Over much of the last year, and particularly in the months running up to her exams, my girlfriend had been plagued by "intense" dreams. She rarely remembers all of the details, but had been waking up as exhausted as she was the night before, and often more stressed than the night before. The likeliest cause was the combination of her medication and the heightened stress levels she has been experiencing over the last year or two. She's recently spoken with her GP about the constant tiredness she has been experiencing, and that will now be investigated with a view to determining whether it's a matter of adjusting her medication, or if there's an underlying medical condition which has yet to be diagnosed.
I'd not had any particularly interesting dreams until Friday night, hence the lack of blogging about them, but I had a doozy last night, and it seemed similar to the kinds of intense dreams my girlfriend has had.
Essentially, I woke up within the dream to find myself strapped to some kind of hospital bed. The straps were being released and was told I was 'ready to go', but had no recollection of how I got there in the first place. As I met up with my girlfriend and various family members after leaving the hospital, it slowly transpired that I'd has some kind of breakdown at least a year before. I had been deposited at this hospital by concerned family members, who had described something very wrong with me, and begged one of the doctors to "do something about it". The doctor had confidently assured them that she could "fix me", and my release into my girlfriend's care was the final part of the process.
I had no recollection of any 'therapy', nor the events that had led to my incarceration in the hospital. No-one would tell me anything specific about what had happened - perhaps for fear of undoing the doctor's therapy. Gradually, I was overcome by a creeping fear that some necessary part of me - something that either made me who I am, or that allowed me to do my job effectively - had been taken away, yet I couldn't identify what. I didn't feel incomplete, except that I had at least a year's worth of amnesia, and that alone was enough to start me panicking about returning to 'real life' and work. Much of the time, I was wondering "what if I can't do my job anymore?" and picturing common office situations, trying to remember how I'd have reacted 'before' and figure out how I might react 'now', which just exacerbated the panic.
Waking up 'properly' was a bit weird.
Sunday 21 June 2015
Saturday 20 June 2015
Impulsive? Moi?
Perhaps its a sign of a mid-life crisis (hah - as if being in a relationship with someone 16 years younger than me wasn't evidence enough. Ahem. Joking, obviously) but I seem to be becoming rather more impulsive these days. After work yesterday, I decided - on a complete whim - to experiment with a new route to get to a toy shop that's otherwise been rather frustrating to get to. Located in Friern Barnet, getting to my closest Smyths Toys has previously required a trip via Brent Cross (and, therefore, Toys'R'Us). It occurred to me (quite at random, during the day at work) that the Piccadilly line has a bizarre route through Greater London that eventually almost doubles-back on itself, with Cockfosters actually not that far away from where I live, as the crow flies, despite me living at virtually the opposite end of the line. I work not far from Kings Cross St Pancras, though, which is only about a 20 minute journey from Bounds Green which, as it transpires, is only about a 20 minute walk from the Friern Barnet Retail Park. Leaving a little early on Friday, I decided to try the journey, to see how it would go, and to see if I could get anything cool while I was there (obviously because it's my niece's birthday soon, and I fully intend to shower her with TransFormers again, not so I could load up on plastic crack myself).
As it turns out the route is almost annoyingly simple, and the walk from Bounds Green is quite pleasant compared to the hellish bus rides involved in getting to Brent Cross and then on to Friern Barnet. There's even the possibility that getting back home the Brent Cross route - either picking up the Piccadilly line at Park Royal or the Metro at Wembley - would end up quicker than simply walking back to Bounds Green and hopping back onto the Piccadilly line before it picks up the Central London crowds. That would be vastly more expensive, however, so I elected for the single-train route... Only to realise (after letting three Heathrow trains and one Northfields train to go past) that I could probably shave about 20-30 minutes off the journey time if I switched to the Metro at Kings Cross. And, having had that realisation, the train after mine when I got off to transfer at Kings Cross was, naturally, the Uxbridge service...
Still, I even got a seat on the Metro, and managed to finish my current book - a sort of biography of the American astronaut Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom - on the journey home.
