philosophy supernatural nude

I'm having slightly better days. I am not fond of the whole recovery-is-not-linear rhetoric - while true it's not helpful; it also presupposes that recovery is a thing that will ever happen to me, which won't and ought not to and I would not want it, etc - but it feels terrible and maybe it is terrible but in the meantime the tracker is showing that I genuinely am having better days, more of them, closer together. Sleeping is not happening very well but is happening better. And I am definitely not hypomanic any more. Depressed in significant patches, but not the other thing. My tag for bipolar concerns is "ad lucem" - which acknowledges that sometimes it's a dazzling brightness and other times a citronella-scented bug-catcher, but all better than dark.

A. and I came off the sleeper this morning after a week in the islands (him) and a week at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (me) which was difficult in some ways because I love the place and I always will and it's not nice to think, if I am depressed here I would be depressed anywhere in the world. And yet: get up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to class, eat lunch, go to class, walk out into the bright afternoon down to the water, come back, eat dinner, listen to some music, go to bed, every day for a week. It's exactly the sort of thing that's good for me and it did do me good. And - bonus - my Gaelic is much better for the week. I was feeling rotten and sad and like I'd lost more than I'd gained, but around about Wednesday I woke up and started participating? And speaking and listening and muddling my way through my various interactions, and that was all ok.

Things I've managed this week:

-Conditionals! Round of applause please. Mura càr luchdaicheadh tu a-nuas! Not that I could pull one of these off the top of my head and that one probably isn't right, but I got somewhere.

-Genitives (but not plurals). I suddenly figured out that "fad an latha" and "fad na maidne" are extremely useful to remember the difference between masculine and feminine nouns. (The other trick: am balach, ris a' bhalach, taigh a' bhalaich; a' chaileag, ris a' chaileig, taigh na chaileige - summarised as "girls a step ahead of boys".) Why, why does a language need four extant cases and a full complement of prepositions. No one needs that.

-Dealing with racists! (One of these things is not like the others, yep.) My fave was the one who, upon hearing that I'm from India, looked surprised. "Wow, I'd never have known," she said. "You speak good English."

Which - ok, is definitely my all-time greatest-hits racist comment, it's the one I've heard the most, in the broadest range of circumstances. But it's the Courtney Love of racist comments? Very nineties. A little surprising in this year of our Lord 2018. Every time I ran into her after that (my racist, not Courtney Love) I forgot she didn't have any Gaelic and spoke to her without space for interruption for a reasonable amount of time before I remembered she wouldn't be able to understand it.

(There was also the woman who wondered why India doesn't divide itself into states for ease of administration. Not states, she clarified, when I pointed out India does have a great number of state governments. Countries. Different countries. After all, we did that once before and it went fine. (Everything's fine.))

And, while we're on the subject of my marvellously racist week. I despise the double takes I get from strangers, when I speak Gaelic in a Gaelic-speaking community to Gaelic-speaking friends. I accept that this is my fate (an dàn dhomh!) as long as I do insist on speaking the language while brown. But I don't like it any more each time it happens.

Anyway. Sin mar a thacras. Given the givens, I had a nice time and the weather was glorious. The little book is not any further forwards on paper, but getting sharper in mind. I got several new books, of which the next is The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane's study of paths and tracks and holloways across Britain, the one after that is The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a high-concept murder mystery I'm quite looking forward to, and (in service of the little book), The Celtic Placenames of Scotland. I'm pretty sure I know how to live.

I am weepy and tired and verklempt. I spent yesterday afternoon "reading" The Arrival, by Shaun Tan; troyswann recommended it to me when we were up in Scotland and I saw it in Housman's bookshop at King's Cross and bought it on impulse. (And had a weird encounter at the counter, where the clearly-very-new person behind the counter asked me if I were a student or a trade union member, for reasons of discount, because it's that sort of bookshop. "You don't look like you're in a trade union," she said, which made me huff a bit, because what does a trade union member look like? I am in two, for the record, depending on how you count: both on the roll and as a civil servant. Hmph.)

Anyway, The Arrival - it's a fantasy graphic novel told without words, depicting the story of an immigrant family's journey to a strange new place. And I find I don't want to use words to describe how powerful and beautiful it is as a piece of art. I just cried wordlessly at it. This is an unqualified recommendation but it's not something where a brief snippet will give any sense of the enormity of the whole.

So there's that. Here are some other things:

-I've had the flu all week, and am still feeling insubstantial; I went to work on Friday and realised in the middle of the afternoon that September 23rd represents the halfway mark of this posting that is killing me. (I will be glad to have done it I've learned a lot everyone pays their dues etc, you've heard it.) I look back on the last eighteen months and I'm not proud, exactly, because that's not a word that means much in these circumstances, but I have made it this far and I'm glad of it.

-Gaelic restarted this week, and I trundled down to the class on Wednesday and enjoyed it moderately. It's the beginners' class, and the teacher kindly suggested afterwards that gratifying as it may be for one's ego to be the best in the class, it's much better for me to be remedial. So I've been bumped across to the second-year class, which is scary because I really will be the worst in it. Tha mi ag ionnsachadh an-dràsda, etc. After a couple of months away, I still love the language inarticulably outwith its own terms.

-A. and I are going out tonight to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We have been married for three years, together for nine. I ran out of things to say about this years ago. We are what we are; we go on.

-I have several batches of beta comments on the novel, and keep crying at these also; not because they're sad - they're helpful and heartening - but because I've been working on this thing alone for a long time and the externalisation has been a process. (And also because I've now got to pick it up again, in a while, and go on with the work. The first six months I was writing it I never backed it up, because of a secret hope that I'd knock my laptop off a table and bam, I wouldn't have to write it any more.)

But: in a while. The next book on my to-be-read pile is Lavie Tidhar's The Violent Century. Right now I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Star Trek on Netflix.