have died attempting the journey. The film was something of an eye-opener. It was part of the film festival, and would you believe, they’ll be showing not one but two Romanian films (which I expect to be eye-openers too).