Angel eyes

I sang this about 10 years ago, and have never come across a recording quite this haunting (not that I've been looking that hard, to be honest...).

Snob Alert!

Ermentrude, the cleaner (who is lovely) is NOT going to go through your bag while you nip to the loo.

Insecurity broadcast

Skippy, are you so insecure in your relationship that you have to call your husband 'my darling', 'gorgeous' or 'babe' EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE?!

Note to Skippy

Sticking out your bottom lip and looking perturbed is not, repeat NOT, endearing.

 

When at work, you're supposed to at least try to act like an adult.

 

UPDATE: tuneless humming is also rather irritating and could get you slapped! Or at least glared at.

The OCD in me

For some reason I find it intensely satisfying when I finish pads of Post-Its or cartridges of staples. Indeed, rather oddly, it's much more satisfying than finishing pieces of work.

Coworkers - please think before you speak...

Skippy: I can't lie on my belly anymore, and I've only got 4 weeks left until I'm too pregnant to lie on my back.

Ermentrude: Can you lie on your side?

In my head: No, she has to hang upside down on the back of a door. *roll eyes*

Psychic iPod Strikes Again

I've often thought my iPod is psychic, but I've just experienced another example of its powers. This morning while brushing my teeth, I was musing on how Counting Crows and Barenaked Ladies reside in the same box in my head, and generally if I'm in the mood for one, I'm also in the mood for the other.

 

I just put on my iPod to help me concentrate while reading a piece of work through, and selected 'American Girls' by Counting Crows as the first song of my random playlist. The second song? Obviously, Barenaked Ladies 'I'll Be That Girl'.

 

Out of 2235 possible tracks. Spooky.

Katie the Creepy

I'm a fairly rational person, but one colleague never fails to give me the heeby-jeebies. Katie is nearly 60 (she's retiring next year), and about can't be much more than 5 foot tall. Maybe it's her short stature, but she seems to glide silently round the office, and always tends to appear behind you when you least expect it. When my desk faced away from the door, I would often turn around after working intently and find her standing just out of sight, waiting. She will never try to attract your attention, she just stands. Staring at you. Where you can't see her.

 

Katie is admin support on an account I used to work on, and my first contact with her was during team meetings, where she would take the minutes by hand. She has small, very neat writing, and she writes with deliberation. Always. We would often have to repeat things 3 or 4 times so that she could write them down, slowly and in full (abbreviations are the Devil's Work according to Katie, Super-Christian Lady that she is...).

 

Katie never moderates her pace. Everything is slow and ponderous, but I think this is just so that she can always creep up behind people, waiting for them to turn away from the printer and walk away at a normal pace, but jump out of their skins because Katie is standing there. And then she smiles at them, creepily and silently. And then she will carry on at the same pace, never quite moving out of the way in time if someone is rushing past, so that people often bounce off the wall rather than bump into her. I'm not sure whether this is because they're too polite to bump into her, or because they're scared of the consequences if they did...

Weirdness of pigeon

I'm watching a pigeon that is sitting on a rooftop and nodding sporadically, but always in time with the music on my iPod. It is much paler than it's companions.

 

And apparently has better hearing.

Exciting new technique!

To avoid logging into this blog at work, I'm experimenting with posting by email. This will allow me to vent more fully about the woes of sitting with Skippy and Ermentrude, while not having to worry about IT becoming aware of the blog's existence, which would be rather awkward.

3 weeks

Over the past 3 weeks, Tom and I have been trying to be less dependent on each other, and more focused on doing what we want. This is part of his attempt to work out what will make him happy (which makes me suspect he isn't entirely realistic about what 'happiness' means). It's a really strange situation to be in, because I'm not sure most of the time whether I should include him in my plans or not, and he doesn't seem to know what he wants or expects either.

