I talked to some friends as I was backward moon-walking around the carpark at the back of my parents’ house with church architectural plans stuffed down my jumper!  Chris (aka “plane guy”) called me a  “Technospazz Nerdhead” 🙂 .

He said those were my words and he just put them together.  Maybe he is right, but HE put them together for me, squaring their effectiveness.  He gives me book titles for the books I am not going to write.  That is one of them.  The other is “Time Does Not Exist”.   He told me to “keep my knickers on”.  It made me belly-laugh.  So English.  Haven’t heard that in a while.  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”  I realized as I was talking to him that I was talking back in British English.  I said “nob”.  “Nob” led to “nobhead”, which led to “bellend”.  Why are English insults so funny?

I told him my dad said I liked being told what to do right now.  He is right.  Chris joked that if he was trying to get me to go to sleep he said he would say “There, there, nobhead.  Go to sleep.”

Happy New Year.  2012 can kiss my arse.  2013 is going to be better.  I woke early after less than 4 hours sleep and decided I would start the year by hand-writing a letter to someone that had asked me to.  I will call him “wizard”.

I took out my writing book.  I unscrewed the ink dispenser (last loaded with a blend of brown/black ink) and cracked a cartridge.  It was green, the only colour ink I could find. (Trevor found it for me, actually, whilst I was packing.)  It has been so long since I used my fountain pen, I can’t actually get the ink to flow back into the nib.  I have sucked and blown.  Sucked the nib, blown down the tube.  When I was a baby, I used to suck my dad’s fountain pen.  I think I ingested so much ink that eventually he kept it unfilled.  (Sucking my dad’s nib.  There is an Oedipus joke in there somewhere! 🙂 .)  My fingers are covered in ink and there are concentric and ever-lightening brown circles on an envelope.  But still no easy green flow.

Whilst I was doing this, I notice a handful of letters stuffed in a side pocket.  I don’t even remember them.  There are love letters from my first boyfriend, heart-felt missives from star-crossed (almost) lovers, and letters from my best friend.  Wow – the written word, indeed.

I got distracted reading these instead of writing to the wizard.  It’s all right 🙂 .  He will forgive me.  Maybe it is the age we were at when we wrote these letters to each other – there was no email, no Facebook. The sentiment in them is raw, it is honest, it is romantic.  Have we lost this in this face-paced life in which we live?  When I was in India, my parents had to write to me post-restante, guessing where I would be when their letters arrived.  Mostly I received them.  Sometimes I did not.  In this life, there are no guarantees.

The wizard says he is taking a month off electronic devices.  Even the telephone. I admire him.  Since writing this blogpost, we have texted, and I have changed his name to “wizard”.  You can UNDO the typed word, you can only cross-out the written word.

I believe multitasking is killing our brains.   The notebook and pencil I keep in my pocket is helping, but I don’t have the will-power not to constantly reach for my phone.

What can I do to stop that?  What would Jesus do? 😉  (“Who would Jesus bomb?” goes the joke.  It is funny until you think about it.)  What would (non-existent) god do if he had to distribute the 10 commandments over Twitter or Reddit?

I don’t believe in God.  (ESPECIALLY with a capital ‘G’.)  How can I have lost faith and now start to believe in a ‘G’od that would take my babies?  But maybe I believe in a master plan.

Can’t wait to see what 2013 holds in store for me.

The guy I met on the plane said his therapist told him he was a ‘protector’, and he says I am one, too.

Like so many people in my life, he coaches me to put myself first.  Only a healthy person can continue to help others.  Another analogy I have heard is “put your own gas mask on first”.  All of these things are easier said than done.   Giving is easy, its taking that’s hard.    Is that like the saying:  ‘dying is easy?  It’s living that’s hard’.  Who said that?  Seems like a Western movie quote to me.  (My dad would say “It isn’t ‘hard’, Nina, it’s ‘difficult’”.  But sometimes it is ‘hard’, too.  Like a diamond.  Anything worth having is hard.)

I am trying hard to think of myself as worthy.  At the same time, I want someone else to do all of that hard work for me.

