life without a plot

::yawns:: I guess it would have been too much to ask to be eased gently from holiday-mode into work-mode.

Woke up from a nightmare today where - my sister, I think - killed someone and I spent the the best part of the dream trying to get rid of a plastic bag with (curiously small) body parts. Very relieved to wake up, let me tell you. That's what you get when you're wishing for 'real' nightmares instead of university/work related anxiety dreams. :)

~

Brief holiday summery.

# Lazy, lazy, lazy. Never even made it to Maishofen, stayed in Salzburg the whole two weeks.

# The single exeption from the general & completely embarrassing laziness was a lot of Russian learning. Once I actually brought myself to open the book & put the CD into the CD player, I really enjoyed it, or at least it wasn't a chore & gave me the sense of having achieved something and actually using my brain for once; I don't know why I kept putting off and off and off until I'd forgotten so much, for one and a half months. My brain works in strange and unfathomable ways. [ETA a couple of tiring work days (& coming home completely braindead) later... oh wait. Question answered.] Repeated, wrote a lot/много писала, and I mean a lot, used up almost a whole spiral notebook, the next person to use the recycling bin is going to wonder, because as it was I couldn't spell at all without checking with the textbook over and over, and sadly knowing how to pronounce the word rarely helps (*is nostalgic for Spanish*), browsed a bit through the rest of our textbook and went through the first six tracks of my vocabulary CD [новые слова изучала]. I hate the early stages of a language when you're hitting walls with every step & can't say anything beyond, Меня зовут Вероника, живу в Вене, русский язык изучаю, because you're lacking the grammar and words. Grr.

At one point, when I was tinkering with my TW fic I started to write g's for d's and cyrillic s's and for a moment couldn't remember how to write a latin one. *headdesk*

# Reading: Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (reread), and then The Making Of Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (new) & more about that later, because the desire to say something even remotely intelligent and coherent is what keeps me from hitting 'post' since Monday-ish; maybe when I've also reread the relevant diary years. Still very brilliant; still completely heartbreakingly sad. Struggled through the music passages like always with only a very shadowy understanding, because my theoretical knowledge stops at being able to read a (simple) score, but repeatedly caught myself at the thought that I must get the CDs. ::facepalm::

Finished Modern Nature and started Smiling in Slow Motion (rereads; & btw, watched The Garden just before I left, which is eerily, elegically beautiful & which I'm going to take a gazillion screencaps of for my screensaver folder to replace the current Torchwood wallpapers); read Dostojewskij's Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kellerloch (one of those books that are just a bit too close for comfort, even if you're aware of enough distance and difference not to actually identify) and Vladimir Sorokin's Der Himmelblaue Speck (No comment here; so far I've always liked his novels, but this was just crazy, and not a little shocking; I've no idea where, if anywhere, he's going with it; probably I've missed the point completely.)

Tried to reread Mrs Dalloway, but while I still love Virgininia Woolf's prose, I can't seem to focus. I stare at a paragraph for minutes, starting over and over, and my mind keeps drifting, I've no idea why.

# Discovered to my complete shock & amazement that I was still fit enough to run through the park, down the whole Hellbrunner Allee and back again without a break. More morning runs. A bit of biking around, to Bad Reichenhall and, once, around the Untersberg, this with a lot of ups & downs, geographically speaking.

# A bit of uninspired (everything too lush & green, too neat & picturesque) photography, although with some surprisingly nice results when I least expected them. Or at least that's what I thought when I quickly looked through the pictures yesterday.

# Watched some old school DW, Genesis of the Daleks, which was a bit... um, archaic?, and, er, maybe kind of stiff when you haven't grown up with it, but I can totally see the cult potential (although I think I prefer modern day Sarah Jane), and City of Death, which I genuinely enjoyed (without politely phrased reservations); funny, with Douglas Adams' touch very recognisable.

# Day-trip to Munich, Lenbachhaus and Pinakothek der Moderne. The former — lots of early Kandinsky landscapes; lovely but almost impossible to appreciate hanging side by side like that, one explosion of colour after another, impossible to chose; frustration at the sudden complete block in my mind at his abstract paintings, fighting my stupid and too literal brain for something like fifteen minutes, trying to make some kind of connection, with some success, but no real understanding. It's strange, or maybe more precisely, fascinating how these things work, or don't work. Earlier that morning I had the rather unsettling experience of looking at a painting and suddenly it kind of... dissolved and all I could see was strokes of paint on a canvas, and it meant nothing at all. It passed, but wtf, brain? Münter, Jawlensky, Marc; Klee, lovely - mystery and subtle humour. Sitting in the garden, the sun coming out after a rainy morning, writing this into my notebook, the square paving stones of the path, greyish- brown, with moss and the occasional small plant growing between them, like a Klee painting. Nothing that I completely loved, but a lot that I liked.

