Ina Disguise's Blog: New blog, page 68

What’s the point?

I would like to have something else to say, but I really don’t. Life is short, you had better hurry.

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My 47th Birthday Present from David Wolfe UK event 2017

My 47th Birthday Present from David Wolfe UK event 2017

Today is my birthday.  I am avoiding all calls from social services and have been out buying obscure seeds and a gigantic commercial blender (we are into horsepower level of power now and the kitchen sounds like a large car starts up when I prepare our respective supermix)

I took the liberty of looking up the UK events page for Wolfe, to see if I wanted to buy the ticket for October, and on a very tiny link at the bottom of the search box, at last came across the blog post about how Wolfe keeps his wife of seven years happy.

So thank God I found it before buying a non-refundable ticket for an event that I would have been tolerating only to get moved on with my academic work.  The last seven years has been a source of hurt, self-doubt and self-loathing for no reason at all!  How long would it have taken Wolfe to email and simply say sorry, misunderstood, what is your work about, actually?

Instead of which, I have been blocked in terms of an important piece of work, I have done a lot of completely irrelevant and unnecessary work, and Ina has, all things considered, been a complete waste of my time and energy!

I am pretty delighted that I spotted this very tiny link before I spent any money on the non-refundable ticket.  I can now not bother doing anything about my health and basically stop wasting my time worrying about hurting the feelings of somebody with no apparent conscience about how he treats complete strangers.

Not the first time I have been assured of my complete lack of importance, and it won’t be the last. Happy birthday and wasted decade.  What a bore. Don’t think there is a way of putting a positive spin on this.

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Handling Stress

I have not handled the last three months at all well. As a result, I do not feel in control of my surroundings, I was chatting to myself about how tired I was this morning as I fed the cat, and I entirely cracked up despite being lauded as taking great care of my mother at the meeting I did not attend. So here is a post about handling stress, from someone who cannot, to the point of ignoring the phone this morning.

One of the pithier things that are said to you when you are a carer is that you are supposed to look after yourself first, as you cannot pour from an empty cup.  Whilst this may be true, it is not practically possible for many people, never mind somebody in a position where they are scared to accept help because it means the involvement of family who mean them harm.

I became aware that I was suffering from more advanced levels of stress after my mother came out of hospital, and rather than accept that my mother’s new raw diet was making her well, social services and the NHS did everything to refuse to accept the information, which as you can imagine is extremely frustrating in addition to being a time-waster in other respects.  Why would I give up my pension, career and right to children to make a bad job of caring for my mother?  You would need to ask them this question.  Clearly I am very ugly, and have nothing else to do.

It has not affected mother’s care up until the last month, when I have not been as assiduous about her massage and exercise as I could have been, since I did not know if she was going to be here or not.  They like to tell you that they are doing the opposite of what they are actually doing, so as they told me many times that they had no intention of removing her, I was convinced that everything they were doing indicated that they were.

This week, they had a third meeting about her ‘protection.’  Her protection has consisted of passing information to her vile children, stressing me out as much as they could, investigating her unusually healthy diet on the grounds that it did not look ‘normal’ enough and insisting that nurses who are here for 5 minutes a day are to be listened to, whilst I am not.  I did not end up going to this meeting, as I was aware that I was too stressed to sit in a room full of hostile and in many cases stupid people expressing their opinions about my care of my mother.

Anyway, when I realised that my stress levels were out of control, I first took to spending a lot of time lying on the couch with my eyes shut trying to think my way out of the situation. Unfortunately this means I try to think in advance of an established system based on stupidity – they simply pretend that they are too stupid to accept any information from you in order to insult you.  As my family have been doing this for years, you would think I would be used to it, but no, apparently not. So, recounting conversations to myself in an effort to handle things better was of limited use and wasted a lot of worry-time.

I am unable to do any creative work when I am like this, so I then had the lucky break of discovering Wolfe’s event, and set myself an unreasonable target in terms of my appearance.  Walking helped with stress quite a lot, as did attacking the jungle gardens of myself and my neighbour.  Mrs W insists that I must remove clutter, so a lot of niggly jobs that I was ignoring have now been done.

B vitamins, which I doubled up on, were of limited use in terms of myelin sheath repair, and I still went off like a rocket every time the social workers tried to talk to me, as their enquiries varied from illogical to insulting.  Valerian and rose water was of marginally more help, although I did find myself choosing tryptophan rich foods during this period.  I have not attempted any big decisions as I have no confidence at all that I would get anything right.

