My big plan

My big plan

Out of there!

September 22, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Dad flew up to Wellington last Friday. We spent the weekend packing and cleaning and vacuuming and shoehorning items into the car in the teeming, unremitting rain. On Sunday we had two inches. The staff at Countdown were extremely helpful in getting us extra banana boxes. It’s amazing how much crap (and it is mostly crap) I’ve accumulated over the years. The van and trailer arrived at 7:20pm on Monday. Dad and I helped the driver and his younger assistant shift all the bulky items. They didn’t hang around. We turned up at the Bluebridge ferry terminal at 10:30 and boarded shortly after midnight. This feels like the start of my trip. We had a cabin which, with a loo and a hot shower, surpassed our (admittedly terrible) expectations. Although I was cold I must have managed at least four hours’ sleep, interrupted by the safety announcements as we left port at half-two. We got a wake-up call at half-five and were off the ferry by about 6:20. I don’t think Dad had slept a wink so I did most of the driving. We stopped at Blenheim (for petrol and a coffee and muffin each), Amberley (for tea and some chips) and Ashburton (for more petrol) before arriving at my parents’ place in Geraldine at 1:40. We just had time for a cup of tea before the van arrived on the stroke of two. Dad was cursing as my almost valueless crap kept filling up his garage space. My brother has already done his bit by palming off army boots and the like. My chest of drawers got damaged on the way; I wish now that I’d left that and the bookcase in storage in the basement. I paid $920 to have my freight delivered, little over half of what some other companies quoted me, so I can have few complaints. But moving is stressful.

That guy did apply to rent out my apartment and I happily accepted. He moved in yesterday so my place is already earning money. What a massive relief that is. My new tenant has spent the last eleven years working for an engineering consultancy in Auckland and has just taken a senior position in Wellington at the same company. His tenancy is for a relatively short term, until 19th February. I expect my property manager to bill me for this, that and the next thing over the next five months. The chair of our body corporate emailed me in her usual pompous style to say that they wish to move “imminently and aggressively” on seismic strengthening. I just hope the movement isn’t so imminent and aggressive that my tenant or his immediate successor will have to vacate the flat. God, I’ve hated the whole business of owning property and dealing with people who deal with property. I’m not cut out for it or in any way enthused by it.

Friday was my last day at work, where I was appreciated as a person more than I realised. My boss just about wrote an essay on my leaving card. I should try and keep in touch with him because you just never know, but really, could I face all those performance reviews and meetings and games? There was a remuneration review just before I left, and people complained about their derisory pay rises. One of my colleagues said she should have been rated as “achieving” rather than “growing” or “developing”. Hell, you’re 54. I’m buggered if I’m going to get a school-style report card telling me I’m growing when I’m 54. September has been a huge month for people leaving the company.

My flight to London leaves Christchurch on Tuesday.

Life :) - My big plan

Pretty vacant

September 16, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I still haven’t got anyone to rent out my flat, and time is getting pretty damn short for me. It wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed my property manager had changed the ad to say it had two bedrooms rather than three without telling me. I told her what I thought of that. She’d received some feedback that one of the rooms was too small. And anyway, as I realised yesterday, the advert was crap. Really, really crap. That’s why thousands of people were looking at the ad but not liking what they saw. The lead photos were of the outside of the apartment, the interior photos gave no sense of spaciousness, the major selling points were omitted from the blurb or relegated to near the bottom, and if a student of English had written it, it would have been dripping with red ink by the time I’d finished with it. On that last point, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I never said anything. I completely rewrote the ad for my manager; it now includes the dimensions of the bedrooms so nobody can have any complaints. I asked her to take some more photos. And perhaps most importantly I dropped the rent by $25 a week. The good news is that someone who viewed the flat almost a month ago has expressed interest now that the rent has been lowered.

On Sunday I played a singles match. So much spin of all varieties to contend with. I won the first set 6-2 − a slightly flattering score; it was really a case of me winning the important points. But I really struggled after that, losing the last two sets 6-1, 6-2. At one stage I lost nine games in a row; at least from 5-0 down in the final set I salvaged two games and some respectability. The whole match was done and dusted in 65 minutes. The main positive I took from the loss was that I had no trouble getting to the ball − I’ve got my energy levels back. It was what happened after I got to the ball that was the problem. I thought I’d done tennis for the foreseeable future but I now have to play one final match on Saturday, a rematch against the guy I recently beat from match point down.

On Monday my student and his wife made dinner for both me and his wife’s tutor who comes from America. After soup to start, the main dish was big on seafood including squid. The American tutor (who will still be teaching my student’s wife) has a much stronger bond with her student than I had with mine, and helps her with many things that aren’t directly language-related. It was great that they invited us over for what I gather was typical food from their part of Myanmar minus most of the spiciness.

