Spooked

When your personal and professional goals line up - how nice is that? For work, I went to a Scream Park, and chatted to my professional equivalent, wrote a blog post, and took some photos for our Facebook page. Write more. Take more photos. Who doesn't have those goals?

(Part of the point of the exercise was to give good google to the place where I took the photos, so I won't name it, then say confusing things about nightmares and ghosts in the same breath. I am aware of, and bitterly mourn, the SEO I'm sacrificing.)

I was nervous about visiting the haunted house. I get scared. I don't seem to have the shell some people do, to withstand being spooked. "I've been to the Scream Park, and didn't find it scary at all," said my Flatmate, "All the actors were crowding around me and I was just like, 'what? Are you meant to be terrifying? Because you're not.'"

There's a theory that we use horror to deal with the trauma in our lives in an allegorical manner. That's why Japan is famous for kaiju, monster movies - they're used to process trauma, current, past and future.

Kaiju represent earthquakes, tsunamis. Vampires are allegory for sex and sexuality. Movies about zombies are really about viruses: swine flu, SARS. I wonder if gothic stories are New Zealand's brand of kaiju. If it's a way of dealing with the deep vein of depression that runs through this country, the loneliness that comes from living on an island, the quiet, persistent feeling that nothing is really as it seems, that maybe everyone is crazy, or else I am. Or if it's a literary convenience, and, like the good keen man, never really existed. 

I have nightmares, sometimes. They're infrequent, but very unpleasant. About once a year I scream in my sleep loud enough to wake myself. (Pause for a moment and imagine what that is like.) 

After I had a screamed myself awake from a dream about a ghost-witch riding a giant spider, it occurred to me that my subconscious has a complete list of everything that terrifies me, and pull up images at random. Ghost-witch on a giant spider isn't an image from kaiju. It's just a dream I had.

My life is extraordanarily blessed in many ways. I don't want to suggest I've survived some awful trauma, because I really haven't. As I write this, I am warm, my rent is paid, and I know myself to be loved. But when I think of when the nightmares started - they started in adulthood - I think, well there was that, and yeah, maybe. 

My Equivalent told me ghost stories. There's a grey nurse, who walks. (He's never seen her, but others have.) Doors lock themselves. Once, some children visiting the Scream Park saw an inexplicable mist. (They screamed. A staff member told the mist to go away, and it did.) 

They have to get the building blessed periodically, otherwise the disturbances build up, as the ghosts get restless. 

I don't believe in ghosts. They're a comfort for the narrow-minded and the spiritual. If you believe in ghosts, you believe in an afterlife. Is it comforting to think this all goes on, and you can rattle your chains down the centuries, or would you rather leave it all behind with your mortal flesh?

 

I have one nightmare more than others. It leaks over into my waking life, a little bit, sometimes overtaking me and making familiar corners and doors breifly terrifying. It's nothing I've seen or experienced - nothing I can recall ever seeing anywhere outside my imagination. It was represented at the Scream Park, my nightmare made flesh. Or, I should say it was made puppet, because of course it was only a ratty old mannequin pretending to be scary. I didn't take a photo. 

I don't know how I'll sleep tonight. I wonder if seeing it, made real, will help deal with the nightmare or bring it back to me. 

Not believing in ghosts doesn't stop me from being afraid of them.

 

At one point during the tour, I lost my Equivalent, and had to hallo out for him. There was a dim room behind me, filled with a looped recording of laughter and a baby's cradle. Ahead there was darkness. It was a thick, velvety dark. More then that: it was a darkness that was nothing, like the darkness between the stars on a clear night. The floor had disappeared beneath me, and if I took one step I would fall. Then my Equivalent called back directions, and suddenly I was on solid ground again. 

Salad Days

Trigger warning: this post contains diet talk (concepts, no numbers). I suggest you skip it.

I'd been struggling for a while - I think a lot of us struggle, this push and pull between the bodily necessity, the knowledge ingrained at a cellular level that we need food to be alive, and the hatred of our bodies, that says you are wrong.

I couldn't talk comfortably about dessert. I found myself crying over cheese. The way I was dealing with, interacting with food was - with the best of intentions, piles of fresh spinach and literature on intuitive eating - seriously broken.

The prize for work’s Biggest Looser Competition was a fair bit of money. I could buy a new ukulele. And could it be any worse than what I was doing to myself already? I really wanted a new ukulele.  

"You'll find it easy!" said someone, trying to be comforting, "Just cut out treats like ice cream, and the weight will fall off." I tried to say that I only ate ice cream as a social food, an activity out with friends, the same way thin people think of ice skating or rock climbing, but I stumbled over the words and I saw the disbelief in their eyes.