This week has been quite an eye-opener in many ways. I have been surprised, over the past year, by several things I have in common with my boss (penchant for sci-fi, reading Asimov while growing up, listening to rock music, etc.) despite us being very different people (and not in a way that guarantees anything complementary... or complimentary, for that matter) with very different styles of management. This week has shown the entire team that she's not necessarily as incompetent as we have thought, because her second magazine has now been taken on by the editorial team that have always operated her first... and their first month was such an unmitigated disaster that it eventually stumbled to press right at the end of the day after their press day.
What I found bizarre is that, despite the apparent lack of any proofing of the editorial pages at any time before press day, our boss decided to later praise the lead editor's piss poor performance, telling me that he'd done well, for his first crack at the magazine. I have to bear in mind that, for non-work reasons, she wasn't in the best emotional state for a press day, so perhaps she's just being too forgiving... but this editorial team just seem to be getting worse in their attitude toward 'press day'... and, given the lack of noise from our boss yesterday, I'm suspicious that Monday's press day will be similarly abused.
And, on the subject of abuse, just when I was making ready to leave, I had an email from another editor who is 'managing' a client project... and when I say 'managing', I mean that she is merely interfering in the most annoying way possible - there's a third-party designer working on the artwork, I was dealing with the advertising artwork, and my boss was dealing with the print side of things, so quite what she thought she had to do, I have no idea. Nevertheless, it seems that the designer, having received all the advertising from me on time that day, decided to contact her rather than me when it transpired that we were two pages short (and this, after she had contacted me regarding what she thought was an extraneous ad because she hadn't scrolled to the top of the list I sent her). The salesperson who had been working on this project didn't quite know what to make of that initially, but soon realised that she had 'agreed' the additional two pages earlier this week... over a fortnight after we agreed a page total with the designer.
And no-one thought to tell the guy who was dealing with the advertising artwork.
So two extra pages had to be found for the job in the few minutes before the end of the day, simply because this editor got unnecessarily involved at two points in the proceedings, and didn't communicate all the necessary information to all the relevant people.
Last night, the end of a remarkably busy week at work, brought a rather curious 'anthology' dream, which started with a white mouse being loose in my home. Weirdly, 'home' was a blend of my flat and my parents' home, so that my bedroom was actually their back bedroom (the 'guest room' now), my bathroom was seemingly located in my old bedroom (now used by my niece whenever she visits) and certain current furniture was replaced by stuff from my distant memories. The upshot of this section was that this mouse (possibly my girlfriend's pet?) got loose somehow and was intent on coming into the bedroom. I kept batting it out with what seemed to be the wheat sack I stick in the microwave to heat up for my back, and it kept hiding underneath a wardrobe. When my girlfriend announced she needed to get to the toilet, I warned her not to let the mouse in, but get in it did... So I had to bat it out again more vigorously (no real animals were harmed during this dream... I don't think I even disturbed my girlfriend, a notoriously light sleeper).
The next phase was either very brief, or I've forgotten too much to make sense of it because all I can remember is finding little caterpillar things - much like the moth larvae I had in my kitchen a couple of years ago - crawling around part of my toy collection.
To conclude this night of - frankly exhausting - wackiness was a return trip to an exaggerated Perivale Wood. The straw bale visitors' centre was complete... and surrounded by legions of travellers and assorted unwashed folks who wanted to live 'off the grid', as it were. They were rowdy, they had arranged themselves into little streets, like some kind of mediaeval village, some of them were drinking and saluting the hill (or something else in that general direction which I couldn't see)... and they only had three portaloos to service the entire community.
As it turns out the route is almost annoyingly simple, and the walk from Bounds Green is quite pleasant compared to the hellish bus rides involved in getting to Brent Cross and then on to Friern Barnet. There's even the possibility that getting back home the Brent Cross route - either picking up the Piccadilly line at Park Royal or the Metro at Wembley - would end up quicker than simply walking back to Bounds Green and hopping back onto the Piccadilly line before it picks up the Central London crowds. That would be vastly more expensive, however, so I elected for the single-train route... Only to realise (after letting three Heathrow trains and one Northfields train to go past) that I could probably shave about 20-30 minutes off the journey time if I switched to the Metro at Kings Cross. And, having had that realisation, the train after mine when I got off to transfer at Kings Cross was, naturally, the Uxbridge service...
Still, I even got a seat on the Metro, and managed to finish my current book - a sort of biography of the American astronaut Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom - on the journey home.
