Ein kleiner Jägermeister war nicht gern allein...

_{(One little Jägermeister didn't like being alone...)}

I'm getting more and more spaced; for a few days I've been wandering around in a fog of depersonalisation, not entirely sure what's real and what's not and having limited energy to deal with the real world.

It was my birthday on Friday, I am now 22. Last thing I remember I was 18; everything since then is something of a slow-motion blur leading up to now.

Gary's^[1] student loan finally arrived last Thursday, just as I was leaving for my mum's. I spent most of the weekend drinking wine and looking at digital pianos - my favourite so far is the Casio AP200. I'm looking forward to having a piano in the dining room, and to having piano lessons again and working towards being a brilliant pianist and hopefully one day an excellent teacher.

On Wednesday I took my Grade 6 music theory exam. I'm fairly confident I passed, not sure about anything beyond that but I'll be happy as long as I've passed. Moving on to Grade 7 now, as soon as I can get my brain in gear.

I'm still being entirely indecisive about the path of my OU degree. My only current decision is that my next two courses will be those making up the Certificate in Mental Health Studies, and I'm giving myself some time to decide whether I want to do the Diploma in Music. I'm not making any concrete plans beyond the Certificate yet, I'm trying to convince myself I've got plenty of time to decide where I want my life to go (though it's hard to believe).

I saw a new psychiatrist this week, and am getting mirtazepine added to my meds cocktail. Hopefully this will also help me sleep, as Jägermeister is a poor substitute to controlled pharmacological intervention.

I can't concentrate for longer than about two sentences (you may have noticed). I'm not dead or making any plans to change this state of affairs, but eloquent prose isn't my forte right now.


_{*I thought it was time to give my husband a pseudonym, and have continued with the Men Behaving Badly theme. The similarity is best summed up by this quote:
Dorothy: Do you know what it's like going out with you, Gary?
Gary: A bit like white water rafting; challenging, but ultimately satisfying.}

I don't wanna live in the modern world

Once again, the BBC makes my blood boil.

"School leavers applying to English universities will get more data about courses under government plans to treat them more like consumers.

A food labelling-style system will flag up teaching hours, career prospects and seminar frequency, says the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills."

(BBC, 1st November 2009)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: university students are not 'consumers'. This is simply buying into the myth that a certain degree at a certain university will get you a certain job. Let me be very clear: NO degree gives you a definite guarantee of ANY job, let alone a guarantee of a job in the field of your degree. Even fairly safe careers like medicine, law and teaching don't guarantee you a job upon graduation - the job security comes after you've actually found the job.

The value of education for the sake of being an educated person - the very value of knowing things - is disappearing by the day. Nobody cares what you know, and whether the knowledge of a subject is valuable; all people care about is career progression, and directly transparent career progression at that. Degrees in traditional subjects such as English and philosophy are sneered at by many young people, not because of the content of the subject itself but because there is no immediately obvious progression from degree to career. I frequently got asked in high school (by other pupils, not teachers) what the point of doing a philosophy degree would be, as all I would be able to do with it would be to become a philosophy lecturer. This is an incredibly narrow-minded view, and nobody ever seemed to consider the possibility that learning about philosophy might be worthwhile for its own sake, or that having a degree improves your general employment prospects and your development as a person rather than just being a prerequisite for making lots of money.

Many young people view the educational side of university as an unpleasant hurdle between them and making a shit-load of cash, which further perpetrates the myth that all students are lazy and feckless and spend all their time drinking and partying. In my opinion, this is partly because of jealousy of the perceived lifestyle of a student, partly because the amount of loans students receive to live on are grossly overestimated by the general public (the absolute maximum once can receive is less than £6000 per year, and most people get far less than that) and partly because some students perpetrate this myth themselves by only ever mentioning the subject they are studying in negative terms. Everyone's entitled to complain about being stressed by their workload from time to time, but if you never mention anything positive about what you are actually studying it looks as if all you care about is what you are going to get out of it, and only put the bare minimum into it in order to obtain the results you want.

If education means nothing to you, don't go to university. If you don't want to do the related undergraduate (and in many cases postgraduate) study for your idealised career, chances are you won't enjoy the job. If you're doing it because it's what Mummy and Daddy want you to do and you yourself are fairly indifferent, for G-d's sake don't; people who go to university purely to spend three years constantly drunk will get more out of the experience than you.