"I'm just going to eat like I did that time I had an eating disorder - easy," I said, funny, a joke. They laughed, "No, seriously," I said. "You're so funny," they said, and turned firmly back to their computer screen.

It was easy, like sliding back into bed. I told my friends, "I'm not eating at the moment." No one questioned the phrasing, or offered me food. With structures around meal times and food divided into firm Yes! and No! categories, it was much easier to deal with.

Things feel into place in the rest of my life. Work seemed less stressful, all of a sudden. I started (kinda, sorta) seeing a new guy. I went to the gym and ran until I had an asthma attack, more than once. I felt lightheaded, in a good way. Everything was great.

The old habits came back, the arithmetic of nights out. I could eat or drink, but not too much of either. My feminist group meets at the bar. My craft group meets at the bar. My ukulele group meets at the bar. "Just one drink for me - I couldn't possibly have another - I'm driving."

I stopped adding milk to my tea or my breakfast oats. The ends of cheese in my fridge (tasty cheddar, camembert, a sharp cumin gouda) dried up and I threw them out. 

The New Guy took me out for tapas and we ate cheese and drank wine. Nothing bad happened. We went out for ice cream, twice. The arithmetic of evenings out got harder to figure. I had eggs at brunch, but not bacon or hash browns or cake. I had milk in my tea, just once.

I was moving house, clearing the fridge. The cheese was gone, there was no milk. I threw out three potatoes that were sprouting eyes. I ate tinned tomatoes, rice, chickpeas; I was too broke to go to the supermarket for lettuce, fresh tomatoes, chicken.  Moving costs.

I teased the organiser of the competition for eating chocolate from the vending machine and hated myself for it. The competition was extended. Three more weeks.

Food has many roles. It keeps us alive, sure, but that's not the only reason why we eat it. If it was, we wouldn't bother with slicing, casseroling, baking, sitting down at a table together, cloth napkins, hot sauce, butter on your peas, the good china, ham for Christmas lunch, barbeques, pass the salt, the perfect poached egg, dinner parties, cheese platters, fish of the day, where do you want to eat tonight? Instead, we would eat carefully and scientifically balanced meals, packaged with precision and marketed even more carefully.  You could weigh out the powder according to your weight, sex and age, mix it with tap water and volia. A meal.

In theory, we could do this already. Why don't we?

An old flame took me out for lunch. I ate exactly half the bread on my sandwich. "You look great," he said.

Before weigh ins, I skipped my morning cup of tea (green, so I wouldn't miss the milk), and saved my morning ration of oats (two tablespoons with boiling water - nothing else) to eat later. The rest of the time, I drank water compulsively. "You sure do like water, haha," said a Coworker whose desk is by the water cooler. "Haha, I sure do," I replied.

I taught New Guy how to poach an egg, making a whirlpool of the water and adding a capful of vinegar. He had fancy flavoured salt, and I resolved to get some for myself. It’s funny, the things we learn from lovers. Music, movies, salt.  

Out with one of my groups, I ordered dinner at the bar because my other two meals that day had been pathetic. Oats, dried lentils, rice. They fed, but didn't nourish.  

I think a lot of people get hangry - hungry angry. I get it pretty bad, and can't, physically can't, skip meals. The last time I tried, I ended up face down on the bed, literally catatonic with sadness, thinking how nice it would be to simply not exist anymore. Old Flame, who knows me well,  ordered a curry, and forced me to eat some. I felt better at once.

I was in second place in the competition, three hundred grams behind, but just as everything had slotted into place before, it began to fall apart again.

I worried incessantly about work. New Guy didn't want to see me any more, for no reason he could articulate. I was tired in the afternoons, and my knees hurt when I tried to run, brought be to a gasping, pain-filled stop.

The competition was extended for a third time. I was bored of waiting. At brunch, I ordered bacon and covered it with hot sauce.

I bought my own damn ukulele on a whim one morning, on my way home from Old Flame’s house. I didn’t need to wait until some arbitrary goal was reached. New Guy reached out to me and I laughed him away.

I came third in the competition. I won $20. I took my best friend out at lunch time, and I spent all that money on cake.

Ukulele at Gather

Gather's an unconference - the participants run it. What you get out of the day is what your fellow attendees show up with, not what Keynote Speaker Number Three brings to the table.

The organisers know I play uke though, and I was asked to run a session on it.

I haven't even been playing for a year. I'm not particularly good. But how do you refuse something like that? The tension between no-I-couldn't-possibly and the impossibility of refusing a polite request briefly paralysed me until I heard Carol was going to run it too and then it was all okay. 

