between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Success! Triumph! Things going right!

I spent the weekend mostly insomniac and playing videogames, but when I woke up at 1500 yesterday (after five hours' day-sleeping) I felt like myself for the first time in six or seven weeks. (It's been so long I have lost track of time spent bouncing between infections.)

It's shocking, how little I realised how strongly I was affected, until I felt more myself again. Yesterday for the first time I could walk three miles in a reasonable timeframe and still feel alive after: I could string words together while writing a review in ways that did not make me feel as though I was clawing through cotton wool.

I still have very little endurance. For example, today I've managed to spend a little time in the gym and read a book, and now I'm really tired - but it's not the tiredness of sick weakness so much as the tiredness of a body long in enforced idleness, only recently restored to activity. Here is hoping that I avoid yet another relapse into awfulness.

Having lost six weeks of work (and they are lost weeks: I'm sure I must have done something other than keep up with the column for Tor.com, but I have no memory of doing thesis work after the end of September [if I read a book for research, I have no recollection of either book or contents], and if anything was writ during that time, doubtless it will only need to be redone), I really need to get my head around to what comes properly next.

Searching back through my emails, I find that I sent my supervisor a set of draft chapters on the 14th of October, and added: "In the remainder of the year - and up to March of 2014 if necessary - it is my goal to write two further draft chapters: one on comparative (modern) faith-healing and one which takes Aelius Aristides as a case study. Thereafter it is my plan to put all this material in proper order and construct the through-line of my thematic argument regarding the nature of experience and healing cult."

(Clearly I did do some work in early October. I just can't remember it.)

So I should settle in to do the comparative chapter. Good. There's a plan to be made for that, but at least I know what comes next now.

Sometime in the past while - definitely in the past month - I've turned into that boring person who spends all their time either talking about work, or complaining about it.

In part, that's my own fault. I may be a little over-committed as a writer of book reviews and of weekly columns, but I need the money. The scholarship has been great, but the vagaries of the last year have left me without savings (because among other things, I went a little wild on the spending side once I had money to spend - NEW CLOTHES! POTS AND PANS! SLOW COOKER! BOOOOOOKS!) and if the scholarship is continued, that's something I need to rectify, since I can't rely on finding a job after I finish, always granted I finish on time.

This project is, in its way, one of the loneliest experiences of my life. How much that is to do with the thesis itself, and how much, over the past year, with the family matters going on in the background - my grandmother's slow continued dying, my mother's ongoing medical leave - is an open question. I believe it would be lonely and difficult even absent those external pressures. With them - well, in emotional terms, this year has been the hardest fucking year of my life to date, even counting the year of my nervous breakdown, and it's not over yet. I'm, quite frankly, a little surprised that I'm still on my feet and moving forward. Since my first year of college, since that nervous breakdown, I've always seen myself as brittle. For so long it has taken very little to shake my emotional equilibrium, after all.

But I can't afford to have a nervous breakdown right now: all the physically-present hands that have caught me and held me up in the past have too much else on their plates to hold me up now. (The virtual hands: I am grateful beyond words.)

And I have too much invested in this to let myself fall.

The last year has eaten my ability to write poetry or fiction, or to maintain any but the most cursory of contacts with people who don't initiate emails or chat. It has screwed with my sleep patterns and filled me with grief and apprehension and semi-regular despair. It has seen reading turn from an exercise of fun into something frequently laborious, and my desire to go interact with people drop to all-time-lows.

But I'm still here. And come hell or high water, I'm going to carry on being here.

And I'm still trying to keep the whining to a minimum.

The scene: to my back, a fire with log and turf and flames. To my right, my laptop on the hearthrug. To my left, an armchair, colonised by a sleeping cat. My notebook is open across my cross-legged knees. My current reading is balanced on the armchair, half-shoved under the snoring cat to keep the pages open. A teapot (presently empty) sits on the hearth. The ceiling light is on. My back sweats and my toes are cold.

Every few pages I must pause in my note-taking to settle my anxiety. And so we go on.

(Reading: Saara Lilja, The Treatment of Odours in the Poetry of Antiquity.)

