04 November 2017

10% happier

After completing on the house last month, there has been an endless list of tasks – things to buy and tear up and paint. With the crowbar, I pulled off all the doors in the downstairs and like that, everything opened up. I replaced the curtains in the front room and pulled up the rest of the carpet to scrape and sand everything down. The architect is coming on Monday to talk about extending the back of the house out to make a bathroom. I made a list of things we need to decide when we redo the kitchen and make this extension: all the fittings and the bathtub and toilet. Sinks and light switches. A spreadsheet of miscellany. A friend of mine, a guy who enjoys these types of projects, came round the other night and I listened, nodding along and thinking how little I cared about all these choices that needed to be made. Tile colours: surely there isn’t a multiverse where I care about tile colours.

Instead, I’ve felt a dull silence attaching itself to everything. I can or can’t sleep and wake up just wanting to sit and avoid whatever decisions need to be made. I’ve been meditating again, but the silence which is so sweet at the beginning grows into a dull roar of thoughts about everything and anything and nothing. You’re taught when you meditate to accept the thoughts as they come, to not judge yourself, but I have been judging myself for thirty five years. How do you just stop. I keep thinking I’ll fall asleep, but then I open my eyes and I haven’t been sleeping, but I haven’t been anywhere.

And then there is the number, whatever that number is. It got stuck for a month and I was frustrated, meticulously marking down what I ate like a slave. I am judging myself by a number because I make that number to mean not failing like I have again and again. Whatever failing is. The number is right, but what is right. I'm still fat, because fat has nothing to do with a number. I ate some ginger snaps and feel like I should confess it, but to whom. 

I saw a couple of shows last week: the Sleaford Mods and then Weezer. I didn't plan on seeing Weezer but had gotten on the guest list after a series of weird interactions on e-mail with the lead singer and his PA. They played most of the Blue Album, which keyed into the nostalgia I was looking for, but which felt less compelling as the night wore on. I wasn't ever that happy when I was a teenager. I knew from looking at the set lists online that they would play Buddy Holly in the encore, and I thought about leaving early. What did I care anymore about the drama of high school. About kissing dating goodbye, and purity, and loving Jesus more than everything. I didn’t, I realised — I didn’t care about anything. I came home and Yoko and her friend were drinking wine in our house, the house that we own, in Harborne, in Birmingham, with the white people. I sat with them, eating cheese and talking about home renovations and how I thought I was going to get married when I was seventeen. It's worked out, I guess, I said in Japanese, and went to bed, the rest of the world spinning on and on and my body waiting a couple of hours to wake me up again.
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