On Tuesday I attended a quiz, mainly just to say goodbye to some people.

My dad arrives tomorrow.

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.

Language teaching - My big plan

I won’t be put off…

August 2, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

At the weekend I saw two Romanian movies, Bacalaureat and Sieranevada, as part of the film festival. They hardly showcased Romania’s natural beauty. In fact they could both put anyone off living over there. Sieranevada, which lasted nearly three hours, certainly put me off living in a seventies apartment block in Bucharest, not that I was ever planning to do that anyway. But they both provided a fascinating window on Romanian society: family, religion, politics, corruption, the clash between the modern and the traditional. Here’s a review of Sieranevada in the Guardian.  And here’s a very positive review of Bacalaureat from the same paper.

For a change last night I gave my student a crossword to solve. It was one I’d made myself, with pictures replacing the usual clues. Making even a small 9×9 crossword for a beginner-level student isn’t that easy, simply because your inventory of words is so heavily reduced. It’s very easy to end up in a situation where “abyss”, say, is the only word that fits, and that of course is hopeless. He’d clearly never attempted a crossword before (they wouldn’t work in his native language which doesn’t use an alphabet but rather an abugida) and at times trying to help him solve it was a painstaking exercise.

I’m flying to Timaru on Thursday morning to see my parents. We’ll go straight from the airport to their new(ish) house in Moeraki. When I spoke to them two nights ago they were still feeling the effects of jet lag.

Life :) - My big plan

It’s the pits

July 10, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday I fell into a deep depressive hole and had no real intention of crawling out. Oh god, I have no idea what’s going on at work anymore, I can’t think or concentrate or remember anything and what has happened so many times in the past is happening again. By the afternoon I was dangerous. I wanted to break something and could easily have done so. I got home and everything felt absolutely awful. I lurched from one wall to another, shouting. I sensibly took Wednesday off work and my mood improved during the day. That afternoon I had a complimentary space-age-style eye test (through my AA membership) and everything was fine on that score. I’m lucky to have good eyesight. I had dinner with my carpool mate, who has been so good to me, at the Willis Street night market.

It’s tough at the moment. I have very little and I am even less. This adventure is perhaps my last chance to be something, somebody, and there’s so much to do before I go. The Brexit vote didn’t help. For one thing, I’m poorer to the tune of five figures as a result (I didn’t mention that, did I?) and could have prevented at least some of that loss.

I have to play a singles tennis match tomorrow morning and expect to lose badly. The beauty of tennis is that one-sided matches usually end quickly.

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Motivation

June 30, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t felt great the last few days. I’ve had no motivation to cross off any of the items on my overwhelming to-do list. Some of those items involve making decisions, so yeah, forget it.

I go away in under three months. The very thing that makes going to Romania possible – my complete lack of dependent family or dependent anybody – is what makes it so damn hard. I’m on my own here. But last night my carpool mate and I discussed my list over a drink, and what a useful process that was. Getting people to make decisions and draw timelines is precisely his thing. All the high-fiving and sentences ending in ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ would have been annoying if I didn’t know him better, but I’ve now got some plans in place that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for him. We decided that I’ll travel around Romania for a while to begin with instead of settling immediately in one place, except in the unlikely event that I get a job before I go. I’ll get to know the country much better that way, and besides it should be fun.

The Brexit vote and fallout haven’t helped my mood. The vote to leave the EU has caused political turmoil not seen in Britain since the Second World War. It’s fascinating in a way to see it unfold, but it’s also very upsetting. To see Nigel Farage speak with such pomposity and lack of magnanimity in the European parliament was troubling. To deliberately antagonise the people you’ll be brokering an exit deal with, what was he thinking? It’s like he didn’t care about British people other than himself. Millions of good people voted to leave, but the Leave-supporting politicians all seem bad, evil, despicable people. Millions of good people have nobody fighting their corner anymore.

It beggars belief that no coherent plan for “leave” was set out before the referendum. “Leave the European Union”. That was it. So much mayhem could have been alleviated with some planning. The Scotland referendum was a similar story, and I was thankful that on that occasion they voted for the status quo.

Just to rub it in, England exited Euro 2016 at the hands of Iceland, whose population is roughly that of Wellington. I saw the last quarter-hour of England’s embarrassing 2-1 defeat on the TV at work. I mentioned in my last post that English used to have a separate letter for the th sound. Well Icelandic still does, two in fact. They’re called eth (uppercase Ð, lowercase ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ). Eth is used for the voiced th sound, as in this and that, while thorn is used for the unvoiced th sound, as in thick and thin. Icelandic also has an interesting naming system. Supposedly 80% of Icelandic people believe in elves, and roads have been rerouted so as not to disturb their caves. Björk is from Iceland, as are the band Of Monsters and Men.

I’d dread to think where I’d be if my flatmate was still here.