self empowerment

This last week has been extremely emotional. At my lowest ebb I found my self-esteem slipping away under the floorboards. Unable to catch it, I remembered the perfect way to restore it.

Music. More effective than losing yourself in alcohol, the right song can send you spinning to the stars with euphoria. Those who know me may have witnessed me on the dancefloor in some bar or club with a gleam in my eye. These moments are when I find my self-esteem at it's highest, where I'm disappearing and reappearing between a far-off place of my own and the rest of the crowd.

Applying this remedy, I have adjusted my playlist to only play empowering songs. Yesterday I sank below the surface with Radiohead and Coldplay.
Today, the gleam in my eye is back.

the hard place

It is fitting that it should be raining. Inside, I feel bleak, miserable and defeated. What a choice I must make - between the sun and the moon. As if I were holding what could be a winning lottery ticket, my mind is confounded by the options
and consequences of claiming the prize. Can I discard the growing hopes and dreams for harmony and accord? Should I?

In the corner of my eye I see a little cat. To me, the cat is tamed and loving, but deep in its soul I fear that it is not the creature that I know. What does the cat look like when I turn my back? Distracted, I walk away but the cat always follows.

dreams etched upon the sand

I spent far too much of last week drinking. 5 days out of 7 is not good. I would guess that I probably drank over three times the recommended amount for a female my age. I considered going on a detox but it looks likely to be a pipe dream as there is always something to celebrate...

I am also wondering if I am not subconsciously trying to avoid thinking about my problems by immersing myself in the drinking culture at work. I had some revelations last week about myself that I have been dissecting ever since and it's hard work, especially when I always end up where I started.
One of the things that has been troubling for quite some time is the fact that I seem to have lost direction in where I want to be in my life, and what I want to do. The future is more uncertain that it has ever been for me. I have recently been promoted at work, and although I always thought that I would leave after 2 years, I feel compelled to stay. There are more reasons for this than the promotion though, I am actually quite content doing what I do, I love the people I work with, the environment is good and laid back. I can maintain a nice balance between work and play. Yet for some reason, I am frightened that it's all too simple, too good to be true perhaps. I am afraid of being too settled. I'm afraid of a hell of a lot of things right now. I feel like perhaps I should be aiming higher, trying to fulfil some greater ambition. I think to myself, one day when I have reached the end of my life, I will measure my success by my achievements. What have I achieved? I don't think that accumulating material possessions counts. Not in my books. It's probably pointless to worry about stuff like this, invariably things always work out in some way or another without any personal intervention. However, as I realised with great clarity one night, I am a total control freak when it comes to my own life, and I hate the idea of just waiting for things to happen. It's frustrating.

On the other side of the scale, I had to listen to someone complaining for 25 minutes today about how boring their life was at the moment. And how the only thing keeping them going was the hope of going on holiday. His wife is expecting a baby sometime in July/August. They are unlikely to be going anywhere whatsoever for a year at least. As he told me how he was trying to price up this distant holiday, I thought, good god. I would go insane if I spent every single day for a year looking forward to a holiday. And we're not even talking about a dream holiday like going around the world, or some exotic place far away you've never been. We're talking about going to a place that you've been many times before and practically grew up in. It also spoke volumes that there wasn't a shred of excitement that he was going to be a new father very soon.

So perhaps my life is not quite so bad. At least my hopes and dreams go beyond a holiday :)

guilty until proven innocent

I was watching some music videos earlier, and Smooth Criminal came up. It made me feel kind of sad. I am always always going to remember Michael Jackson as an icon - someone totally unique with an inimitable sense of style. I think it's tragic that this generation is going to remember him as a delusioned man accused of paedophilia. I don't want to turn this into a debate about whether he is guilty or innocent, that's down to personal opinion. As it happens, I don't think he is guilty. I refuse to forward on the tasteless emails containing jokes about him. He is too much of an easy target - already convicted by the public and the media before trial.

It all makes me wonder. I can spend my entire life being a good person and doing good things, but at the end, all it takes is one single opportunity for someone else to destroy that. One rumour, one accusation, one motive. It's no wonder there is no trust in the world.

10 reasons why I hate iTunes

Well actually, there is only one reason.

I installed the latest version of iTunes the other day. I hadn't used it since I first got my ipod ages ago since I found that 4 gig of mp3's was really enough to keep me going without needing to update. Anyway, my hard drive got reformatted since and so I decided that I would reinstall the software.

