Success/failure

Well. Yesterday went pretty well. I was feeling pleased with myself. Got up before 8am, went to a morning meeting without any 'oh god, do I really have to get out of bed' drama, mentally composing a post about how amazing my whole new way of living is. On the way back from the meeting, spotted this building with three sculptures of naked blue men playing instruments climbing up a wall - if that isn't a metaphor for joyful aspiration and achievement, I don't know what is.

And then inevitably last night I got distracted, stayed up too late, and when the alarm went off at 7.45am this morning there was a migraine waiting on the bridge of my nose and the edges of my forehead. Fail. Exhaustion. Of course by the time I got up the emails were already piling up in great drifts around my ankles. Just about managed to drag myself out of the house at 4pm to watch the sunset.

But, to me, this is why blogs are interesting. I like reading other people's blogs because of the day-to-day-ness of them. Unlike novels, or journalism, or TV shows, they are very immediate. If someone is blogging about their improved fitness or their journey out of debt or their struggle with depression or their work on a novel or their fledgling company or whatever and things start to go wrong they either 1) disappear or 2) just 'fess up that it hasn't worked out today/this week/this month. And it happens to everyone, because despite what self-help books might promise, no one's life is a 100% upward trend.

There's a thing therapists say about how most of us spend too much time comparing our insides to everyone else's outsides. We look at other people: they all seem perfect, healthy, productive, happy, well-adjusted and generally coping well with life. We look at ourselves: we often feel grumpy for no reason, wonder if we've made the right choices, second-guess ourselves, feel ugly, lazy or stupid, worry that we're not rich enough, funny enough, thin enough, wish that we were more successful, got more done and failed less often.

The nice thing about blogs though is that there's no concealing failure. (Unless you lie, I guess. But I haven't seen too many obviously dishonest blogs. I wonder why.) Either you stop blogging: failure. Or you blog and admit that not everything's perfect. Even this guy, Thomas Barnett. He's a very successful person, mostly putting up dozens of posts a day on very clever ideas about America's foreign policy and strategy. And then suddenly he posts about his horrible infected sinus cyst, which has caused him huge amounts of pain and discomfort for the past six months. It was quite shocking to find this post among his other astute observations on diplomacy and the world's military hot-spots. Basically no one is fine all the time, whether because of physical or mental health issues, business setbacks or family traumas. Blogs, like diaries, reveal the minor setbacks as well as the major successes.

So, failure today, but back on the horse tomorrow. And then it's Saturday which is my day off anyway! And then it's only four weeks until it starts to get lighter again...

Two things I have discovered...

...since starting my 'getting up early/at the same time as normal people' project yesterday. One is that the violet tea at La Fromagerie is absolutely gorgeous. The other is that it's really easy to park at Homebase at 8.30 in the morning. (Picture above is La Fromagerie. Homebase not pictured.)

Yesterday was all pleasure. Woke up early, sat in bed having a think, reading, making a list, then drove over to Highbury for a cup of tea in a room that smells of cheese. I'm always on the lookout for new lovely places to work, and in theory Fromagerie is perfect - has wifi, is pretty - but in practice I'm much pickier than that and couldn't really work there because of a) the constant cheese temptation causing my thoughts to stray and b) the constant radio chatter. Why do beautiful places tune into annoying radio stations, thus spoiling the carefully-constructed ambience? A mystery.

This morning, all business. Leapt out of bed at 8.15am, drove over to Homebase to pick up some home essentials, plus ran a few more errands all before breakfast - and before 9am when they start to charge for parking all over Hendon. S'funny, I think I'd always imagined that there'd be hoardes of people doing their shopping or whatever at 8.15am, but it turns out that, no, that's early enough to be wandering almost-totally-empty shops with helpful assistants who aren't yet exhausted and harrassed.

Here is my question for today. Why is it that, having said on this blog that I'm going to get up before 8am every morning, I'm doing it, whereas if I'd just said it to myself I'd have hit snooze on the alarm and rolled over? Motivation: another mystery.

I Have Forgot The Sun (a pre-solstice project)

I am not a morning person.