The biggest effect of this new regime is that we don't plan to eat together during the week. This is hardly ground-breaking, considering that during a normal week I'm out on Mondays and Tuesdays (Italian and knitting), and he's often out with work at least one other evening. Also, he's really getting into the way we ask each other questions (or rather the way I ask him things - he's as tactless and, quite frankly, patronising as ever). Apparently, 'Would you like to see this film with me?' is hurtful, as it makes a refusal sound as though he doesn't want to spend time with me, when actually he just doesn't fancy seeing 'Burn After Reading'. Er, really? If someone says 'No thanks, I don't really want to see that.' to me, I just assume they don't want to see the film, not that the concept of 3 hours in my company is abhorrent to them.

The other major problem I'm having is that he seems to be projecting emotions and reactions onto me. We did some housework, including a trip to our storage unit, earlier today. This is never my favourite pastime, but I got on with it, didn't bitch and even made some jokes about the runner we passed sans socks. From Tom's perspective though, reluctance was 'radiating off me' and he sniped and snarked at me until I left him to it when we got home. Fast-forward 40 minutes to a big, blazing row which cleared the air a little, but left me totally drained. He's at work now. I just wish that he would talk to me if he thinks I have a problem with something. I'll tell him if I do, but if I don't know that he thinks I do, that makes everything really complicated.

Book of the Month

Leviathan - Paul Auster

Prose so silky you don't notice you've read 200 pages for a story intricately woven into a tightly-crafted bundle. It seems so simple, until you start thinking back through all the connections and coincidences, and you get a little bit dizzy.

Alanis Morissette should have used this in 'Ironic'

When your husband is struggling with his sexuality and you decide to watch 'Angels in America' without knowing what it's about...

...isn't it ironic, don't you think.

Tea - it's not rocket science

Whenever Skippy or Ermentrude make each other a cup of tea, they always have a long discussion about the strength of the brew, and whether it measures up to the recipient's expectations. I could understand this if they were variable in their tastes in any way, but they're not. The tea is always determined to be 'Fiiiiiine' (with the most nasal of long, drawn-out Northern vowels it is possible to produce).

Crisis

I created this blog partly as a way to let off steam about my inescapable and infuriating colleagues, but mainly as an outlet for the other things I can't say in real life. My marriage has never been simple, and I figured that writing about things as they came up would help me work through them better. It turns out, when things are coming up, it's all I can do to keep my head above water, hence the 5 week hiatus.

Things seem to go in a familiar cycle:

• we have a few weeks of just 'normal'
• Tom gradually begins to withdraw, staying out late, not turning up when he says he will, picking fights where there is no fight to be picked, insisting nothing is the matter when asked (frequently, though not to the point of nagging. I am very careful about this)
  
• me trying to stay calm and not make a fuss because he has a lot on his plate. His plate is always fucking overflowing
• me slightly losing it and making him explain what is going on
• we have a really intense few days, going through whatever it is that's wrong
• we feel incredibly close
  
• we have a few weeks of just 'normal'

...rinse and repeat as necessary.

The last few weeks have been particularly bad, with the added bonus of his mum's ropey health rearing its ugly head. Tom is trying to deal with not having dealt with things in the past, mainly his sexuality. It's a little easier for me because I've been expecting this forever - I never thought that his bisexuality would just go away (which he, apparently, did), so I always assumed he would need to work through what that meant for him. He claims that when we got married, he made a decision to 'bury' that part of him, but he didn't tell me. If he had, I would have told him that that probably wasn't going to work.

It's now 5 years since he had an affair, and 4.5 since I confronted him about it. I never thought it would take this long for him to realise that he needs to work out the implications, but at least he's got there now. We've had a lot of late nights talking about the whys, whats, whens, but nothing is resolved yet. I don't want to push him, because I know that under pressure he panics and lashes out. I also know that it's not fair on me for him to keep me dangling.

Fancy that...

Strangely, my stress levels are increasing today. Ermentrude has been on holiday for two weeks, and before that was working in another department for a month, limiting that inane chatter with Skippy. She's been back for just over 2 hours, and already I want to throw things.