Kim gave me a book called ‘The Dark Side of the Light Chasers’.  The back cover reads “Perhaps a touch of ‘laziness’ is just what the workaholic needs; perhaps some judicious ‘selfishness’ can save us from exhaustion and resentment’.

The lady I met on the plane that run runs the Guatemalan charity?  She had also suffered multiple failed attempts to get pregnant, IUIs, IVFs.  She made me feel lucky that I had even got to feel my baby kicking inside of me.  I have never looked at it that way before – and she is right.  She was there and I felt her.  Maybe non-existent god put her in my way so I could learn this, and so I could invest in her charity (quicker than starting my own).  It is kind of strange that I have been to the EXACT area of Guatemala and likely seen those girls.

I told her we are phoenixes, rising from the ashes of our failed pregnancies and heart aches.  We will arise strong and brighter and more radiant.

But I sometimes wonder if I am just burning up.   I am physically hot, running a temperature.  I have no control over my internal thermometer.  The children touch my face and pretend it burns their hands.  “You are so hot, Auntie Nina.”

Someone recently told me I was like a comet, someone else told me I need a heat sink, a lightening conductor, a grounding wire.  He said I was the space shuttle coming in to land and I needed coolant heating tiles.  What if I burn up on entry?  Should I just stay in orbit?  What is it that I need?

Kim, Steve and I were playing ‘Cards Against Humanity’ last night and joking, arguing and verbal spar-playing what person needed to live.  It came down to “Love it All You Need”.  (Well, and maybe a sandwich now and then 😉 .) Steve says that isn’t true, and Kim says Love should be a verb.  You have to “love” someone actively.  We decided that it should have been “reciprocal, demonstrative love is all you need.”  Whilst we managed to all agree on this, and think ourselves very smart, I doubt Ringo would agree 🙂 .

Someone told me today that I am like Hunter S. Thompson, but with a work ethic.  I think it is the biggest compliment I have ever received.

I have noticed that this blog is more and more about me (yawn), and no longer even punctuated with the occasional recipe or picture of John Taylor 😉 .

This is a photo of me I posted on Facebook.  I just don’t want Facebook to own this memory.  I touched a wild horse on Port Meadow yesterday.  I love my Oxford friends.  And THANK YOU Paul Harvey for carrying me on your shoulders to get here.

And actually, I wonder if the best compliment I received was when I was in my mid 20s.  My boss and his wife couldn’t conceive and I offered to carry their baby for them.  (I read a book on it, to make sure I was ready to commit, before I offered.)  He cried and it took him 2 days to ask his wife.   Apparently, that wouldn’t help but they asked me if I would be their surrogate   They told me “there is nobody’s DNA we would prefer to yours.”  How’s that for a compliment?  Better than Jack Nicholson’s to Helen Hunt  “You make me want to be a better man”?  Unfortunately for all of us, I was too young to agree to that.  THEN I thought it the baby was half-mine, I might feel I had ownership over it and refuse to give it up.  Looking back, maybe it would have been good to have a half-me out there that I could occasionally spoil with love and affection.  I have no need to continue my genes.  There are enough out there thanks to my cousins.  I wanted children just because I am stagnating and I want to continue to improve and expand.  Work doesn’t love you back, and loving children unconditionally would continue to evolve me.  And I would love them back like that.  I have a lot of love to give.  Crazily, someone just offered to carry my baby for me recently.  If only it was that simple!

But then tonight, Amie told me I was her favourite Auntie.  And I saw the drawing in the downstairs loo.  I am dying with love and gratitude.  Am I going to have to move back to England?

They say you can’t choose your family.  But if you could, I would choose mine.

3 of my favourite women in the planet are in this picture.  My youngest niece, Charlie.  My cousin, Nikki. If only my other cousin Kerrie, were here!  And my mum.  Love you, Mum.

Being around my nieces has been bittersweet this year.  That word doesn’t even encompass the emotional rollercoaster I have been on around them.  They have blossomed!  They are both so charming and funny and beautiful and generous and witty and sweet and delightful and evil. (And there was deliberately no punctuation there!)