Some people leap out of bed first thing in the morning, rejuvenated and ready to start the day. I am not one of them.

When I wake up, my brain is mushy. It's not even that I need coffee or want breakfast - I don't even get hungry until a good two hours after I wake up. (In fact, exactly two hours. Some perfectly-accurate internal clock takes care of this.) After I get up, I can basically read - which is what I tend to do, for preference.

My evenings are great, though. I often get a burst of creative energy around midnight (look at the timestamp on this post) and I've been known to stay up writing until 3 or 4am. I also often find I have a sentence floating through my head just as I'm on the verge of sleep. If I make myself write it down, it usually proves quite good - weird, but good. Unlike the ideas I wake up with in the morning, which tend to be more like 'hmm... how about some kind of *love story*!'

Left entirely to my own devices, I tend to gravitate towards a pattern where I'm going to sleep between 1.30am and 2am and getting up between 9.30am and 10am. I am pretty embarrassed to admit this, actually. I feel like people with real jobs will despise me and think I am lazy, even though I get good work done between midnight and 2am! Such is the early-morning prejudice of our culture.

Anyway, in general this pattern doesn't bother me. As long as I'm still working, I figure it's less important exactly when I do it. It only comes to be a problem... well, now, really.

These are - at least in terms of the calendar rather than life events - my worst weeks of the year. Between the hour change and the winter solstice, I think my whole body becomes slowly convinced that the world is dying, that the wolf Fenrir is devouring the sun and that Ragnarok is coming upon us. It's not exactly depression, but a kind of bleak melancholy. Weirdly, it turns as soon as it starts to get lighter again on December 21st, even if only by a few seconds a day, so I never worry about it too much - I know it'll disappear (and I have a light box, which helps a lot).

However, this year, the clang of my internal Winter Gong made me think... hmmm, perhaps I could do a little project! Since I enjoyed the August one so much. This project is called:

Naomi Alderman Is A Morning Person
(Yes she is. She is. Yes.)

I'm not really a morning person, but I'm going to pretend I am, for five weeks, starting on Monday 16 November (although I might practice some over the weekend).

What this entails:

1) Getting up every morning no later than 8am and posting a message on the Twitter account I have specially set up for the purpose. I don't really expect anyone to follow this account (although you're welcome to), but I thought it'd be good to have a record somewhere with a timestamp, and this blog would get pretty boring if I posted 'awake!' on it every morning.
2) Leaving the house while it is still morning and going somewhere. 'While it is still morning' = before midday, and I may cut that fine, and not feel ashamed. The somewhere I go doesn't have to be a new somewhere - although I'm sure some of them will be. Just somewhere that is not the warm cosy nest of my home which I can so easily stay in all day until it is dark. 
3) Writing something here about the place I went to. Or, if it has wifi, from the place I went to!

The exceptions:

1) Saturdays are excluded. Because, you know, Sabbath. Also I refuse to give up my lazy Saturday mornings in bed with the paper.
2) I might fail. You know. Failure is ALWAYS an option, especially when it comes to blog challenges. There will be no apologies, although there might be explanations. I hate when people's blogs become full of their apologies for not blogging/not doing what they said. Never apologise.
3) This project ends on 21 December, when the sun begins to return. I mean, it will return, won't it? Won't it?

And on that note, time for bed! Must stop thinking of 12.30am as the ideal time to start a new short story/talk outline/blog post. At least for the next five weeks, then I'll be happily back to my old ways.

Read it and weep (but, literally)

Read the incredibly powerful Dragonslippers: This is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like a couple of days ago. It's a quick read but unputdownable (that over-used publishing ersatz adjective, but really true in this case). Started reading in bed at 1am thinking I'd look at a few pages and then go to sleep, finished at 2.15am, sat in the dark shivering till 3am.

It's not the kind of book I'd usually read: I guess I feel like I've seen enough documentaries/episodes of ER and Eastenders to understand what domestic violence means and to go, in a fairly detached way, 'oh yes it's terrible, and so often these women stay with their abusers.' But this is a totally different level of understanding: of the way that a relationship like this is essentially a kind of slow brainwashing, that it breaks down the will, that behaviour that, if it happened at the start, would have made the woman call the police can come to seem, drip, drip, drip, normal.