I managed to communicate that fact that I just want to be left alone, with a return of my previous privacy, reasonably calmly this morning after a five hour panic attack overnight.  This is  not good for your health, and I should probably have done an 8 mile circuit rather than stay in bed.  The cats at one point sandwiched me between them, so worried were they that I would fail to open a can this morning.  Anyone who knows cats, knows that this level of organised cooperation is quite extreme even for cats that know each other well.

Today I managed to sleep a bit, and am going to go out later in the spirit of my Mrs W project.  I wonder how I expect to handle a public event if I cannot handle a bunch of strangers entering my home and expressing ill-informed opinions about my mother’s care?  Should I not be more laid back about this, since she is 90 and I cannot expect her to live forever?  Given that she has had 22 years, and the life I wanted is out of reach, should I not be pulling back?  Or is it just the seething fury at the level of disrespect for the sacrifices I made for this family whilst being treated like utter garbage being extended to random strangers who readily make stupid assumptions about my life?  Again yesterday, I had a nurse telling me that I failed to maintain long-term relationships in response to my explaining that I had managed even heavy jobs here thanks to my team of ex-boyfriends dropping in at various times over the last twenty years.  On the contrary, they have been around for thirty years.  It is a bit like having six absent husbands who don’t hang around for the nagging.  Surely that suits everyone?

Anyway, I have learned from the last three months that I am no longer able to handle strangers in my home or stress particularly well and I definitely need to improve my level of fitness and I need to get out of this situation a bit more.  I feel considering going to the event is on one hand selfish, and on the other not selfish enough.  Nobody gives a shit about my well-being.  They keep telling me that I need more help to manage one sleepy old lady, apparently not understanding that the more superficial bullshit I have to talk and the more strangers that come into my home, the more danger I feel we are in, given the persistent investigation.  Therefore even when they want to come here and deliver good news, it is just another threat and I do not want to see them.

So, after saying all that – the best stress coping mechanism I can see from all this is getting out of the situation entirely.  Making space is at least as important as nutritional tweaks.  Apart from that, just don’t get into the situation in the first place.  Nobody is really worth being reduced to a doormat over.

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For those tracking statistics…

It looks as if nobody is reading the blog at all. I have 14 spammers per day, who hit the same pages without leaving a trace, and I probably know the only people actually reading personally.

Facebook and Twitter used to yield quite a few, as did linkedin, and there used to be a few direct readers checking in to whatever the blog said. Now, also because I tweet a lot less widely, there are no real readers by the looks of the statistics.

So, thanks if you have been keeping tuned in, but there looks as if this is a dying blog from the last couple of weeks or so. Youtube is doing marginally better, so I may concentrate more on the audio blog once I have filled in all the blanks that are worth filling.

I am having pretty much constant anxiety attacks due to the extended attack on my mother and I, and I am not sure how much more my health will tolerate, so everything is now very unstable here.

Am spending a lot of time de-cluttering as a result. I have nothing to prove in terms of my care for my mother, and I am not really in a position to carry on fighting to make myself ill.

Not a great period, and certainly not a productive one as I am worrying about how I will store all this stuff and pay for everything in the near future.

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The Quest for Quality

The Quest for Quality

Today I am considering the matter of quality.  As I have previously written, perfection is for failures and people who don’t try.  Today I want to consider the matter of finding your degree of excellence and reaching for that.

If you wish, you can check out my work so far.  You will notice that the work for David Wolfe is more experimental and less perfect than some of my previous work, and that the colours are fairly vibrant, depending on my mood at the time.  There are also a lot of word games involved, and a fair bit of whimsy.

I now look at this work and think it is intermediate.  This is no reflection on Wolfe, I was really seeking to demonstrate the time wasted on pointless emotion whilst creating something new out of this wasted time.  I do not like waste.  Having feelings for somebody I don’t know is a waste, therefore something had to be created.  Between the books and the pieces of artwork I have spent a lot of time on Wolfe.  It was something that I never thought I would actually get done, so I am kind of grateful for the misery.

You don’t get to seek quality unless you take a risk on your experiments, if you are trying out something new.  Therefore in order to be a master of your new direction, you have to be prepared for lemons.  I will probably sell these off at less than their value once I hit my true pitch.  I will put out the Boris collection next year probably, which is rather different and more British/rural than the Wolfe stuff, and then perhaps work on some of the more advanced Wolfe pieces if I have not found a new point of interest by then.  I think the Mrs Wolfe piece of work is likely to take up most of the next two years, as it involves a lot of changes of habit which really need to be permanent at this point.