This week has been quite an eye-opener in many ways. I have been surprised, over the past year, by several things I have in common with my boss (penchant for sci-fi, reading Asimov while growing up, listening to rock music, etc.) despite us being very different people (and not in a way that guarantees anything complementary... or complimentary, for that matter) with very different styles of management. This week has shown the entire team that she's not necessarily as incompetent as we have thought, because her second magazine has now been taken on by the editorial team that have always operated her first... and their first month was such an unmitigated disaster that it eventually stumbled to press right at the end of the day after their press day.
What I found bizarre is that, despite the apparent lack of any proofing of the editorial pages at any time before press day, our boss decided to later praise the lead editor's piss poor performance, telling me that he'd done well, for his first crack at the magazine. I have to bear in mind that, for non-work reasons, she wasn't in the best emotional state for a press day, so perhaps she's just being too forgiving... but this editorial team just seem to be getting worse in their attitude toward 'press day'... and, given the lack of noise from our boss yesterday, I'm suspicious that Monday's press day will be similarly abused.
And, on the subject of abuse, just when I was making ready to leave, I had an email from another editor who is 'managing' a client project... and when I say 'managing', I mean that she is merely interfering in the most annoying way possible - there's a third-party designer working on the artwork, I was dealing with the advertising artwork, and my boss was dealing with the print side of things, so quite what she thought she had to do, I have no idea. Nevertheless, it seems that the designer, having received all the advertising from me on time that day, decided to contact her rather than me when it transpired that we were two pages short (and this, after she had contacted me regarding what she thought was an extraneous ad because she hadn't scrolled to the top of the list I sent her). The salesperson who had been working on this project didn't quite know what to make of that initially, but soon realised that she had 'agreed' the additional two pages earlier this week... over a fortnight after we agreed a page total with the designer.
And no-one thought to tell the guy who was dealing with the advertising artwork.
So two extra pages had to be found for the job in the few minutes before the end of the day, simply because this editor got unnecessarily involved at two points in the proceedings, and didn't communicate all the necessary information to all the relevant people.
Last night, the end of a remarkably busy week at work, brought a rather curious 'anthology' dream, which started with a white mouse being loose in my home. Weirdly, 'home' was a blend of my flat and my parents' home, so that my bedroom was actually their back bedroom (the 'guest room' now), my bathroom was seemingly located in my old bedroom (now used by my niece whenever she visits) and certain current furniture was replaced by stuff from my distant memories. The upshot of this section was that this mouse (possibly my girlfriend's pet?) got loose somehow and was intent on coming into the bedroom. I kept batting it out with what seemed to be the wheat sack I stick in the microwave to heat up for my back, and it kept hiding underneath a wardrobe. When my girlfriend announced she needed to get to the toilet, I warned her not to let the mouse in, but get in it did... So I had to bat it out again more vigorously (no real animals were harmed during this dream... I don't think I even disturbed my girlfriend, a notoriously light sleeper).
The next phase was either very brief, or I've forgotten too much to make sense of it because all I can remember is finding little caterpillar things - much like the moth larvae I had in my kitchen a couple of years ago - crawling around part of my toy collection.
To conclude this night of - frankly exhausting - wackiness was a return trip to an exaggerated Perivale Wood. The straw bale visitors' centre was complete... and surrounded by legions of travellers and assorted unwashed folks who wanted to live 'off the grid', as it were. They were rowdy, they had arranged themselves into little streets, like some kind of mediaeval village, some of them were drinking and saluting the hill (or something else in that general direction which I couldn't see)... and they only had three portaloos to service the entire community.
Sunday 14 June 2015
Not a Dinosaur
And so, twenty two years after the original and a full fourteen after the third movie, we finally get another movie in the series where scientists resurrect the dinosaurs by mixing-and-matching their DNA with those of contemporary animals, and no-one sees the inevitable bloodbath coming.
It's actually a funny thing: you get movies where science is held up as a sort of 'new God', scientists are the wisest and most benevolent people in the story, and where they're responsible for everything good that happens in a world which is being torn apart by superstition, and then you get movies where, for example, scientists can say, for example, "Oh, we gave this dinosaur some cuttlefish DNA for this reason, but never dreamed it would inherit that cuttlefish trait as well!"
