At this rate I’ll have to do another redesign and make the page come out fluffy pink with hearts.

Ok, I will stop obsessing about the possibility of me falling in love. Or, at any rate, I will keep obsessing but try not to write about it constantly and at least intersperse the writings on that subject with some other, less sickly sweet, thoughts.

forelsket, adj. in love, having a crush. The prefix for- is common in Norwegian, you take a verb and add for- in front and hey presto: a brand new verb requiring an object (“� forelske seg”), usable, in the past tense, as an adjective. I’m having problems defining ‘for-‘. Just like with many English prefixes, the word without a prefix either means something else or doesn’t really mean anything much at all. You can be elsket, but it means “loved”, a passive condition rather than an active one. You can be forbauset (surprised), but not “bauset”, come to think of it, you can’t really be “prised” either, can you? Well, I mean, you can, but it’s got a different meaning entirely.

Anyhow, we also have forlovet, which means engaged, the root being pretty obvious, “� love” means “to promise”. Then there’s the next step in the process, but here the prefix disappears and we have gift, married. Due to some entymological mishap, gift also means poison, and forgiftet means poisoned. So we have the well-used pun: “Forelsket, forlovet, forgiftet”. Life’s natural progression.

When I mentioned that thinking about ex-boyfriends would probably ruin my concentration at karate, I hadn’t thought about the possible effect thinking about potential future boyfriends.

My left foot was a good excuse, but forgetting hand-movements is a bit hard to explain away – as is going in completely the wrong direction.

I should probably also have touched wood when I was so smug about not being corrected quite so often as the others. Oh, well. You’ve gotta laugh, really.

There was agreement yesterday that “Gee wiz” is a pretty nifty expression. I thought it would make a good domain name, but suspected I might not be the first to think so. I therefore went serendipity surfing, I would suggest you refrain from following my example, especially if someone else is around to see your screen.

That is all.

Voice in my head: whaserfaces crooning Dream (which the conversation yesterday was prompted by – in case you wondered why anyone should suddenly take to talking about “gee wiz”)

Rereading my previous post, I took to wondering: Are you sitting there wondering “Is she talking about me?” by any chance?

Well, maybe I am. Maybe I am not.

Just for the record: At least three people spring to mind as equally likely candidates – unless you’re inside my head in which case they are all three very unlikely – and you don’t necessarily know each other at all. So though you may wish to juggle any “facts” I mention in order to figure out if I might be talking about you, do not, at this point, take anything for granted. Once I make up my own mind (or think I have made it up) I will let you know, and give you a chance to react whichever way you like. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the friendship I’m offering, please. Roses, candlelit dinners and limousines will be appreciated, but have very little real bearing on the issues at stake here – for now (possibly for ever) all I really want is your company.

I just thought I’d mention it. Whereas having people swooning at my feet is flattering and all to the good, having people assuming that I am swooning at their feet is somewhat less desireable.

Whatever.

Voice in my head: definitely Avril Lavigne now, singing “If I could say what I want to say, I’d say I wanna blow you away, be with you every night. Am I squeezing you too tight?” which is silly, because that is not what I want to say at all.

Typical, isn’t it? Here I am, writing a long entry on why I haven’t been writing much and probably won’t be writing much in the near future and then with no warning I break out all rambly and verbose and feel like carrying on this odd conversation with the sometimes polyphonic but mostly unresponding-like-a-wall entity that is “y’all”. To whom, precisely, am I talking? Do I really want to know? Does it really matter? If it matters, does the fact that it matters actually matter?

I must be coming down with something.

Or is Jane’s RL friend (friend? Enemy? Significant other?) correct, is this not communication? Actually, it is communication. All writing is communication, though a lot of it is the writer communicating with him/herself. This blog, however much it’s me talking to myself, is undisputably also communication with other people. I know for a fact that people read this. In some cases I even know who my readers are. The rest of you: you’re very welcome (though I do like comments…) When I write, I may not write for a specific reader, or rather, the reader I write for is not actually a real-life person but a sort of conglomerate of several, known and unknown, but I am still conscious of the specific readers I know about (not to mention the ones that may drop in as a result of some specific searches). So you could say that some of this is like e-mail, written with a certain person or certain people in mind – or an e-mail to a mailing list, if you will, private and public at the same time. Other parts are more like a message in a bottle, thrown to the winds for whomever happens to pick it up to read.

To be honest (odd phrase, really, it sort of suggests that I have not been honest so far, which is not strictly true), I don’t really care whether this is communication or not. I feel like writing, so I do. Now for the thing I was intending to ramble on about:

I have been contemplating ex-boyfriends and near-but-never-quite-boyfriends lately, and re-analyzing what went wrong with what I thought I was feeling. I have a recurring problem with falling in love with love – when it happens, the person in question is more or less accidental, it could be any decent, available bloke that happens to be around at the time. Which is the problem. Not only do I mess up my own emotional life by convincing myself that I’m feeling more than I really am, but I mess up other people as well. Which is not nice. As I think I’ve mentioned, I tend to end up not liking myself very much for a while. I’ve also lost some (potential) good friends that way, which is definitely not good.

The pertinent question being, obviously, am I doing it again? A: Probably. Q: Am I actually doing the “sensible” thing and concentrating on the friendship part and “see what happens”? A: Unlikely. Q: Will I, again, try to hurry things along a path they were not meant to take? A. In all probablility. Q: Will I over-analyse everything? A. Indubitably. Q: Despite over-analysing, will I still end up in a “what the hell was I thinking?” situation? A: Beyond all reasonable doubt.