This is Amie, doing the splits.  Just cos she can.  She can do them in the air, too.

As everyone and their mother knows, I am not sleeping well.  When they were packing to leave Boxing Day, I was snatching just a couple of minutes of alone-time on a bed upstairs, listening to Adele’s Downfall.  Amie bounced in like Tigger.  I told her: “Auntie Nina needs to be quiet for a second.  Would you like to come and snuggle?”

She pressed herself into mine until we were concave. And listened to Adele with me.  Her little body against mine, and the lyrics and my general tiredness made me cry.  I cried absolutely silently.  I usually do.  Unfortunately, my back gave a shake and she looked up to see tears rolling down my face and into my ears.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.  I told her “Auntie Nina is just tired, and also sad about her baby”.  “Don’t worry”, she told me, stroking my hair.  “Your baby is in heaven with Great Nanny Iris and Pushka”.  (Pushka is their cat, that used to be my cat before I went to America.)  She said that they are looking after my baby.

I told her it was okay and that sometimes grown-ups are sad, even when it really is okay.  She put a hand either side of my face, and said to me with the seriousness of a 90-year old woman, “I know”.  Now THAT is an old soul.  There is more on this than I am willing to type.

When her sister came in the room, we changed the subject.  Amie asked to play her favourite song.  It’s called (of course) “can’t get no sleep”.

Kim and Steve are doing an amazing job with these girls.  It breaks my heart that I lost my baby, but I am wondering if (non-existent) god has other plans for me.  Maybe I am supposed to help more children than just the ones I can grow?  Who knows how these cards will play out?  Maybe I will start my own charity – not just help with my new friend’s?  (I was supposed to be writing an interview on charity, but instead I am blogging….)

Here is one final picture, just because.  It was taken after we did bedtime yoga, and Kim read us all a story.  I stayed with them until they went to sleep.  And then a bit longer, just to listen to their breathing.

When someone asked me to pick a pen name the other day, I didn’t really know who she was when Anais Nin popped into my head.  I haven’t had time to google her yet.  The extent of my knowledge was that she was likely French and wrote Erotica.  A friend at work sent me this:

I like her already!

I drew this card in Cards Against Humanity last night.

It took me a really long time, as I was very drawn to to the funnier card. Anyone who has ever played this game with me knows that I never go for the most obviously choice, but in the end I went for my brother’s. “To forget my relationship status.”.

More poetically I drink to forget to regret.

And for those of you that don’t believe in synchronicity – this is a CD I got for Christmas.  As I was trying to write the last blog post, I heard these lyrics.  I had to transcribe them so they may not be quite right.  I have considered all of these things in the last couple of weeks.

Hard Candy Christmas Lyrics

Hey…

Maybe I’ll dye my hair

Maybe I’ll move somewhere

Maybe iiiii’ll get a car

Maybe I’ll drive so far that I’ll lose track.

Maybe I’ll bounce right back.

Maybe I’ll sleep real late

Maybe I’ll lose some weight

Maybe I’ll clear my junk

Maybe I’ll just get drunk on apple wine.

Maybe I’ll be just fiiiine and dandy.

It’s a hard candy Christmas

I’m barely getting through tomorrow

Still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

Hey, Maybe I’ll learn to sew

Maybe I’ll just lie low

Maybe I’ll hit the bars

Maybe I’ll count the stars until the dawn

Maybe I will go home

Maybe I’ll settle down

Maybe I’ll just leave town

Maybe I’ll meet someone and make him mine

Maybe I’ll be just fiiiine and dandy

Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas

I’m barely getting through tomorrow

Still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

I’ll be fine and dandy

Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas

I’m barely getting through tomorrow

Still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

I’ll be fine.

I’ll be fine.

This was the next song to come on…. My battery is dying so I didn’t transcribe them all.

Maybe this Christmas will mean something more

Maybe this year, love will appear, deeper than ever before

Any maybe forgiveness will ask us to call

Someone we love, someone we lost

Reasons we can’t quite recall

Maybe this Christmas.

