grubby metaphores

i can't be bothered rifling around for them. 

this year, it is simple. i am getting my mental health sorted out far better than i have this year. my head's stayed above water, yeah.  i've had no major breakdowns, no complete moments of utter self destruction, but the lapping feelings of misery are getting more and more regular. i wake up and i cannot move.  i cannot fucking move. i sit up to try and leave, and every bone in my body is begging me to lie down again, and hide, HIDE hide, don't LEAVE the room, don't leave your house, just close your eyes.  if i push it, my brain starts pushing back angrily with a constant influx of internal monologue.  it's a stream of hate and loathing, and it sounds like it's not my voice.  then i doze.  throughout the day, and night, i'll be awake for patches, but unable to read more than a few chapters of anything, and numb to the point of apathy. i don't even care i am missing work. i don't care i am losing money. i don't care i am paralyzed here. i'll have mild aural hallucinations - voices speaking to me just out of what i can hear - and if i try to do anything much, i feel as though i am being flayed. 

i've had enough.  i'm getting a full bipolar assessment done at the black dog institute. 

the mania is fine. the mania is delicious. the mania is also really fucking destructive and needs to be managed because it's the Other Fucking Side of this.

i've also drawn the curtains on a four month relationship.  this makes me achingly tired, because i stupidly, optimistically, thought that this time, it could be someone i may be able to start a life with. but not.  and that's ok, i know, but i feel older and older, and more and more tired and unsure of what i want, apart from someone to walk with me and hold my hand when it's cold outside.

more reading. go team

perhaps this is more indicative of my desire to procrastinate?  i really fucking hate writing assignments.

i fond this book amazingly pleasing in a way i find hard to define.  i felt fond and warm and sometimes, a bit horrified.

the narrative was a bit too loose in a way that seemed a bit too tricksy, but that's more a personal preference; i like tight narratives, and not cross sections sliced out and put under the microscope. i feel that i only got to know little fragments of Leah, but despite that, i loved her in a way i don't tend to usually love characters. it was a damp and heavy sort of book at times, but the writing, if not the narrative, was amazingly tightly polished.


i liked it more than i like a lot of the new young shiny things that i tend to think are too much glaze and not enough solidity. it was a book that makes me think i might consider buying other things by the writer. but it didn't change me. i think about this, verses something like 'gilead' which comes in and sucks you dry and ecstatic and the narrative and the writing fit so incredibly...

but yeah. i finished it, happily, and felt i was glad for reading it.
    

Book Time! 'one dimensional woman'

One Dimensional Woman (Zero Books)

i'll admit i blatantly stole this idea off another blogger whose name i have already forgotten. but i like the self shots with the book.

Now - my main critique of this was the fact that it was .... too short.  yeah. this is not something i normally find - i adore brevity in books, especially about ideas - but i don't feel things were... fleshed out as much as they could have been and as much as i would have liked them to be. but, it was a great start.

a lot of major issues with contemporary feminism, and porn, and the analysis of porn, capitalism, feminism, and the notion of 'choice' were brilliantly discussed. but, the thing i often like in feminist texts is the personal - and the lack of this was a bit frustrating - when discussing forms that post-contemporary porn may take that remove it from the troubling place it is in, she's not addressing issues in the porn industry, or the individuals who work in it - she discusses the work as an abstract.

and a pet peeve of mine - the discussion of pornography, but only touching the edges of her darker sister, prostitution. i think when discussing sex and commerce, and the enactment of sex as a commercial transaction, failing to look at least passingly, or acknowledge that obvious space and the fact that porn provides an image of sex, while prostitution is the purchase of time, flesh and some sort of physical intimacy - a far more explicit transaction, is an oversight.


and Oh how it is raining. oh how good it is.  i just want to dive into the sound and never come out. i dread it receding back, and clouds parting. i just want rain rain rain, all over my flesh tone, and wrinkling my toes in my shoes.