It's also funny that, in literally creating a new dinosaur, through more extreme genetic engineering than was used to bring back the dinosaurs in the first place, they have created a film which is a damning indictment of Hollywood sequels generally: everything has to be bigger, cooler... and with more teeth.
Before I get too far into what seems to be slagging the film off, I would like to say that I really enjoyed it - the dinosaurs (and the locations) are, with a couple of exceptions, every bit as spectacular as they were back in 1993, when I saw the first movie. It was nice to see a sequel that properly acknowledged the passing of time (someone mentions that it's taken over 20 years to get the Jurassic World theme park off the ground), and the setting in a fully-functional theme park populated by dinosaurs made it slightly more compelling, for me, than that of the 'proof of concept' setting in the first three movies... However, given that Jurassic World is operating in the same old location as Hammond's original Jurassic Park, one has to wonder how they managed to build a theme park on an island already populated with dinosaurs.
The film presented more questions than answers throughout, as if conscious that it's not really a movie in its own right, merely part of a series which is, as the old television cliffhanger goes, "To Be Continued".
The casting was excellent, but there were a couple of occasions when Owen Grady/Chris Pratt's look of surprise/shock veered a little bit too far into comedy mugging (then again, this was a kids' movie - rated 12A - so a lot of it was pitched toward lightening the atmosphere), but he was otherwise a believable and sympathetic character, particularly in his dealings with his four Velociraptors. Bryce Dallas Howard played a fairly stereotypical character - Jurassic World's operations manager Claire Dearing, very efficient at her job, terrible with her family - pretty well, and had some good comedy moments, my favourite being the bit where she pulls her blouse out of her skirt to tie it round her waist, rolls up her sleeves and poses with her hands on her hips, only to be asked why she'd done that and, looking rather put out, responds that it means she's ready to go. It's also worth noting that her character apparently survives the entire film wandering around in all sorts of terrain in high heeled shoes. Never once slips, falls, breaks a heel. Surely a first?
There were some pretty massive plot holes and character inconsistencies, but the film moved along fast enough that they didn't have much of an impact. There seemed to be several subplots, too, though resolution will evidently be happening in a later movie (or not at all, in the case of the park's slightly dodgy financier, Simon Masrani). Probably my biggest gripe about the film would be the unnecessarily protracted demise of 'the assistant' (played with a delightfully plummy English accent by Merlin's Katie McGrath). It was obvious the moment she got picked up by one of the flying dinosaurs that she was done for... but watching it happen so slowly, with so many moments where she might have escaped her fate, just seemed like a kind of torture porn.
On the subject of the flying dinosaurs, I felt they were the only special effects that didn't convince: some looked like something out of How To Train Your Dragon, others looked like the sort of flappy rubber thing you'd have seen in a 1970s Hammer Horror movie.
The trouble with making a sequel to such a phenomenal movie after such a long time is that, in spite of their many attempts, there's no way to match the 'wow' factor of the original. The grand confrontation at the end of the movie was fairly predictable (as was its outcome), but it mostly left me thinking that Jurassic World had given us the Godzilla movie we all wanted out of the 2014 movie...
It's actually a funny thing: you get movies where science is held up as a sort of 'new God', scientists are the wisest and most benevolent people in the story, and where they're responsible for everything good that happens in a world which is being torn apart by superstition, and then you get movies where, for example, scientists can say, for example, "Oh, we gave this dinosaur some cuttlefish DNA for this reason, but never dreamed it would inherit that cuttlefish trait as well!"
It's also funny that, in literally creating a new dinosaur, through more extreme genetic engineering than was used to bring back the dinosaurs in the first place, they have created a film which is a damning indictment of Hollywood sequels generally: everything has to be bigger, cooler... and with more teeth.
Before I get too far into what seems to be slagging the film off, I would like to say that I really enjoyed it - the dinosaurs (and the locations) are, with a couple of exceptions, every bit as spectacular as they were back in 1993, when I saw the first movie. It was nice to see a sequel that properly acknowledged the passing of time (someone mentions that it's taken over 20 years to get the Jurassic World theme park off the ground), and the setting in a fully-functional theme park populated by dinosaurs made it slightly more compelling, for me, than that of the 'proof of concept' setting in the first three movies... However, given that Jurassic World is operating in the same old location as Hammond's original Jurassic Park, one has to wonder how they managed to build a theme park on an island already populated with dinosaurs.
