Back In the Green County

There is no sky bigger than this one. No sky in the world bigger than this one.

My Mum has been redecorating the house again. Her preference is a variety of different shades of beige. The new carpet in the landing and hallway is very comfortable – but it’s still beige. The doors are nice, instead of them being painted (various shades of off-white throughout the years) my Dad has ‘dipped and stripped’ which basically means taking the paint off of a very nice lot of wooden doors and varnishing them. They look really good.

It’s definately no longer the house I grew up in. Even so it’s a little bizarre with the Jellicle Cat here. I was texting people earlier and considering quite how separate I tend to keep my friends and family. I still think there are good reasons for that, this is most easily evidenced by the difficulty my Dad has in understanding the Jellicle Cat when he offers him a whiskey before dinner and is turned down repeatedly. Of course they have both discovered each has a liking for bad puns so maybe they’ll be getting on better now.

Maybe. And of course Dad can feel satisfied that my life is along tracks he likes now. I feel quite bitter about that actually.

Turns out tomorrow the Jellicle gets bombarded with not only the village of Royston Vasey (he’s been through that a couple of times before) but also the staff of Royston Vasey school… hmmm that’ll amuse me. Both of the teachers who know my actual sexual orientation will be there, that includes the only one I officially outed myself to. I’m sure he can cope.

We’re under the biggest sky in the world here. Under it I’m realising precisely how much I’m turning into my Dad. Proving that I’m still Daddy’s Girl involves me knowing that a circle is 2 pi radions and that there are 100 gradions in a 90 degree angle. Pi is 3.14, so I’m not remembering it very far at all unfortunately. Luckily mostly what being Daddy’s Girl involves is listening and being impressed which isn’t hard for me when faced with my Dad, so the stuff I’ve forgotten, the Mathsy stuff doesn’t matter. Looking at the Jellicle though, as he tried to ignore Dad’s random pop quiz and play Scrabble with my Mother, I was suddenly reminded of Foxy Jonno’s face last time I had to explain some classical referencing to him. I am turning into my Dad, and not in any sort of good way. On the other hand for a girl who hasn’t done Physics for ten years and never took it past GCSE I think knowing what a gradion is is relatively impressive. Still had to tell him I wasn’t going to retrain and become a Physics teacher.

Daddy’s Girl. Yep, still there. He got a Leonard Cohen CD for his birthday, we laughed together and told Mum that we’d play it all day tomorrow. Funny, huh. Occaisionally I think Plath would have still ended up in that gas oven even if Otto Plath hadn’t died until she’d married Ted Hughes (not that she’d have married Hughes if that was the case of course).

The biggest of skies is here in the Green County, reminding me of exactly how insignificant I really am. No, this is a good thing. A happy thing. Mish living in a world where Mish doesn’t matter one jot, not to the way the sky and the fields and the wolds and the fens work. Mish living in a world where what Mish is really like doesn’t matter one jot, it’s all in how she can be filtered and re-projected that counts (and of course she doesn’t do the reprojecting), for one thing she doesn’t get called Mish over here.

The biggest of skies, none bigger.

I’m not doing too great at the momen. I’m taking refuge in familiar attitudes and habits, ones that I’m trying my damnedest to break free from.

His password is Saturn. I’m not trying to read into that but it’s so bloody appropriate I’m trying not to laugh until I cry. My automatic response is hysteria.

Hysteria and self-destruction and running away.

It’s so easy for me to be cynical about love. It’s far too easy for me to slip back into it all and I’m trying to get away from that.

Lately though I have been being way too dependant all over the place and with the wrong people and just not thinking before acting. Or else getting drunk. However you slice it I’ve let people down lately because my own problems have become so all embracing and I haven’t been saying no enough, or rather saying it at all the wrong times in all the wrong places. I knew this would take time, maybe though I envisioned that it would take less time or something. I wanted to be the best Mish I could be and I knew that I was slipping, far far back in the past. I need to get out of this past, I need to face parts of it and get rid of them. Embrace love for what it is, take my independence and have it within love not because I’m spitting in her face and running hell for leather in the opposite direction.
However you slice everything lately I’m at fault, oh not totally and not for absolutely everything, certainly I’m not responsible for half of what Bobbin loo gossip would have me responsible for. But I am letting people down, people who have inspired me to try to be this wonderful person some people think I am, I’m letting myself down, this Mish whoever she is, whoever she can be.

Love is so fucking difficult for me. It would be so much easier for me to get on a train and leave. Theres adverts in the papers lately, jobs all around the globe that I could get far easier than staying in Castle Moon and not getting anything. And it comes down and back to Love. I’m not walking out on this, I’m not retreating into that oh so easy cynicism and I’m not taking the other easy route for me which would be to tell myself I’m right about everything and becoming some dependant little girl, shutting down all possibilities for the Mish to get out.

Saturn, how appropriate is that?

The biggest sky in the world. Biggest fucking sky in forever and Mish is always screaming at that sky and telling it who she is, and it doesn’t matter one jot to the sky because you can be whoever you want to be under that sky and it isn’t going to pay the damnedest bit of attention or change however you end up. It’s always going to be the sky.

I encourage myself in the worst ways, I always have. I’m making bad decisions lately. Really bad. I can’t tell the world to stay away or not come and talk to me because that just encourages me to retreat within myself in the worst of ways rather than the best but I do advise anyone who is asking my opinion on things (I’m including questions such as ‘does this shade of green suit me?’) let alone anyone who asks advice to take my responses with a larger pinch of salt than you would usually.

I’m having problems at the moment. Oh in the grand scale of things compared to a lot of friends and acquaintences who are and have really gone through things lately I’m having a ball, but don’t expect Mish to be quite right at the moment. For gods sakes don’t rely on me.

Biggest sky in the world.

Saturn, even if it is just psychodrama, even if it is totally real on whatever level there are some things I have to do, and soon, awfully soon. I have to right myself with Love for one thing, you can’t expect a clear ride after eight years of calling someone a Bitch.

Biggest sky to strip naked under.

I’m getting there and I will be ok. Soon. Just need a little more time. Time and a blasted heath.

3 thoughts on “Back In the Green County

  1. Remembering what a Gradian is is pretty impressive, although I’m not sure why anyone would be expected to remember it, as it’s a pretty pointless way of measuring angles.
    (That actually sounds like one of my late grandad’s random pop quizes, where I would always have to find a polite way of explaining that no, I don’t know the name of the guy who invented the jet engine, or the specific gravity of gold, because these fragments of knowledge are entirely irrelevant to my life. I’d advise you try and forget what a Gradian is as quickly as possible, for any number of reasons.

    As for the other stuff, #waves dismissively# sounds like a headspace thing to me. Having heard the sort of stuff you reckon that you’re at fault for, I’ll reiterate that that’s bollocks (and you should just sometimes remember your ‘insignificance’), and just your brain, screwing with you.

    Also, as someone who has relied upon you in the very recent past I find you to be quite, quite reliable.

  2. I think it was Yeats, although it might have been Shaw, who commented that conversations with actress and magician Florence Farr reminded him of a game of spillikins, because she was able to weave so many varied and unpredictable threads into them.

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