Apologies for what is quite possibly the longest blog post ever.

Something very strange happened to me in the airport bar.  I was desperate to get a quick drink in and a few minutes relaxing before flying to England.   I told one guy he couldn’t sit down next to me as I didn’t want anyone to talk to me.  But then I accidentally initiated a conversation with the next guy that asked if he could sit there.  His name is Chris (which I would remember as it is my dad’s name) and he is English.

Conversation cascaded immediately and within minutes (and for no reason that I understand or have ever done before) I had told him about the loss of the baby.  My babies.  He looked more crushed and less embarrassed than most people.  He shared that he and his wife had gone through EXACTLY the same thing (the same number of IUIs, the same number of IVFs, the heart-shaped uterus , and he was on the way to England to see HIS Mum.  He had just started seeing a therapist.  He said he had been twice.  I think I have seen mine 4 times.  More and more coincidences poured out.  He asked me which seat I was in: 6B.  He was in 7B.  Phew!  It would have been just too weird if we had been sitting next to each other.  His wife called and we left the bar separately.  When I boarded the plane, he was having difficulties with his seat.  There was already someone in it.  The airline were unable to sort out the seat difficulties and asked him if he would mind… sitting next to me!

OF COURSE!!

Chris had just started a tumultuous affair with a beautiful Asian woman.  We talked of her and my friend Helen (who is incredibly hot and has a hot English boyfriend).  In fact we talked a lot of the night. We talked and drank and tried to sleep.  Sleep is very elusive so we talked about photography and I showed him a couple of camera apps.  He chose a crappy one (I can’t even remember the name of the filter) to take a photo of one of our cocktails.

The series of coincidence don’t stop there.  I won’t even bother to list them all.  He had been to Thailand with an ex because they had already bought and paid for the trip.  I went with my ex-husband after we decided to separate as we had bought and paid for the trip. We both stayed a block from Soi Cowboy. Neither of us could remember the name of the hotel, so we couldn’t check if it was the same one.  We were both laughing at the random series of events and fucking with it just to see when it would stop.  We tried guessing each other’s star signs, birthdays, middle names.  We got them right!  We talked about writing.  He doesn’t write.  He plays the piano.  He asked me what my pseudonym would be.  I said no idea and randomly picked the name of a famous person.  Anaïs Nin.  Why not?  I don’t remember a lot about her except that I think she was French and she wrote erotica.  Nin sort of sounded like Nina is my misfiring-synapses brain,  I expect.

He had insomnia too.  He slept a few hours.  I think I got a couple at some point, too.  Finally.  Only took god-knows how many drinks, an ambien and a valium.  I am surprised I remembered anything when I woke up as Ambien and alcohol together normally make me black out.  To tease me, he tested me on birthday dates etc. when I woke up.

As we landed, he told me to listen to the words to a song he likes.  Fun.  Some Nights.

Here they are:

There are some nights I hold on to every note I ever wrote

Some nights, I say “fuck it all” and stare at the calendar

Waiting for catastrophes, imagine when they scare me

Into changing whatever it is I am changing into…

And you have every right to be scared.

Cos there are some nights I hold you close, pushing you to hold me

Or begging you to lock me up, never let me see the world

Some nights, I live in horror of people on the radio

Tea parties and Twitter, I’ve never been so bitter

And you, why you wanna stay?

Oh my God! Have you listened to me lately?

Lately, I’ve been going crazy…

And you, why you wanna stay?

Oh my God! Have you listened to me lately?

Lately, I’ve been fucking crazy…

There are some nights I wait for someone to save us

But I never look inward, try not to look upward

And some nights I pray a sign is gonna come to me

But usually, I’m just trying to get some sleep…

Some nights!

And I think, even if I never see him again, Chris is what I needed right then.  Someone who could make me believe in a second chance.  In video game language, he was a “health pack”.  It was level one.  Just the intro to teach me how game life works. I didn’t know what to expect but I recognized a health pack when I saw one.  I’m a gamer.  A nascent game designer with 20 years in the industry. I know this will alienate me to many of you, but this is too much for coincidence.  This is intelligent design.