Q: Knowing all that, is there anything I can do to behave more sensibly? A: We’ll see…

For all I know it’s an irrelevant point anyway, I think he’s available, but he may not be. He may be married, for all I know. He may be gay (aren’t all the best men gay?). He may be sworn to celibacy. He may just be “friendly, but not interested in that way, you know”. All of which is fine*, really, as long as I don’t embarrass myself completely. I do really mean that bit about needing friends more than boyfriends (or, at least, more friends than boyfriends), you know. If it turns out he’s just really bad at sending signals and he actually detests me, then that’s a pity, too, but there’s hardly anything I can do about it. Could anyone be that bad at sending signals, I wonder?

Voice in my head: Avril something or other – too late to think…

———
*Look, footnotes! What I meant to say “Married” (or equivalent) is fine to a point, it does not exclude friendship, obviously. However, I am not very impressed by people “acting single” if they are not. It is unfair on their partners and it is unfair on the rest of us. So if he turns out to be married it will lower my respect for him, and that might be an obstacle to friendship (I tend to need to respect people).

Now, for the practice thing. I started a beginner’s course in Karate. So far it’s great fun, and probably good for me, though the most tangible result so far is that I am half-way limping at the moment due to having overstrained something or other on the top of my left foot. No pain, no gain, eh? Actually, I don’t suppose overstraining does me any good, so I will be a bit more careful hereafter. The general physical exercise, however, is bound to be good for me, as are the meditative aspects of the sport.

I have been wanting to learn martial arts of some sort for a long time, so I’m quite happy about having finally got myself off to a course. I’d have quite liked to do Aikido rather than Karate, I went along to one or two sessions of the Aikido club at Manchester University back in the stone age (well, a few years ago, anyway, five or so) and rather enjoyed the general style of the thing. However, Karate has a couple of points in its favour. 1. Pia is in the same club, though on a much loftier level. I can therefore look forward to being whacked by someone I really like instead of casual strangers. 2. It’s rather difficult to separate my concept of Aikido from rather a lot of other stuff going on at the time, especially since it makes me think of a certain person. In that context Karate is bad enough, it’s the same white suits (gis). Anyhow, though I can look back reasonably fondly, so to say, looking back fondly constantly is apt to detract from my concentration – and concentration is rather important in any martial art. Anyway, I’m sure thinking about ex-boyfriends constantly is not particularly healthy, especially five years after the fact and all. So there you are – at least Karate is different enough that I can concentrate on the task in hand. Besides, I like the kata concept. Do they have katas in Aikido? I don’t think so.

Having done both fencing and a short course in Tai Chi seems to have helped me in how quickly I grasp the movements, and especially the weight-transferral principles. Or maybe that’s just my imagination. Perhaps the reason I’m not corrected quite as often as the others (I’m quite sure I’m not) is simply that I’m so hopeless there’s no point correcting me? I dunno. Fun, anyway.

Now all I have to do is learn Japanese so I can remember all the names of movements and such – and the counting, “we” count in Japanese.

Not only do I have waaaay too much to do at work and not only have I actually managed to turn up for practice (more of that later) twice a week for several weeks, I also seem, all of a sudden, to have aquired a social life.

Huh? Where did all these people come from?

So that is why, if you’re wondering. (If you’re wondering, that is, how come I am not updating this thing as often as I used to/ought to/planned to/whatever.)

The few hours I manage to snatch between work and general-interacting-with-other-people are necessarily spent recouperating. Much as I enjoy the company, or rather, much as I enjoy this abundance of people who’s company I enjoy, it doesn’t change the fact that I am an introvert (and the definition of an introvert, in case you didn’t know, is that he/she is de-energised by people and re-energised by solitude, whereas the majority of people are extrovert, energised by socialising.) There’s a decent (if somewhat self-congratulatory) article in The Atlantic (via Vaughan) on the nature of introverts, but that’s a sideline – what I was about to say is that though I am, for example, looking forward to tomorrow night’s Trivial Pursuit session and to Sunday’s “Stitch and Bitch”, and therefore have no intention of cancelling, I will also have to find, on average, a couple of hours a day where I am not required to do anything that could be classified as “communicating”, or else I will run mad/collapse/have a nervous breakdown or just generally snap.

And this blog, of course, is communication.

So: My apologies for being sporadic. While work is taking up as much time as it is, “sporadic” is inevitable unless I become a hermit, and I’m enjoying all these people’s company far too much to want to do that at this point in time.

…well, uhm, maybe not quite morning anymore. Whatever, time for the weekly referral haiku:

sandals in winter
toothbrush manufacturers
rubber suit cycling

Evocative. Of what, though? And oh, search for “lesbian kualalumpur” on Yahoo, and you’ll find me at number 9. Not very surprising, perhaps, I guess the number of sites out there that have those two words on the same page is kind of limited. What puzzles me is why anyone who entered that search phrase would follow the link – seeing as the context summary is “Here’s to hoping it’s just gone on a bit of a wild trip to Kualalumpur or something … Though I am not, as far as I know, a lesbian, that could have been accurate … ” Pretty clearly pretty irrelevant. Whatever.

Voice in my head: Alanis Morissette – Precious Illusions

1. What is your most prized material possession?
There are a couple of books whose loss would be pretty devastating (due to the extreme difficulty of replacing them) – two other things spring to mind, though: An oil painting by Molly Cormick, given to me by the artist and my slide collection (both, for obvious reasons, irreplaceable).

2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest?
I still own several things that were given to me in my first year, and, to be honest, I can’t precisely remember which I got first…

3. Are you a packrat?
Emphatically: Yes.

4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum?
We like clutter. And dust. Dust is friendly.

5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there?
A theme? I am planning a Macintosh kitchen, however, my general style is definitely eclectic, so I doubt whether it will be very strictly adhered to…