I think I've written before about how ukulele is very life-afirming. A session leaves you thinking more, yes please, another forty of fifty years of this, I could do this forever, as opposed to say, cleaning the bathroom, which makes the quietus of the grave seem evermore attractive. 

Standing up, addressing a room full of people, and singing in front of them was a great experience. You are very brave, someone messaged me, but it didn't feel brave. It felt strong, especially considering all the periods in my life where even considering doing such a thing would leave me in a puddle on the floor. Standing and singing and talking about how rad it is to make simple music just felt right. 

Goals

One of the benefits my gym touts are regular review sessions with a trainer. They're quite insistent about it; I finally scheduled one when the owner cornered me and asked me to make an appointment.

"So," said the trainer. "Let's talk about your goals." She read from my file: "'Increase strength, flexibility. Control exercise induced asthma better.' Are these still your goals?"
I nodded. It was 9am on Sunday, and I was a bit hungover.
"It says here you don't want to be weighed or measured... you're still not interested in keeping track of that?"
She didn't explain how my weight or measurements were related to my asthma, so I declined.
"I know you’re concerned about ‘fitness,’ but have you noticed any changes in your body? Clothes fitting better?"
"I guess?" I said.
"How have you made changes to your diet to support your exersise?"
"I haven't."
"Oh... What about your other goals? Strength, flexibility, controlling asthma?"
Those were all my goals.
"I go on the treadmill, and I still can't run for very far without having an asthma attack, and I'm not sure what to do about that."
"But would you say it's improved?"
"Yeah, a bit, but I still can't go very far without my puffer."
"That's good," she said, circling improved on the sheet. She turned it over. "So... if you don't want to be weighed - are you sure you don't want to be weighed? - we're done here. Yay! It's always good to check in, but remember you can ask us anything any time."

Out on the cross trainer, I got madder and madder. It's a women's only gym, which may go some way to explaining to obsession with numbers and tracking. I tweeted that it was "a good reminder that my value as a human being is in direct, inverse proportion to the number on the scale," but in harsh words like that, it just made me sad.

The real issue was that the trainer was reading off a sheet asking about weight - there’s nothing for strength or asthma control or anything else - weight is the only focus, that any other reasons for going to a gym are invisible.

I like my gym. I like that it's right over the road from my work. I like that it's women only. I like that it's not too fancy, and there are no celebrities, unlike my last gym. I like that it's quiet on Sundays, and that the rowing machine has a fish video game you play by rowing, and there's a stair machine, which is literally a Victorian torture device.

The tricep pulldown machine faces the gym's inspiration board. If I squint, I can read some of the notes people have left.

About half of the notes are about beaches and bikini bodies. It would be disingenuous to pretend that there's not a good reason for those goals. Leaving aside vanity, which is a good a reason to do anything as anything else (as someone with a personal blog, I know a thing or two about vanity), there can be real social and career consequences to being the 'wrong' size or shape, and for any individual, it's certainly easier to strive to attain thin privilege than to try and break down the system which perpetuates it. 

The other half of the notes are badass, which makes the review's focus on weight still more bizarre:

 To tip the balance, I decided to add my own:

Hashtag This

We were lining up for a flu shot at work, when Coworker asked me, in all sincerity, "What is a hashtag?"
"It's the little hash-key in front of a word," I said.
"Hashtag YOLO," said another Coworker. "I heard someone got a flu shot and their arm fell off."
"I know that," said the first, "but why do people use hashtags? What do they do?"
I only had time to say "Hashtags are good for jokes and events mainly," before it was my turn for the flu jab. (My arm didn't fall off, and you should go get immunised too.)

I've been using hashtags for so long that they're as second nature to me as apostrophes. Most regular readers can either skip this post or forward it to your mum, but here's a quick hashtag 101 for Coworker and their ilk who don't know about the Wikipedia.

(Most of the examples in this post are from people I follow, but not all are. As always, retweets are not endorsements!)

Hash Key

A hashtag looks like this: #hashtag. That's simple. But why does it exist at all?

For Searching

Twitter allows you to search all tweets. It's a really powerful tool, but it's off the main page, out of your stream.

When you tag a post, it makes it easier for users to sort tweets, just by clicking on the tag. This makes it easier to follow events and conversations.

Events

Because you can pull up all the Tweets as they occur, it's great for following breaking news and political debates.

Generally, you don't use Twitter like Google. If you were planning a trip, you might be looking up things like "meals in Auckland," and "accommodation in Auckland," when you were still at home. This works well because the information you're looking for is relatively static and unchanging. But Googling [event unfolding right now] kind of doesn't work. You can generally get more information from Twitter. (Yeah, it's not necessarily accurate, but nothing is in the first hour of a breaking news story.)