I very much doubt the new framework for higher education is going to place the focus back on education itself, however much I want it to. I am opposed to tuition fees mostly because they encourage this kind of attitude, where money is more important than learning and where students are further encouraged to view learning itself with at best a mild indifference. The target to make 50% of young people go to university doesn't help either, as if half the population has a degree then a degree will not be seen to have much value, and there is no funding whatsoever for postgraduate courses other than PGCEs and graduate medical degrees so all this will achieve is creating another glass ceiling with shifted goalposts and even more people going to university for entirely the wrong reasons.

The academics have no place in the modern world, other than to act as tutors for the next generation of academics and tens of thousands of other reckless teenagers besides. Universities will become more and more like schools, which rather defeats the point of the whole exercise. We are facing an intellectual apocalypse, where our best and brightest will fuck off somewhere else where they are appreciated and our country will be left intellectually bankrupt, save for a few idealistic and highly motivated individuals who refuse to become jaded and give up on the concept of British education altogether. Unfortunately, I don't think I can be one of them.

For anyone who isn't a fan of the Primary Gifting Period

Enjoy.

"This is us, and somewhere waaaaaay over there...is the plot."

My last post was slightly cryptic and less than informative, for which I apologise. In my defence I have been on-call pretty much 24/7 for the past couple of weeks and my brain has been melting out of my ears somewhat.

Last weekend my mum came up to visit, my sister came with her and is going home tomorrow. Having guests always makes me tired, even though I was very happy to see them both and had a good weekend. Unfortunately Dorothy hasn't been having such a good week; we came back from the theatre on Saturday night and she went straight up to bed. I went up about 15 minutes later and found her surrounded by packs of painkillers and various sharp objects. Thankfully I'd managed to catch her before she'd taken anything, but it greatly concerned me to discover this was a planned attempt. I also know Dorothy doesn't 'do' parasuicide, and the flaws in her plan made me even more concerned about how seriously ill she was.

It was five years on Monday since her last suicide attempt, which left her in a coma for three days (though both thankfully and amazingly with no long-term damage). She's also started to gradually reveal details of her previous relationship; she told me a few weeks ago that her last boyfriend was violent and abusive, and the more details that she feels able to share the more upset and angry I become. Thankfully this man is now approximately 5,700 miles away, which means both that he can't hurt her and that I, my husband, her brother, her brother's husband and our best friend can't go and kick the shit out of him. As satisfying as it might be, the former is far more important to me than the latter. What's important to me right now is trying to help her rebuild her confidence and put her life back together so she can move on and be happy.

Part of the issue is that she finds it very difficult to trust me and to believe that I really do love her as I say I do, as part of his abuse was directed at me (he never met me) and at trying to convince her that I didn't care about her; anyone with any knowledge of how abuse works can guess what comes next, i.e. that he was the only person who could ever love her and so she should stay with him and put up with being hit and generally treated like shit, thus grinding her self-esteem into dust and meaning she might start to actually believe him. He left her in the end, breaking up with her by text message the day before leaving the country for an open-ended period. I didn't know about anything he did to her until after they split up; in hindsight, I knew very little about him at all, and she didn't talk much about their relationship and would always make excuses to avoid introducing him to me and her/our friends in general. I felt there was something not quite right, but couldn't quite put my finger on what it was and didn't feel comfortable making accusations about someone I'd never met without any real evidence. At the time she was in her final year of uni, which gave a whole host of other possible reasons for her seeming stressed and upset (many of them dissertation-based), and it was only when the stress of finals and moving house and such were over and she was getting worse that I finally convinced her to stop pretending everything was fine.

Over the past week or so I've been extremely worried about leaving her on her own for more than a few minutes at a time, due to her suicidal thoughts and self-harming urges. I had to leave her overnight with only my sister in the house on Wednesday, as my husband and I had tickets to see Green Day in Birmingham and the gig finished too late to get back home so we had to stay overnight. (The gig was absolutely fantastic, but more on that later.) My fears were well-founded, as she ended up making a poor decision that the best way to get to sleep would be washing down codeine-based painkillers with alcohol and a joint. Thankfully I'd hidden 95% of the meds in the house so there was only enough to give her the hangover from hell in the morning. Since then she's seeming a lot better, though still fairly strained by human interaction and that whole 'outside' thingy neither of us are particularly keen on.

My brain is still melting, and it's taken me several days to write this post. I'm hoping to get some rest over the weekend and save up some energy to clean the house, which is in a bit of a state.

If anyone has any ideas or resources on recovering from domestic violence and abusive relationships, I would be grateful for some advice. I don't really know what to do or where to direct her for help; this is well outside my area of expertise. I'm mostly just being there and giving her opportunities to talk and be listened to, but I wish I could do something more productive.

