Tribal connection
Let’s face it, I’m special. I can have serious trouble showing enthusiasm for things, even when I am very excited about them somewhere deep down. I also tend to stay far away from things that I like to classify as tribal behaviour. These include things like watching sports (although that one football game between England and Portugal in the European championships 2004 will always stay with me, mostly as one of very few times that I’ve sworn in public, trying to express how exciting the game was,) following any kind of religion, computer related or otherwise, clapping along with music, or getting drunk and singing bad karaoke with friends.
This behaviour of mine was why I was caught out on Covent Garden as the only person in the audience who wasn’t clapping when the performer asked for it. It is also why you will at most see me nod my head along with the music when I am at a concert. Which turns out to be precisely the normal behaviour at a Porcupine Tree concert, but usually not at others.
There is one exception, however, which has tonight proven to be repeatable. At Gogol Bordello concerts, two years in a row, it hasn’t take more than a minute before I’ve been right there in the middle of it all, jumping along with everyone else, shouting myself hoarse and clapping along with the music, and enjoying every moment of it. Right now I’m sitting in the sofa with ringing ears, feet that feel like they are still moving and a big grin on my face when my mouth isn’t busy whistling out the tunes of their songs.
That said, I still have a few mental blocks, even at a Gogol Bordello concert. I can for some reason never get myself to lift my hands over my head. Clapping takes place at eye level at the highest. Anything higher seems totally inappropriate and is impossible for me to even consider. Also, I can never quite stop worrying about the people who are standing around me, wondering if I will step on their toes or jump into them. The fact that they keep jumping into me without showing any remorse doesn’t change this.
Anyway, the important conclusion here is that if you haven’t yet seen Gogol Bordello in concert, you need to do something about this as soon as possible.
Busy week
Next week is going to be a very busy one for me compared to what’s become normal here in Copenhagen. First off, I’m going to be going to Norway for work between Monday and Friday, coming back to Copenhagen some time in the afternoon. Then at five, it’s on to BarCamp Copenhagen. During the same week, I’ve somehow managed to set things up so that I will have deliveries coming with a MacBook (a plain old thing, because I’m not willing to beta-test the Air for my own money) and my new phone as mentioned in the previous post. I ended up ordering a Nokia E70 which, although it’s now a reasonably old phone, seems to cover a whole lot of what I would like to have in a phone, including being able to play with Python for Series 60 (even if I don’t particularly have a project that I want to build yet) and a qwerty keyboard that can still fit in my pocket. So for the parts of the weekend that won’t be filled with getting used to new behaviours from my dog and my wife, I’ll have plenty of new things to play with.
What, me worry?
As a reaction to me telling them about the current set of changes in my life, someone pointed me to the Holmes-Rahe Scale as a way of measuring my current stress level. Personally, I most enjoyed going through the effects of too much stress listed there to see which ones rang a bell.
- Concentration and attention span decrease
- What, like randomly clicking through my email without having received anything new, or swapping between tabs in my browser and not knowing why I opened them? Or perhaps staring at the Holmes-Rahe list, trying to remember a whole point before switching back to the window where I’m typing this?
- Short- and long-term memory deteriorate
- Michaela will be able to provide you with a long list of things I keep forgetting. Me, I don’t remember what they were anymore.
- Drug abuse increases
- Food is my drug, and it looks like my weight is slowly creeping upwards again.
- Sleep patterns are disrupted
- The time is currently 02:08. At this time, I would normally have been asleep for three hours already.
Looking at another site for the Holmes-Rahe Scale, I am also told that I have an 80% chance of serial physical illness within 2 years. I feel that is a great way to help someone dealing with lots of stress. 
What’s happening? I really can’t remember anymore. Oh wait, there’s something about us getting married, moving to Copenhagen but not having found a flat yet, and me having to find a new job there. So it’s only a few small things, really. Any hints would be gratefully accepted. =)
Self image
When I was at university, I had a period when I would spend a lot of time looking into the mirror. I would stare at myself, observing every detail of my face. Thinking back, I don’t remember why I did it, but I do remember that it would calm me down significantly. It was also how I discovered my first few grey hairs at the age of 22. Later on, my habit just disappeared by itself. The need to stare into the mirror just wasn’t there anymore.
Yesterday afternoon, it returned. It started in the mirror in a dressing room, and continued when I got home and then again this morning. The big difference is that this time it wasn’t my face I was staring at, it was my legs. Or rather, the cloth covering my legs. After a short period of trying on new trousers and not finding what I wanted, I made the sudden decision to buy a pair of jeans. This has now become one of the most uncomfortable experiences I can remember.
The important thing about these jeans is that they mark the end of a 17 year long period. As a young teenager I decided that I was tired of trying on all these uncomfortable variations of blue with their obscure names that needed a mapping to explain what they meant in terms of how they would fit on my body. And the reality was that none of them ever did fit. 17 years later, jeans still come with obscure names that mean nothing to me and there are more variations on blue than there used to be, but my body has found a new shape and the jeans have actually become comfortable to wear. For the legs, not for the mind.
I was shocked to find a pair of jeans thrown over my chair this morning. It was as if someone else had been in our bedroom and put them there. They could certainly not be mine. But after I had showered and had breakfast it was I who put the jeans on. Later on, it was I who wore the jeans when going shopping for a carbonated low calorie soft drink with vegetable extracts with sweeteners. But when I looked down where my legs used to be, it was someone else’s legs that were moving me forward. There was just no way my brain could acknowledge that those jeans wearing legs could be mine. It’s all a bit surreal right now.
Unpredictable weight loss
To keep track of my weight loss, and to have something to display on dlade.net/weight, I weigh myself every Friday morning after going to the toilet and add the weight to a simple text file that the chart is built from. I always take a pleasure in having lost weight, and suffer severely when I see the chart go up again. This week, I was really looking forward to my weekly weigh-in. I had eaten less than my daily allowance every day of the week and run further than ever before.
This morning, I was shocked to see that I had actually gained weight compared to last week. I feel that I can see very clearly that my reflection in the mirror and the hands that I hold in front of me right now are a lot slimmer than they used to be, but the chart tells a different story. I still weigh the same that I did nine months ago. Oh well, I’ll just do what everyone else does and blame it on my body building muscle or retaining water or something…