I was shocked that, at the start of her relationship with 'Brian', 'Roz' (all pseudonyms) was 35, a successful businesswoman, winner of the Woman of the Year award from her local chamber of commerce. I really had - it turns out - presumed that women who get into these relationships are badly-educated, poor, unable to find other economic options for themselves. (This despite the fact that I have a friend whose husband was also physically violent to her who is successful and brilliant.) Roz's website contains a list of warning signs of an abusive relationship which I really think everyone in the world should read: both to spot it if it begins to happen to you, and to understand why some 'romantic' behaviours can actually appear very threatening and scary.

The book also made me think about the ways in which our social construction of relationships, and of women's roles, facilitate abuse. Several times in the book, Roz - having been emotionally and physically abused - comes out with cliches about relationships. 'Relationships are about forgiveness', or 'he must love me, otherwise why would he get so jealous?' And Brian emphasises, and she agrees, that relationships mean 'becoming one', 'being absorbed into each other', 'not trying to be so independent'.

It made me think that an abusive relationship is just a relationship that really follows some of these pieces of hideous folk 'wisdom' to their logical conclusions. If a relationship means 'becoming one', then surely it's OK for your husband to ask you to give up friends he doesn't like? You're one now, so you shouldn't be trying to pull away from him by having hobbies he doesn't enjoy too. Or by going on vacation without him, or by taking a job when he'd really like you to be home.

The truth is that however close you are to someone else you will NEVER become 'one' with them, and a good thing too; we remain wonderful individual beings with our own hopes and dreams and likes and dislikes. But the rhetoric of relationships is that 'becoming as one' is somehow supposed to be a good thing.

And everyone knows that women are more 'verbal' than men. So, like those books say, you can't always expect him to be able to tell you what he thinks in words. Sometimes he might have to storm off into his 'cave'. Or shout. Or throw something. Or hit you.

The truth is that everyone, both men and women, sometimes need to be quiet and uncommunicative. If you are in a relationship, though, it is a good idea to be able to say this quite clearly. "I need to be quiet for a while. I need to be on my own for a bit." [Of course if you believe that you have to 'become one', even voicing that idea can be difficult...]

Looking back through the book, it seemed clear that from the very first moment they met, Brian was breaking Roz's boundaries. They met at a friends' house at a pool party. He picked her up bodily and, even though she was saying 'no, no!' [but we all know what it means when a woman says 'no', but keeps smiling, don't we?] he threw her into the pool and jumped in after her. Flirty behaviour? Or a total inability to respect her autonomy?

In the 1990s, Peggy Orenstein did some amazing research into how boys and girls are treated in the classroom. Essentially, it goes like this: a teacher asks a question and some kids put up their hands and others shout out. If a girl shouts out the answer, whether it's correct or incorrect, the teacher says "don't shout out, put your hand up". If a boy shouts out the answer, the teacher responds saying either "yes that's right", or "no that's wrong". Boys are rewarded for being impetuous, breaking the rules, going aggressively for what they want. Girls are rewarded for obeying the rules, and being placid and accepting.

This goes on in all areas of society. Babcock and Laschever did some research in 2007 that investigated why women don't push as hard for pay rises as men do (which is always what's blamed for the pay gap: of course, it's women's fault). The researchers found that there's a good reason for women not to ask for more money: they receive stiff social penalties when they do.

"women who do rebel against these standards by pushing more overtly on
their own behalf often risk being punished. Sometimes they're called
"pushy" or "bitchy" or "difficult to work with." Sometimes their skills
and contributions are undervalued and they're passed over for
promotions they deserve. Other times, they're left out of
information-sharing networks."

Plus, women don't even get very far when they try to negotiate, because employers simply don't respond in the same way as they do to men.

"They make worse first offers to women, pressure women to concede more, and themselves concede much less."

