Thoughts for the week

[tamaranth]

I haven't been online much lately, but this is solely due to long commute and disinclination to brave the Guardian of the Sofa in order to log on from home. Today I seem to be more or less alone in my part of the office, and have moved desks to a brighter and less noisy position. Yay!

Some things I've been thinking about this week:

Rogue
...different flavours of antique-but-wondrous computer game Rogue. I was playing quite a bit of iRogue (Palm port) while commuting, when BP-pill side effects made me too fuzzy-headed to read for long. (Now fixed.) I played a great deal of Rogue on my first proper PC, an Amstrad, in the early 1990s, and many of my games ended up with me fainting from lack of food and being battered to death by the nearest alphabetimonster. That is, the food:moves ratio wasn't quite right. In iRogue, this is no longer an issue -- there's ample food available -- but I still end up discarding useful items (magic potions, decent weaponry) so that I can hoard food.

Being an Only Child (what's the technical term for this?)
... my sister's actually my half-sister, and I was raised more or less as an only child (with occasional reference to how much better-behaved my sister had been as a child, which she says is nonsense: I was simply allowed to get away with more). And recent experience indicates that I'm still affected by my childhood environment.

You see, if you're an only child, everything is about you. Not necessarily in a good way, either. If something's wrong it's probably something you've done, and if one or both parents is cross it's at you. (Added to which, my mother used to play some weird psychological power games: I'd have to guess what was wrong. I remember coming home from school one day, chattering away about lessons, and knowing there was something up but not what. Eventually she more or less told me to shut up: turned out she'd had a letter telling her that her mother, who I never met, had died.

Ergo, I tend to be over-sensitive to other people's moods. I hate arguments and confrontation. And I've always had problems sharing living space with other people.

But recently, when there was an air of tension in the house (probably caused by evil cats / medication / transport / technology), I was able to think about it logically and work out that it had nothing to do with me -- not my fault and not my problem, and my only involvement would be to either cheer people up or stay out of their way.

OK, it's taken me rather a long time to get there. But I'm there.

The Right Time to Read

I read Margaret Elphinstone's Voyageurs this week (review on tamaranthblog when I catch up with myself -- am six books behind). I bought this novel in March 2005, having enjoyed Elphinstone's Hy Brasil very much. By my reckoning this was the fourth attempt I'd made at reading it. The first three times I couldn't get into it at all -- didn't like the narrator (a 23-year-old Quaker searching for a lost sister) or the setting (Canada / United States, around 1810) or the style ( full of Lakeland dialect) or, or anything.

This time I couldn't put it down. I was drawn into that world, its language and concerns: drawn into Mark's quest (and the story, written between the lines, of what became of his sister) and his personality, and his relations with others. Splendid prose, too.

It's certainly not the first time I've set aside a book again and again, only to enjoy it very much when I finally got started. I wonder if there are right times and wrong times for an individual to read particular books? (I remember reading my first Bujold and really not enjoying it very much. Five years later, I read another that was submitted for the Clarke Award, and was hooked.)

A Balanced Mental Diet

They say you should eat five portions of fruit and veg per day. (I'm not achieving this at the moment: have little appetite and less chance to shop.) I started thinking about the mental / emotional requirements for balance, and came up with 'eight a day': if you write them down in a circle there's a certain pleasing gradation.
- physical (proper eating / exercise / fresh air / 'living in the body')
- mental (work, practical thought-stuff)
- emotional (self-analysis, working through bad moods, facing unpleasant memories: internal stuff)
- social (interactions with others, initiating contact with people, random acts of niceness*)
- ethical (thinking about environmental or social consequences of the day's acts and trying to balance them out)
- cultural (reading for pleasure, listening to music, looking at art / artifacts, talking or writing about any of the above)
- creative (for me this is usually, though not always, to do with the written word. Original fiction or fanfiction or poetry or writing exercises. But then again, collages and birthday cards and jewellery and painting.)
- cosmetic (about how one looks. Haircut, pampering bath, dressing with care, manicure, clothes-buying ...)

*oh yes I do

Comments

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

It took me several goes to read Hy Brasil before I built up a momentum where i just couldn't stop reading it.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

> 'eight a day'

That's wonderful. I'll print it out and bear it in mind when looking at my To Do lists.

You could maybe get a book out of that, or at least a magazine article.

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

I think it took me three tries with The Glass Bead Game before I could stick with it to finish it. Getting through the first 100 pages was the challenge to get over, and then I was in the stride of "Surely he'll explain how to play the game in the next chapter!"

And then he didn't. I enjoyed the deep thoughts along the way, but I still a certain amount of bile towards Hermann Hesse for leaving the game as only a tantalizing passing mention.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I was taking the fainting from lack of food bit literally I'm afraid, having recently developed an addiction to CivCity Rome. (Must remember to eat and go to bed!)

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Have you read The Incomer (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0704340704/)? It's the only book of hers that I have, or that I've read and it's hauntingly wonderful.

Having been prodded by you, I've added both Hy Brasil and Voyageurs to my Amazon wishlist, to be investigated when (hah!) my to-read heap calms down just a little.