Did you know: Prior to asset sales, the Govt still had capital expenditure? #nzbudget
— Keith Ng (@keith_ng) May 17, 2013

$5.5m for rebuild of Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre, helping refugees adapt to their new life in NZ bit.ly/10eDB2w #nzbudget
— MBIE (@MBIEgovtnz) May 10, 2013

"Student allowances are removed for postgraduate study" bit.ly/KrcR6W For realz?! Seriously?!?!#nzbudget #Budget2012
— Ellen Strickland (@ellenstrickland) May 24, 2012

Conversation

Users who don't follow one another can have conversations by following an agreed-on tag. For example, I see #WineParty come up in my feed . (It also makes it easier for people to mute these tweets.)

Jokes

A hashtag joke is one that only works with a hashtag.

Star Border Dispute #nonexistentprequels
— David Michaels (@Vwampage) May 16, 2013

"Star Border Dispute" by itself doesn't make any damn sense. But the hashtag explains the joke, and lets you find more on a similar theme:

@marsroverdriverColonial Werewolf in London #nonexistentprequels
— Lars (@LarsTheWanderer) May 16, 2013

WALL-D. #nonexistentprequels
— Scott Maxwell (@marsroverdriver) May 16, 2013

Emphasis and Expansion

Hashtags can expand on a point in a shorter space of time - compare the character length of #every15minutes vs "Outer Link buses are due every 15 minutes off peak".

...a bus scheduled to arrive about 105 mins ago is due in 6 minutes time. #every15minutes #outerlink @akltransport #ghostbuslives
— Walter Rumsby (@wrumsby) May 15, 2013

Here's an example of emphasis. FML stands for Fuck My Life - yeah, you're having a bad day, but apparently your whole life sucks too.

what usually takes a hour tops to get to the airport Is going to take double if not longer #Fml
— Stevie Tiori (@StevieTiori) May 17, 2013

How are Hashtags Picked?

There are two ways: user-generated, and top-down.

Jokes are user-generated tags that spread because they're funny. News tags can often be user generated too. For example, #eqnz is the tag used to follow news on the Christchurch earthquakes; when there was a wee earthquake in Auckland, the tag #eqakl was used universally because it made sense, is nice and short and is instantly recognisable to everyone who followed #eqnz.

Top-down hashtags are created for events, or by companies. For example, if you attend a conference, it will probably have an official hashtag (or someone will make it one).

Having lots of fun at @lightninglab demo day! Big crowd! #LLDemoDay13
— Femke (@femkesvs) May 15, 2013

The hashtag for my birthday was #RayRayBDay. You probably have opinions about what this says about me.

The Ad Tag

Here's one you won't see much: the ASA guidelines require an #ad hashtag to be included in paid-for tweets. So, if I pay an All Black a hundred dollars to tweet a link to my blog, I could be liable if #ad wasn't included.

The key here is money has to change hands - if an All Black just tweeted about how this blog is totally rad, that's a personal endorsement and doesn't need an #ad.

#Ttrptt

#Ttrtpt is short for "This Tweet Refers to Previous Tweet."

And if so what is it? #ttrtpt
— Vaughn Davis (@vaughndavis) May 17, 2013

I thought veal was a bird, or maybe a sheep that's older than lamb #ttrttpt
— Laura McQuillz (@mcquillanatorz) May 15, 2013

I've also seen it referred to as "elephant noise". No, really. If it's not referring to a prior tweet, it is used in a way similar to lol.

What is a Good Hashtag?

It's hard to say what's a perfect tag, but they generally share some characteristics:

• Short. Twitter only gives you 140 characters to play with, so the shorter the better.
• Recognisable. For example, #eqnz works, because it refers to an earthquake, in New Zealand.
• Easy to spell. It's annoying when one character is off in some tweets: it messes up the feed.
• In camel case. That's when you WriteStuffLikeThis.

When should I use a hashtag?

Generally, if you're not sure, then don't. Use them when following an event or an unfolding news story, but try and keep things relevant! Remember you're edging your way into a conversation: contribute something to that conversation, don't clog the feed.

Don't #Tag #Every #Damn #Word. Try and keep it to one, or at the most two, tags per tweet. Hashtags also don't belong on Facebook.

It's generally considered poor form to say "hashtag" in conversation. You could say, "There is an amusing hashtag joke about movies," but if you say "hashtag YOLO," people will role their eyes at you.

That's my understanding of how hashtags work, as of this minute. They'll continue to evolve, and one day we'll all look back on this and laugh.