We live in a world that rewards men for aggressively pushing for what they want, and rewards women for accepting what's given to them uncomplainingly. It's a world that says that relationships involve self-sacrifice, and giving up autonomy. It's a world that says that women's autonomy is less important than men's. It's a world that tells men 'if you don't get her the first time, just keep on pushing', and tells women 'don't make a fuss'. And although of course there are women who are violent and abusive to their male partners, it's far more common the other way around and one can see why. It's not because men are 'just more agressive' any more than women are 'asking for it'. We live in a world that is set up for abusive relationships; that's what I learned from Dragonslippers.

The library at the moon under water

Some internet rambling recently led me to this - an essay George Orwell wrote about his ideal, platonic perfect pub, The Moon Under Water. Apparently this is where the Moon Under Water chain took its name from, which I didn't know. I don't think they follow all his rules anyway! Carraway seed biscuits?

And then yesterday I was interviewed by Mslexia magazine, an excellent publication can highly recommend it. They asked me about my 'writing day' and I realised that I'm actually quite superstitious, or ritualistic in my writing-in-a-library practices. [I find a desk, I leave my things at it, I wander the shelves, find a book that I like the look of, take it back to my table, read a few paragraphs and then I'm off.] And also that I have a very good idea of what my ideal platonic library would be. So here we are. The library a few streets over from the Moon Under Water.

1. It should have open shelves, with a good collection of both modern and older books covering all the academic disciplines but with a special emphasis on fiction, poetry and drama of course, and history, classics, psychology, religion and anthropology. There is an excellent collection of medical books, and several shelves of photography. At the Moon Under Water Library, skillful and well-educated librarians have chosen the best of modern works, but haven't weeded out older books hard. A Victorian edition of Ovid rubs shoulders with a modern commentary. Occasionally one still finds books with the pages uncut.

2. The librarians know what they're talking about. A reader in trouble can turn up at the front desk and say 'help, where do I start on Byzantine architecture?' and they know where to point you. For more esoteric questions, they know who to ask and will take your details and get back to you.

3. There is no cafe in the Moon Under Water library - food smells do not penetrate its halls nor is there any danger of spillages on the books. However, one is permitted to take in a bottle of water and there is a charming refectory in the Moon Under Water university building next door where readers are admitted on presentation of their Moon Under Water library card.

4. The building is large and its bookshelves are serpentine. There are plenty of little corners with a desk next to a tiny window (and next to a power supply and a good light source. Although the library has existed in some form for centuries, it makes sure that every desk is adequately supplied with power and light.) Although there is a large central desk space, it is easy to find a more private area in which to work. The seats are comfortable. They do not, in general, have arms.

5. There is wi-fi, it is fast and easy to access but - and this is important - the password changes every day and must be picked up from a box of small slips on the front desk. Writers completing a manuscript are grateful that they have to make a conscious decision to be able to log on that day.

6. All the members of the library understand that silence is not a forgotten virtue. Any member found conversing on a mobile phone outside the designated 'conversation area' on the fourth floor knows that they face immediate expulsion.

7. The library is open every day from 8am to midnight. The loan period is typically three months. Loans can be renewed online, reservations can be made online, you will receive an email when your book is in.

8. Although the library allows some leeway to its members - and the members are in general completely trustworthy - those who are found to 'reserve' a desk at busy times by placing a jacket over the chair and then go for a three-hour lunch will be sternly reprimanded. However, this reprimand rarely has to be issued - the miracle of the library is that there always seems to be a quiet desk for those who need it. There are also a number of private lockable carrel rooms - big enough for a desk and a chair - which can be rented by those who want them for a minimal charge. There is a waiting list, but progress along it is brisk.

9. The library is a part of the community, with a noticeboard and an interesting speakers' programme in the evenings. It also has an excellent children's library - well-stocked, with an array of storytellers, reading times, beanbags for lounging and toys for the not-reading-yet children to play with. The children's library and the speaker's area are soundproofed.

10. I'm amazed I didn't mention this first. The library is beautiful. The proportions of the rooms are elegant, the desk-spaces simple and workmanlike but with a grace to them. Even though the library is extremely easily accessible from north-west London (it only takes me 20 minutes to get there from my house) it has glorious views of rolling countryside. How lucky I am to work there.

Sigh. If only if only.

[picture stolen from the Trinity College Library, Dublin website]