"I had a thought about sacrifice and got distracted by Hobbits."

The fact that, conceivably, I'm not the only person of my acquaintance who might utter such a sentence is a great blessing in my life. *g*

Gym: 2 miles in 23.5 minutes, which is an improvement over last week. Still can't run a continuous mile, but got this result by doing faster intervals. Some weights, a short go on the bike, stretching.

Sigh. Need more endurance now.

---

Also now: need to write more thesis. Which is hard, because, well. Thesis.

Books 2012: 66-75


66. Jonathan Maberry, Patient Zero. (St. Martin's Press, 2009)

Ick. Why did I do that to myself? Now I can't get Sexism Fairy spit out of my clothes. This? Would be a not-actively-terrible skiffy zombie thriller if it weren't male gaze-y as all hell and possessed of two active women characters, one of whom is a Cackling Seductrice Islamic Villainess and the other is an SAS major on detached duty in the States who is uber-competent, beautiful, and ends up falling for Our Hero.

Also, Hollywood called. It wants its boilerplate B-movie American Paranoia Terrorism plot back.


67-71. Sandy Mitchell, Caves of Ice, The Traitor's Hand, Death Or Glory, Duty Calls, and Cain's Last Stand. (The Black Library, various dates.)

These are actually fun. And surprisingly lacking in many kinds of fail (particularly gender-fail) that regularly turn up in milSF. I'm not about to become a W40K fan, but for light entertainment in airports, I could do worse.


72. Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. (Hodder and Stoughton, 2011.)

YA. It's fun until you think about it, and then you realise it's got no logic. Also replicates a couple of icky love-attraction narratives and the protagonist is Special enough to make my teeth hurt. Also, excessively romanticised USian view of Europe. A longer review forthcoming in Vector eventually. puddleshark, was it you who wanted to talk about this one?


73. Patricia Briggs, Fair Game. (Orbit, 2012.)

I thought Briggs' spin-off series was going to be hideously romance-generic. Three books in, they're really not: this is an interesting mystery/character study that pulls the rug out from how you thought things would go at the conclusion, with intriguing implications for the future directions of both this and the Mercy Thompson series.


74. Seanan McGuire, Discount Armageddon. (DAW, 2012.)

I've an inquiry for a review of this out in the big bad world. It's damn entertaining, funny, doesn't take itself too seriously, has a really engaging voice and a sensibility that reminds me of the short-lived TV show "The Middleman." It has flaws, sure, but considering that I bounced - hard - off McGuire's first series, I'm pretty happy I enjoyed this one so much.


75. K.E. Mills, Wizard Undercover. (Orbit, 2012.)

Review forthcoming from Tor.com, I hope. Fast, engaging blend of drama and humour in a second-world setting remniscent of the Edward period. Recommend it.

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I am going to go sit in the corner and shake now, because I got the Reader's Report comments back on my not-quite complete first chapter of thesis just a moment ago. I may need to throw up.

It's not a bad report. In many ways a bad report would be easier to deal with.

Today I went to the library of the École Francais and made my thesis grow by a thousand words. The nice boy who mans the desk helped sort things so that I could go look at the archives, too. Although I didn't get permission to see them until about 1500, and by that point I was brain-dead and starving, and had to make my excuses to the archivist at 1530. I do have permission to come back tomorrow, though.

Carbon paper from excavation reports in 1941. The EFA was running excavations while Europe was at war and Vichy France was appointing the School's director. I am not sure whether this is extraordinarily cool or somewhat disturbing. Maybe both. I am this excited about having been allowed to read them. Really. I was too excited to talk when the nice archivist handed me the folder. I was afraid if I said the wrong thing, she would take them away.

I'm weird, aren't I?

Anyway, I did some shopping, staggered out for a run, translated some ancient Greek, and all in all, feel that this has been quite a productive day.

The creation of writtenkitten has been very helpful for my word-related endeavours.

Well, that, and sitting my arse in my chair and working. Today, for example, I worked through three pots of tea (mint gunpowder green, Margaret's Hope Darjeeling, and finally a rooibos called Mélange du Cap) and approximately ten hours of arse-in-chair time, leaving me with one point five completed reviews (for around about a thousand words) and five hundred (500) new words of thesis. The assistance of Youtube was also invaluable.