The film presented more questions than answers throughout, as if conscious that it's not really a movie in its own right, merely part of a series which is, as the old television cliffhanger goes, "To Be Continued".
The casting was excellent, but there were a couple of occasions when Owen Grady/Chris Pratt's look of surprise/shock veered a little bit too far into comedy mugging (then again, this was a kids' movie - rated 12A - so a lot of it was pitched toward lightening the atmosphere), but he was otherwise a believable and sympathetic character, particularly in his dealings with his four Velociraptors. Bryce Dallas Howard played a fairly stereotypical character - Jurassic World's operations manager Claire Dearing, very efficient at her job, terrible with her family - pretty well, and had some good comedy moments, my favourite being the bit where she pulls her blouse out of her skirt to tie it round her waist, rolls up her sleeves and poses with her hands on her hips, only to be asked why she'd done that and, looking rather put out, responds that it means she's ready to go. It's also worth noting that her character apparently survives the entire film wandering around in all sorts of terrain in high heeled shoes. Never once slips, falls, breaks a heel. Surely a first?
There were some pretty massive plot holes and character inconsistencies, but the film moved along fast enough that they didn't have much of an impact. There seemed to be several subplots, too, though resolution will evidently be happening in a later movie (or not at all, in the case of the park's slightly dodgy financier, Simon Masrani). Probably my biggest gripe about the film would be the unnecessarily protracted demise of 'the assistant' (played with a delightfully plummy English accent by Merlin's Katie McGrath). It was obvious the moment she got picked up by one of the flying dinosaurs that she was done for... but watching it happen so slowly, with so many moments where she might have escaped her fate, just seemed like a kind of torture porn.
On the subject of the flying dinosaurs, I felt they were the only special effects that didn't convince: some looked like something out of How To Train Your Dragon, others looked like the sort of flappy rubber thing you'd have seen in a 1970s Hammer Horror movie.
The trouble with making a sequel to such a phenomenal movie after such a long time is that, in spite of their many attempts, there's no way to match the 'wow' factor of the original. The grand confrontation at the end of the movie was fairly predictable (as was its outcome), but it mostly left me thinking that Jurassic World had given us the Godzilla movie we all wanted out of the 2014 movie...
Wednesday 3 June 2015
Sleeptalking
My girlfriend has told me that I'll occasionally talk in my sleep (nothing entirely coherent, by all accounts, but she admits that she's normally half asleep when it happens) and occasionally snore (though apparently not as much since we've had our new mattress and a couple of new pillows). Meanwhile, she fidgets like crazy in her sleep, and occasionally twitches quite violently. Only a few days ago, she woke up in the early hours of the morning with an intense cramp in her leg, quite probably due to one such muscular spasm.
But nothing could have prepared me for what happened in the early hours of this morning.
She woke me up... by giggling.
I should put this in some context: Over the last year, she's been having a terrible time with the first year of her Open University degree. She'd purposely selected some quite random subjects (Mental Health, Geology, Archaeology, Planetary Science) as a break from the Physics she'd spent the last few years focussed on - kind of a clean break from her second attempt at studying at Imperial College, which had done her mental health and self-confidence no favours at all. Trouble was, the OU turned out to be not much better. The subjects were not as interesting as she'd hoped, and the way her progress was assessed seemed at odds with what little I know of higher education: everything seemed to want her focussed on the course materials, not researching beyond it. This led to frustration, and difficulty keeping her attention on the work, which led to anxiety about "not doing enough", which then exacerbated the problems which had given rise to the anxiety, thus exacerbating the anxiety itself.
It has been quite horrible to watch at times, with spasms, much agitated shaking of her hands, recoiling from any sudden movements - even attempts at hugs - self-recrimination, stammering, aversion to making decisions, constant, heart-breaking repetition of "I'm sorry"... basically, a whole shopping list of depression/anxiety symptoms... but I've done what I can to keep her calm, to encourage her, and to give her the benefit of my dubious, uneducated 'wisdom', particularly my philosophy that one learns far more from one's failures than from any number of successes, and so it's always best to embrace a failure and use it to one's advantage in every way is possible. And throughout the year, her grades have either stayed more or less stable, or improved markedly thanks to the feedback she's received on her assignments.