The words just won't come

How do you leave the past behind
When it keeps finding ways to get to your heart?
- Rent (Rent, 2005)

"This is a weak moment. Nobody's supposed to see this."

- Dr. Kevin Casey (Michael J. Fox), Scrubs: S3E12, "My Catalyst"

Playing the piano is depressing at the moment. It's not helped by the fact that someone often wanders in when I'm playing and I instantly feel nervous and almost ashamed of my playing, which means I make more mistakes and sound completely cack-handed. It's embarassing.

When I left high school I was working towards grade 5 piano - I know "working towards" is often a useful euphemism for when you don't really know what you're going to do next and to subtly cover up a perceived lack of time-appropriate progress, but in this case it was actually true. The reason I didn't take grade 5 piano was because it would have neatly coincided with my A2 exams, and I had quite enough to be getting on with. During the two academic years of my A levels I took 26 separate papers (between three A levels, two AS levels and two GCSEs, including three oral exams for the foreign languages). I also did grade 4 piano and grade 6 viola in year 12, which were my 15th and 16th music exams in four and a half years, and I needed a break. I'd already decided not to do grade 7 violin/viola on the grounds of not being arsed to learn all the bloody scales, though I was playing grade 7 pieces and started on a couple of grade 8 ones, so I left high school with grade 6 violin & viola and grade 4 piano, plus the requisite grade 5 theory.

What is irritating me now is how much my piano has fallen back compared to my violin/viola. I picked up the current grade 7 violin book just for the lols, and could make a reasonable stab at sight-reading the pieces. With piano I can just about manage to sight-read a grade 1 piece, and can manage grade 2-3 pieces with a little practice. My manual dexterity and cognitive processing aren't what they were three years ago, and my concentration is shot, which doesn't help.

It's possible this is partly due to the experience I had on each instrument when I stopped - 10 years on the violin compared with 5 on the piano. Having had twice as long to have violin technique bashed into my head, along with having reached a higher level before stopping probably contributes to this, and I know I can probably claw my way back up in a few months. I want to be able to play to at least grade 3 standard when I look for a teacher, as I don't want to humiliate myself when demonstrating what I can play and sight-read. I know finding a teacher isn't an audition, but I don't want to have fallen back so far and show myself up. I also know that with a three-year gap it's fairly understandable that my playing has suffered, but it's still demoralising and isn't helping my self-esteem to be back playing stuff from beginners' tutor books (if so inclined, you can look at some sample pieces from those books here).

I think part of the reason this is getting to me so much is that it's reminding me how much of my life has gone to pot over the last three years. Looking at pieces I used to be able to play and can't any more is about as joyous as having to miss my voluntary work because I can't get out of bed, or wondering why my mouth tastes like ass and then remembering I haven't brushed my teeth for four days. I look and feel like crap, and it's hard not to compare myself with that bright-faced 18-year-old full of hopes and dreams, with the world at their feet. True, I was already completely insane by that point, and a couple of weeks before I went to uni I was told by a psychiatrist that based on my previous, ahem, incidents I should - based on the laws of physiology and pharmacology - already have died twice. I managed to fool myself that all that would melt away when I got to uni; that it would be a new start and everything would come together, and that the severe episodes of mental illness I'd experienced over the preceding six years would disappear and never return.

Nice try, kiddo.

It was three years on Monday since my very own Gazpacho Soup Day, and the scar is still visible. My memory is patchy and often faulty, but I can remember that day in humiliating detail and I fear I always will. That was the day when the shit hit the fan and everything fell apart, and it still lingers in my head when I go to sleep at night. I don't like talking about it, but the gist of the matter is: A fairly stupid, but not irreconcilable incident involving a razor blade, a shotglass, a bottle of absinthe and a bottle of peach schnapps caused my entire world to come crashing down around my ears. Quod me nutrit me destruit.

I'm aware I sound like a whiny teenager, but I'm sick of everything being so hard. It's pissing annoying to have to consider getting out of bed before midday an 'achievement'. Trying to get any music theory work done at the moment involves staring at a blank piece of paper until words and symbols no longer have any meaning. Sex is too much effort - half the time I can't even be bothered to smoke.

My Lamictal has been upped to 150mg, though taking the extra 50mg at night is not doing wonders for my insomnia as I find it very stimulating. I should be getting an appointment in the post from the mental health centre at some ill-defined point in the future, as it looks like this particular instance of crazy isn't dissapating very readily.

I want my mind and my life back.