The thesis, of course, despite being a miserly amount of words, took by far the bulk of the time.

Lucky for me jujutsu was cancelled and I got to stay home. I wouldn't have managed half this amount of work if I'd gone for a commute.

Er. I think I had something interesting to say? But I've forgotten what it was. So. What's up?

For your reading pleasure, this is the fruit of my afternoon's labour - an afternoon spent tracking down online the work of the below-mentioned William Martin Leake, and then interpreting and verifying the information held in the three or four pages where he speaks about a bluff in Corinth relevent to my interests, and the column fragments he came across there.

Thesis progress:

2700 / 100000 words. 2.7% done.

I managed to run for ten minutes in Ares Park last night. The heat half-killed me, but I was brave. I persevered, gasping, envying other runners who seemed to find the heat mild and relaxing, old Greek men playing checkers in the shade, women and children strolling.

Later in the evening, after brief dusk turned to night, we went out to dinner, four of us from the Institute, Heinrich, asometime archaeologist and professional tourguide, and a 6'5 Canadian boy who'd just spent his summer at J.'s study season on Crete, and was passing through between the Piraeus and the airport. We ate at a kafenia open despite the holiday, proprietor'd by a bald wizened Greek with an impressive beard and an anarchist t-shirt, and a woman with the most bizarre shock of dyed-red-orange hair I've ever had the privilege to see. There was keftedákia and cheesy courgette balls and Cretan meat and cheese pie, olive oil roast potatoes and gamey chicken-and-mushroom in a pot and warm fava, an aubergine dish and pilaf and a carafe of wine.

A really nice selection of mezes: the thing is, with a group of six, you can get something of nearly everything and have plenty to share, and the bill will still only work out to about fifteen euro each. Afterwards we repaired to a bar, where I had a decent milkshake and we talked politics (aren't those American Republicans crazy?) and whiskeys and the terrible inconvenience of mobile roaming. It was 0130 before I got to bed, and I didn't get to sleep for some time.

(I did blow my budget yesterday, but that might be the last time I get to be social for a while.)

My roomie is an insane workaholic, though: her alarm went off (as it's done since I got here) at 0630, and she was gone by the time I was dropping back off to sleep at 0700. Less than an hour later, I woke to the clamour of bells from the nearest church, ringing in the Panaghia. (A very holy day today, apparently.) I lay doze-sleeping until about 1100 before getting my act together and (after showering) moving as far as the living room. I spent a good couple of hours working with the windows open and the shutters wide.

At about 1530, I set out to stroll up to Strefi Hill, to see if it was interesting. On the way, I passed a very talkative cat lurking under a parked car. Said cat didn't emerge, except for a single black nose against a black and white face, but he was exceedingly vociferous. He was hard done by, monkey! and determined to make it known.

The park on Strefi seemed to be possessed of a large concentration of people sleeping rough in addition to a motorcycle gang, so I passed on the allegedly good view of Lykavittos Hill (seen from the streets leading up to Strefi, Lykavittos is pretty impressive, with a Greek flag waving in the breeze and this giant drop - not acropolis steep, but from a distance it appears to be even taller) and wandered back down to Plateia Exarcheia, where a cafe seduced me with promises of roast chicken (damn good) and fried courgette (chopped like chips, succulent crunchy food of the gods). I sat there under the shade of green trees festooned with cooing, feather-ruffling pigeons, thinking about all the ways it's so very easy to begin to feel at home here, despite its immense differences and stifling heat.

Admittedly, I'd feel much more at home within shouting distance of a beach. Or even just the sea.

Spent the evening after my return working in my bedroom with the aircon on. (If I didn't have aircon time, I'd be very limited in my productivity. As it is, I've conquered my urge to push it down as far as it can go in favour of keeping it around 23C - and I still sweat under the sheets at night. The roomie is Australian, and seems to enjoy heat, but has been very good about my need for coolness at night.)

Tomorrow, my to-do list comprises two items. Possibly three, but I can't really afford to push too hard and cause myself to collapsify.