A day or so later, I fired up winamp to discover that none of my playlists worked any more. Somewhat concerned, I had a little look in my mp3 folder to find in place of mp3's, hundreds of directories. For a split second I panicked, remembering a time long ago when I got a virus that renamed all my jpegs to .txt files or something.. but on further investigation I found that the songs were still there, only under directories named after the artist. So. I now have in excess of 300 directories, each one containing a single mp3. Great!

I'm sure that it was my own fault. gee, I have a degree in computing, I program for a living and I can't even work out a simple application like iTunes. *hangs head in shame*

United Kingdom, nil points

Thank god for that. I tuned into BBC1 this evening to see what nonsense song we are going to attempt to win Eurovision with this year. After seeing (and hearing) Jordan's absolutely horrendous performance I could hardly wait to see the final results. I only wish I could post a picture of the pink skintight catsuit she was wearing...
I was totally relieved to find that she will not be representing us in May. Good job too - she'd have been 8 months pregnant by then - hardly the sort of thing we want to be seeing on prime time TV.... never mind the fact that she can't sing a note.

Interestingly, last years winner turned up in the London studios to announce the results from the text votes. Ruslana from the Ukraine. A real hottie, especially in that outfit :)))) Now where can I get me one of those costumes...

va va vroom

There are two absolutely brilliant adverts showing at the moment that have to be mentioned. I haven't seen anything this good since my favourite jellyfish ad for 3.

The first is for the new Golf GTI. You can see it here. Or here. It's a redigitized Gene Kelly doing Singing in the Rain but breakdancing... :)

The second has been out for a while now but it's still great. It's for the Citroen C4 - Transformers special :)

And finally, for something a little more surreal.... have a little look at this *shakes head* The things you find on the internet..

snowmen in spring

I managed to eke out nearly an hour in the office today before deciding to go home. In that hour I managed to stare at the same line of code for at least 15 minutes. I can't even remember what that line of code was now :( Feeling bad. What is it about office environments that seem to make illnesses worse?

After an extremely sunny but cold day yesterday, London was awash with snowflakes this morning. The ground was covered with a blanket of soft snow where I live and enormous snowflakes were falling out of the sky, much to the delight of the kids walking to school. British weather sure is unpredictable. It's been snowing on and off for two weeks. Who knows how much longer it will last? It's supposed to be Spring now...

I watched a film last night that made me feel somewhat humble. And thankful. It was called The Joy Luck Club. It's a film about difficult choices and sacrifices, revolving around a group of Chinese families. It highlights the generation gap and the cultural differences between the mothers who originated from China, and their American born daughters. It's an amazingly moving film and for me, almost painful to watch as it was like reliving painful moments of my life. It made me smile and made me cry. It also made me realise that as much as I never thought that my mum understood me, that there were things about her that I never understood, and that my world back then was limited to revolving around me.
I have read comments about this film criticising it for being stereotypical. But I challenge anyone who is chinese with chinese parents not to find some truth in the stories in this film.
It's Mother's Day this Sunday. I am going to buy this film for my mum as a gift. Mother's Day holds some bad memories for me, and I stopped buying presents for her some time ago. This year I have found something that I want to give her. Something important. Understanding.

the sounds of silence

The sun was shining brightly when I left the house this morning, but the frozen puddles were evidence of the cold. My world seemed strange this morning, there was a strange silence. It was me.
My sore throat turned into a cough yesterday and I woke up to find that I had lost my voice. On my way to the station I was deeply aware of not being able to speak. That if I opened my mouth, I would hear a croak likely to be followed by a fit of coughing. The psychological effect that had on me was this:-
The background noises seemed louder and more pronounced. The birds singing, the cars going by, the sound of the trains in the distance. My footsteps on the pavement. Even my thoughts had more clarity.
It felt a little like living in a wildlife documentary but with the narrator suddenly going missing.

It's been a struggle in the office so far this morning. I had a 10am meeting at which I was expected to contribute, the simple matter of buying 2 cups of tea in the canteen was made awkward (the till staff here don't seem to be able to recognise teacups), and even when I wanted to bitch to someone about something I couldn't :(

This all reminds me of when I was primary school. When I was little, even though I had a perfect grasp of the language, I never spoke to anyone. I have no idea why. It turned into a strange habit right up to when I was 10 or 11. Outside of school I was fine. How I managed to get by I don't really know :)