I’ve got two humbling pictures and one faintly amusing one (for the nerds out there, like myself) tonight to finish the evening off. One is of the earth from 1.2 BILLION kilometers away, you can only just see the blue tint. The second picture is care of the Apollo 17 crew – the last men to travel to the moon; and just when we were getting the hang of it, too, and doing some serious science.
And finally, that’s no moon, no wait, it is – Mimas, one of Saturn’s amazing array of orbiting worlds.
I figure the naked word will get some attention, and it gives me another cool tag to coax people into finding my blog :) Needless to say, I’m back from my evening (I had a great time, thanks!) and I’ve decided to finish a third-bottle of Rose wine just to top off the “odd drink or three” that I had with my friends. So, because it’s getting late, and it’s a work-day tomorrow, I’m ready for bed. The house is nice and warm because I’ve turned the thermostat up to global warming levels. If it is any consolation, all the bulbs in my house are low-energy ones and I’m a master recycler. So I thought I’d blog naked whilst stretched out on my super-comfy sofa. Thank-goodness for wireless electronics, and this is a cracking time to not own a web-cam.
There was a specific subject I intended to cover, but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to form sentences that make any sense under the circumstances, but it’s worth a shot – so let’s rock and roll and see what happens.
A year ago, I knew what the rest of my life was going to be. I was going to grow old with the person I loved and everything was going to be great. Super-duper great, in fact. Then in a puff of blinding smoke, it all vanished. Looking back on it now (ahhhh, hindsight, isn’t it great?) seeing all the stability in my life vanish so quickly was a real shock to the system.
From the written notes over the darkest months (it helped to write, even if it was just to myself) through to this blog now, my impression of what the future is has changed dramatically. It slipped from certainty to terror before stopping by at fear, passing through worry, moved into cautious curiosity before ending up in anticipation and then excitement. I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, but I’m not scared to see it. The gap between worry and anticipation happened in just two weeks. The gap between terror and fear took months. It would make a cracking graph in Excel – 6 months of values between 0.0 and 0.005 and then a three week period where the values rocketed up to dizzying heights like 0.8, 0.9 or even 0.99 (the scale is zero to one, by the way ;-))
If you lose someone you love, and you’re finding it hard to cope, then take one piece of advice from me: pick one of your good friends that lives as far away from where you as possible, and go and see them. You won’t want to go. All those who care about you will tell you to go. You’ll think of a million reasons why you can’t, but you should. You’ll hate the journey, but the arrival will lift a huge weight from your shoulders. Get away from the situation, experience something new and be in the company of someone special to you and meet some new people. Oh, and don’t contact the ex during this period. It’s so much harder to be sad when you’re hundreds (or even thousands, I don’t know where your friends live!) of miles away from “the situation” and all the little cues that remind you of your loss. It worked out for me, I came back a changed man (I should probably add one of those whopping disclaimers that what worked for me may not work for you and you shouldn’t secure your future happiness on any advice from this blog which is unregulated by the…. etc… etc…)
Besides which, I’ve ended up naked on my sofa writing a blog entry. I still can’t explain why I’m doing it (the blog, not the naked bit), but what the hell, life is short, and writing is fun – especially now I know someone is actually reading this stuff.
Blog naked – you know it makes sense.
In my all-to-recent experience, the most basic and normal things like cooking, listening to music and watching TV become challenges of biblical proportions. It seems like every TV program and every song is about love. Relationships. People splitting up, getting back together, finding love, losing love. If I didn’t know better, I’d say my satellite provider was out to get me – that they had a secret camera hidden in my living room (good grief, I hope not, that could be… bad.) I can imagine the scene in their control office “hey, he’s crying again, let’s rub it in with polished knobs on by broadcasting something where two people split up and never get back together again”.
Of course, love, sex and romance are always on the TV, they’re in the papers, they’re in magazines, on the radio and in almost every song, I just became acutely tuned to noticing them.
A little while back, before I started getting a grip again, a friend of mine insisted that I stopped being a hermit and came out and watched a movie. The choice was Miss Potter. Anyway, needless to say, I cried like a baby almost from start to end. Even she admitted that in retrospect, it may have been a poor choice. It’s a good film, by the way, in my humble opinion, but don’t go and see if it you’re all teary and emotional – or if you do, take tissues and sit at the back of the cinema.
Then, when I got back from my week in Italy (my friends are in the most awkward places) I found something odd had happened: I have started to listen to music again. At home, and at work. Furthermore, switching on the television is no longer something I have to do armed with a box of tissues. And, on top of that, for the first time in three months, I cooked myself a meal (don’t get excited by that, it was nothing special – cooking isn’t exactly my forte).
Oh, I know I’m not out of the woods yet, there’s still a dateless valentine’s day to get through (unless I really get my skates on), but at least the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the train coming in the other direction, which is nice.
I think I know what’s happened: I’ve finally accepted the loss and I’ve started to move on – for real this time. All it took was a little help from my friends and family, and to do the exact opposite to what I wanted to do (which was lurk in the darkness and not speak to another living soul).
This is a good thing too, because it means I don’t have to write a letter to the TV company that opens “Dear heartless bastards…”
Yes, I’ve created a mail account and I’m going to put the information about it into the About page, if only I can figure out how to make an About page. That way, if you feel the need to e-mail me, you can! If you’re female and you’ve got the cutest bottom on the planet, feel free to send a picture ;-). I suspect the account will get jammed up with spam pretty quickly, so I don’t know how long it’ll last, but we’ll see how it goes. I may even risk setting up that MSN messenger thing on it too.
In case I can’t figure out how to set up an About page before my broken Internet comes back to life, it is the two words “tumbleweeds” and “rolling” separated with an underscore at that hotmail place with a dot-co-dot-uk rather than one of those com thingies.
I’ve had a good day today and am going out for a few pints with some friends, but even with all that, I’m afraid today is three-post-tuesday. The third of which will almost definitely be filed under “drunken ramblings”.
Anyway. It’s tuesday, what are you doing in your part of the world?
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