£25 is a lot of money if you don't have it

Lots of people have been commenting on the welfare 'reform' proposals lately, which seem to mostly consist of Labour and the Tories arguing about who is going to beat disabled people with the biggest stick. I haven't posted on this yet, mostly because it makes me so depressed and/or angry, and partly because other people like Seaneen, Aethelread, Brainblogger and BenefitScroungingScum have already done it far better than I can.

Essentially, I try not to worry too much. This is often easier said than done, and it isn't exactly good for my self-esteem that my main safeguarding logic is the fact that I have essentially already been written off by the DWP. The saga of my IB appeal was purely bureaucratic - not once was any question raised about my actual capacity for work, all I had to do was prove I ticked the education ticky-box for the (20-25) youth rules. I had no medical assessment for either IB or DLA; I'm presuming the 20+ pages of letters from GPs, psychiatrists and CPNs was considered enough. In case anyone thinks this backs up the myth that your own GP will just write whatever you tell them, these letters were from five or six different people, with whom my interaction time ranged from two hours to two years. I have been assessed again and again, told the same story of my life more times than I care to remember, and all of them agree that I am not lying about how disabled I am.

If I am to work, I don't need courses telling me how to fill in a form or write a CV. Christ, you'd think they'd work out that people who have applied for benefits, let alone disability benefits like IB or especially DLA, can fill in a fucking form! My problem is not a lack of basic literacy and numeracy skills; my problem is that I am disabled. Even if I could hold down a job, it would be difficult just finding somebody willing to give me one. It's difficult enough finding a job anyway, especially round here. I took the liberty of going through the job pages yesterday; I found one single job I was qualified for and which was not impeded by my lack of car. Every other job (and there weren't exactly many) either required experience and/or qualifications - almost invariably NVQs - I do not possess, specified the necessity of a car or was in a location that would be entirely inaccessible to me on public transport.

It would appear that what I need to get a job first and foremost is a car. Owning a car is completely out of the question - I can't have a license, I can't afford driving lessons, I can't afford to buy and run a car. Work experience is also difficult, as you can't get a job without work experience and can't get work experience without a job. The issue of NVQs is linked in with the above issues, in that I need a job to acquire one and it would seem I need a car to acquire a job. This is before we even get on to the issue of how my disability affects what jobs I can take on and what adjustments would need to be made. I have some reservations about believing that any adjustments deemed necessary and agreed to would actually take place, but this is probably down to my own suspicious and cynical nature and thus is not an issue in and of itself.

None of these issues are insurmountable; a lot of my issues are locational, and I could always move to a city with more jobs and better public transport. My husband (hopefully) finishes uni in a few months, so we could always move then. This does not solve everything, however, as there are still issues affecting my ability to work. I need someone with me when I am out of the house, I need flexibility in my working days and hours, and if my work requires the use of a telephone I need one with an adjustable speaker volume. I also need people to be aware of my cognitive and hearing issues and to communicate with me appropriately. Most of all, I need to keep my stress levels as low as possible and to have enough time outside of work to look after myself, with minimal on-call or last-minute demands and to be able to arrive and leave on time.

Of course, I know the government couldn't give a flying shit about any of this. I'm just a niggling statistic. What's intriguing is that David Cameron has mostly been talking about shifting people from IB onto JSA, rather than actually getting them jobs. He's at least inadvertantly admitted what Labour won't, which is that nobody seriously believes that all these supposed 1 million IB claimants can all actually get jobs. Unemployment is approaching 3 million, not including those on IB; 4 million jobs aren't going to fall from the sky. The shift would make the already pretty atrocious unemployment figures astronomical. The harping on about £25 per week irritates me, as I can bet most Tory MPs wouldn't wipe their arses with £25.

"And after all, what is £10 to people like us? A half-decent cigar, or a week's Social Security for a family of gypsies? I know which I'd prefer."
- Alan B'stard (The New Statesman S1E3, 'Sex is Wrong')

Why not just cut £1 a week from every working age benefit? L-rd only knows what savings they'd make from that, and £1 a week is a small enough sum that it shouldn't really make a difference to anyone. No fannying about with 'schemes' and 'initiatives' and throwing millions of pounds at the problem to try and make it go away - just cut £1 per week from every benefit, harp on about the enormous savings for the next decade and leave us the fuck alone.

Finally, of the 2.6 million claiming IB about 1 million of those aren't actually being paid IB, and only get NI credits. Something to think about...

Musical positivism

All we really want is affirmation
Affirmation's all we're working towards
So I don't need your wealth accumulation, you can keep it
Second encore
Second encore

(Tim Minchin)