But as the exams drew closer, the anxiety really took hold. One of the side effects of her anxiety medication has been some exceptionally vivid (and occasionally quite nasty) dreams. Over the last couple of months, things have been so bad that she wakes up more exhausted that she was the night before - which, naturally, makes studying harder, which ramps up the anxiety even further - and, having virtually weaned herself off caffeine, she got straight back into drinking tea, coffee and cola just to keep herself awake during the day.
Her first exam was yesterday and, as far as we know, it went OK. She didn't have a panic attack, she was able to write, certainly completing a sufficient quantity of text, so it's only the quality that remains to be seen. While very little of the stuff she was hoping for came up, she was able to remember the stuff that did come up... and she hasn't seemed overly stressed since, aside from the odd twitch.
So when I was woken up in the early hours of the morning by the sound of her giggling, I was curious to know what was funny. I don't remember her exact response, but the gist of it was "It's a Google Mail template... No, no, not GMail..." with that last bit accompanied by the familiar agitated shaking of her hands. Being half asleep, I struggled to make sense of this utterance but, having thought it through, I realised it didn't make any sense, so I asked her if she had been laughing about something that happened in a dream.
"No," she said, most insistently, "I don't think so." And with that, she was fast asleep.
I asked her about it when I got home from work today, and she had no recollection of the incident whatsoever...
But nothing could have prepared me for what happened in the early hours of this morning.
She woke me up... by giggling.
I should put this in some context: Over the last year, she's been having a terrible time with the first year of her Open University degree. She'd purposely selected some quite random subjects (Mental Health, Geology, Archaeology, Planetary Science) as a break from the Physics she'd spent the last few years focussed on - kind of a clean break from her second attempt at studying at Imperial College, which had done her mental health and self-confidence no favours at all. Trouble was, the OU turned out to be not much better. The subjects were not as interesting as she'd hoped, and the way her progress was assessed seemed at odds with what little I know of higher education: everything seemed to want her focussed on the course materials, not researching beyond it. This led to frustration, and difficulty keeping her attention on the work, which led to anxiety about "not doing enough", which then exacerbated the problems which had given rise to the anxiety, thus exacerbating the anxiety itself.
It has been quite horrible to watch at times, with spasms, much agitated shaking of her hands, recoiling from any sudden movements - even attempts at hugs - self-recrimination, stammering, aversion to making decisions, constant, heart-breaking repetition of "I'm sorry"... basically, a whole shopping list of depression/anxiety symptoms... but I've done what I can to keep her calm, to encourage her, and to give her the benefit of my dubious, uneducated 'wisdom', particularly my philosophy that one learns far more from one's failures than from any number of successes, and so it's always best to embrace a failure and use it to one's advantage in every way is possible. And throughout the year, her grades have either stayed more or less stable, or improved markedly thanks to the feedback she's received on her assignments.
But as the exams drew closer, the anxiety really took hold. One of the side effects of her anxiety medication has been some exceptionally vivid (and occasionally quite nasty) dreams. Over the last couple of months, things have been so bad that she wakes up more exhausted that she was the night before - which, naturally, makes studying harder, which ramps up the anxiety even further - and, having virtually weaned herself off caffeine, she got straight back into drinking tea, coffee and cola just to keep herself awake during the day.
Her first exam was yesterday and, as far as we know, it went OK. She didn't have a panic attack, she was able to write, certainly completing a sufficient quantity of text, so it's only the quality that remains to be seen. While very little of the stuff she was hoping for came up, she was able to remember the stuff that did come up... and she hasn't seemed overly stressed since, aside from the odd twitch.
So when I was woken up in the early hours of the morning by the sound of her giggling, I was curious to know what was funny. I don't remember her exact response, but the gist of it was "It's a Google Mail template... No, no, not GMail..." with that last bit accompanied by the familiar agitated shaking of her hands. Being half asleep, I struggled to make sense of this utterance but, having thought it through, I realised it didn't make any sense, so I asked her if she had been laughing about something that happened in a dream.
"No," she said, most insistently, "I don't think so." And with that, she was fast asleep.
I asked her about it when I got home from work today, and she had no recollection of the incident whatsoever...
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