I know that many will think this is fake pattern recognition.  That is what Trevor would call it.  I would have, too, before I lost this particular baby.  Human beings want to see patterns where none exist.  We are programmed to try and make sense out of the world.  Our brains see patterns where there aren’t any.  It is because we want to.  Well, that’s all fine and dandy but sometimes maybe there really are patterns.  We don’t have this whole universe figured out yet.   When I was young, I used to call it Synchronicity   I thought I made this word up – but as I grew up I found out it existed (damn you, Carl Jung!)  I wanted to know what fake pattern recognition was called.  I had to look it up.  It is called Apophenia.

My pet theory is that time doesn’t exist.  Time is a construct that our brains came up with so we could make sense of this crazy world because our brains aren’t big enough to comprehend the enormity of a timeless universe.

I was trying to tell Chris about it and he said that is what I should call my book.  “Time does not exist.”  I don’t want to write a book.  I want to sleep.

LATER UPDATE

Chris and I both check, and we DID stay at the same hotel in Bangkok.  The Rembrandt on Sukhumvit Road.  Oh, and Christina bought him the male version of the only perfume. I have ever worn. (Which is also the same and only perfume Trevor’s ex wears.)  And sure, these are coincidences… but so many of them?  I think I am developing my crazy theory even more.  I have started to think that not only does time and space not exist lineally, but maybe people don’t either.  Maybe we are all particles of the same thing, and you just collide with people using similar particles to you when you really need to.   (I have a friend who says we are all made of star dust!)

When I was very young, maybe 10, I  noticed for the first time that I can become disconnected with the world.  I used to describe it as if there were many parallel universes and only one “Nina” consciousness – and that something important was happening in another one of them.  An old boyfriend contacted me recently to remind me that I once told him that I sometimes felt I was watching my life from the outside and that he felt like that right now.   Don’t lock me up yet.  I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.  I am just spitballing 🙂 .

Yesterday Trevor made me breakfast and found my ink (green).  He offered to put away the Christmas ornaments that he didn’t want put up in the first place if I just stacked them in one place.

He drove me to the airport (which according to Harry in “when Harry met Sally” only happens at the beginning of a relationship.  Not nearly 13 years later.)

He was laughing at my franticness and general tiredness and shitshow personality.  He told me “pull it together, Dobner” with a smile.  I told him sometimes you have to fall down before you can get back up again.  When you shuffle a pack of cards badly, you can end up with some up and some down.  You need to start again.  Carefully turning them all the right way round before you shuffle them correctly.  I have become unshuffled and unhinged.  I need to grab the reins.  Become unruffled and unsung.  I don’t need to blow my own trumpet.  I will bring my saxophone back from England with me.  I need sleep.

I thought I would sleep on the plane, but life had other plans for me.  My insomnia is full on Fight Club scale now.  Soon I am going to be talking to myself about “single serving friends” and hoping Brad Pitt will tell me I am clever.

Yesterday, I accidentally copied someone’s writing style.   I didn’t mean to.  Staccato.  Their writing confounds me and impresses me.  They write with anger and an aching beauty.  They have the soul of a poet.  And so does my husband.  They both have a temper.  So do I.  I’m  allowing more people into my life.  Many of them writers – but I don’t know that until they start to offer me words.  They LOVE words.  I immediately fall in love with all of them.  Paul writes with the intensity of William Gibson, Brian writes like Gandalf, Wendy writes like a witchy woman.  Hugh writes with other people’s cast-off fucked-up words that make me laugh.  Chris writes like a pianist, a DJ, and god-knows what and who else I will add to my life.

What am I?

I love words.  Words are easy and they are our friends.  Yes, words can hurt, but they can’t kill.  And used correctly, they can wrap their arms around you and keep you safe and warm, like a baby bird.  Maybe like a tiny Raven? (the capital R is not an accident.)  Like a baby.  Like a baby in a womb.  My womb.

I need to find my own voice.  Maybe that should be my resolution for next year.   Just be me.