The Pinakothek - More expressionism, since it fit the theme of the day, skipped most of the rest.

# All the time the underlying (although not very worrying) question, why all this, what am I trying to find in all those, books, stories, art — distraction, entertainment, truth, a better understanding of life? Coupled with the suspicion that it all isn't quite real, quite essential, at least looking at it (creating might be different); but what is? The obvious answer is children, but I don't have the least desire for a child. So. ::shrugs:: Also a certain restlessness, dissatisfaction with the sameness & repetition; I think I need a out-of-Austria holiday soonish.

I don't know if it's the warm weather (temperatures around 15 degrees, trees starting to blossom, and the part of me that isn't in a state of low-grade panic over global warming, approaching apocalypse &c., is guiltily enjoying the sun and not having to wear so many clothes any more) or the fact that the first part of the week tends to be a bit stressful, especially when there's also a dentist appointment and the obligatory accompanying nervous breakdown, but I've been feeling feel extremely wrung out/run over by heavy vehicle/other metaphor of choice and permanently tired ever since Monday.

Collapsed into bed around 9 yesterday, slept for 10 hours, dreamt a lot of weird stuff, of which I remember only a bit of a TW-esque dream with Gwen in it, a pool and someone nearly drowning; and someone having exchanged my camera for a different, older model (a D50; I actually remember this part, mostly because it was close enough to waking up to be actually relieved to do so and discover that it had all been a dream; although I think dream me had a D200, so OTOH...). Also some weird bit about almost being blown up and trying to defuse the bomb. Clearly my dream life is a lot more exciting than the part spent awake...



And I'm still yawning. Sigh.

I rarely have nightmares (that I remember); what I usually have are anxiety dreams and the kind of dreams that, when snatches of them come back to me under the shower I realise should have been nightmares, but never really felt frightening at the time. Tonight I actually managed to scream myself awake, or at least I dreamt I was screaming when I woke up. It's hard to articulate or convey what was so frightening, perhaps the part that it was so normal and realistic? As far as I remember, which is very little except the waking up part, I was at home, sleeping, and a woman was bending over me. I can't remember if she even did anything that was particularly threatening or looked that way. After that I slept with the light on, badly, and woke up before the alarm went off, despite having only gone to sleep at 2 am. Made it through work surprisingly well, but was yawning and unfocused during Spanish class, and having missed the lesson before the Easter holidays due to nin-nostalgia and doing all the catching-up on Wednesday, when I'd had three weeks for it didn't help either.

::smacks lazy self::


Lots of strange, very vivid dreams lately.


Also, three months to make it out of the post-Christmas winter depression. Three months. That's a quarter of a year feeling less than myself; more, if you add December where I generally don't have the time to feel much of anything, except exhausted. Starting to see the therapist (and I still kind of resent even typing this, avoiding the phrase 'my therapist' like the plague; hate how it makes me feel damaged and needy and dependent, even when a more rational part of my brain argues it should not. It's a step towards getting a grip on my life and if anything I should feel proud to have taken it. And, god. Now I'm starting to sound like a self-help book.) probably helped things along, too, not to mention spring and sunshine... But yes, definitely feeling better, more balanced and positive, even more open and communicative recently.


Something I realised during/after the last therapy hour is that I can ride out my emotional ups and downs - or, going back a few years, could really, really wallow in the downs, having effectively lost sight of anything else; insofar the riding out and knowing that things will eventually change is already an improvement - but I can't do things X or Y 'to cheer myself up'. [Consumerism? All the stuff (not that much, because I've learned that lesson a while back) that I've never worn, never used, never watched, never looked at again are the things I bought when I was feeling unhappy or unbalanced.] There has to be a spark already somewhere within me, at least a slight need to make me want to do something, plan something, listen to music, read a book, watch a dvd, go out. Look at the world in a certain way. Without that, it always leads to even more frustration - I can force myself to go through with things out of a sense of duty/obligation (as in, you can't sit at home all the time), but it doesn't result in happiness or enjoyment. And I can't consciously create that spark. The only thing I can think of is trying to create a personality, a more positive environment where that spark is more likely to appear/burn a little brighter?


It's a strange thing to realise, because I used to think of myself as a very rational person.