In terms of my own public speaking, I have put out a lot of very raw readings on youtube, which I am not happy with.  My justification for this was that I don’t have a lot of time, and the audio versions are really just to get more thumbnails of my artwork onto people’s screens.  I do not think this is a good reason to put out half-assed recordings.  I think I should redo the lot and start an audio channel elsewhere to make the most of the time spent.

It is really up to you what level you want to end up pitching at.  As I was discussing earlier in the month, your popular online writers often expect to put out several articles a day on their chosen topic, therefore the weight of content and level of information dispensed is likely to be quite low.  This is more digestible, acceptable and attracts more interest, but if you are not happy to put out pulp, you might want to consider condensing your material and drawing from it later, in the same manner that I have done with the original book.  I have not really used the material, but I think I probably should as it is quite interesting work.

I wanted to be the Lalique or Tiffany of carpets, therefore I am less than halfway to my goal.  I am happy with the extent of the Wolfe phase development, but I think I could take it a lot further.  That is more about me than him,  I could get serious but I was so ashamed of having human feelings for a long time that I kind of feared taking it further.  I will see if my personal reinvention on the Mrs Wolfe project improves this somewhat. (for those not quite understanding this, I had this picture in my head of what I would have to look like to stand next to Wolfe, and I am now laughingly thinking I should shoot for it for the sake of my health, even if she is a monstrous bitch!)

I am considering attending Wolfe’s event in a niqab.  This would certainly solve the smiley problem and not be at all distracting.  I will see how I feel later next month.  I could do with the stimulation for the sake of the game also, since I am currently relying on American reports of his events for information, and this is unlikely to be strictly true in the UK, since he is in more of the upper-middle delusion (too posh for Icke) market here.

The horrible meeting is tomorrow.  I may just avoid it altogether.

Ina

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Status Seeking

Status Seeking

I had a very lucid kind of dream this morning, featuring an ex-boyfriend I would rather forget.

I have had this dream before, if you are into dream interpretation, you may have some fun with this:

I am in a coffee shop in a holiday town. I decide to buy a piece of their super expensive white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake for my mother, as it is apparently the stuff of legend. Notice that I have no intention of actually having any myself, as apparently this is important to the dream. A fight breaks out in the coffee shop as the punters are aware that I have a slice of it.

I then return to my job as a chef in a large and rather industrial kitchen, where I work for a head chef that has considerably less knowledge and experience than I do. Nevertheless I am aware of feeling quite happy as I dodge the Victorian pipes and other workers in the course of doing whatever it is that I am doing there.

After a lot of exploring the staff accomodation, which appears to be a rabbit warren, I come back to work and go through the wrong door into the public area, which is in the form of a bar. My ex, who was Raymond Blanc’s head chef many moons ago, is standing teaching a small crowd of rather daft looking people how to make sandwiches. He is waving his arms around and pretending that this is very complex, and of course with a French accent, it sounds rather more technical than putting cheese and lettuce between slices of pan bread.

He sees me, stops and then tries to belittle me. I am aware that he is jealous that I am allowed in the kitchen and he is not. This relates to reality, as when we were together he was jealous that I was getting better jobs than he was on the grounds that I was a)cheaper b)more flexible c)not famous d)unlikely to stab anyone.

To me, this dream is all about status. I have actively avoided status throughout my life. I like responsibility, but I have no interest in status. I am not sure why this is? I am very keen on seeking knowledge, I am happy to work to gain even small amounts of that, but status is not of interest.

Not only has this seriously affected my income, it has been rather sad in that I spend a lot of time thinking that people are not terribly competent. Competence certainly doesn’t relate to success, as far as I can see, at least not as much as wanting status really badly.

The cheesecake issue is about quality of care. My mother has no regard for my well-being, she has actually said as much, however she literally gets the best of everything, even whilst she complains about it. I tend to think this is her idea of having fun, since her life is rather limited. The fight in the coffee shop is people who would rather she did not have this care because they arent getting any. Therefore I think this part is me worrying about aging and how my life is going to end up as a result of caring for her.

The kitchen work element is about resolving this resistance to status, and wondering if knowledge acquisition really matters at this point in my life, since nobody is interested in knowledge anymore.

Rene turning up is likely to be about becoming a greedier and more forceful person, as Rene suffered from a kind of enforced narcissism as a result of his more genuinely narcissistic mother. I actually felt quite sorry for him even as he stamped all over my life for his own gain.

I do wonder if I have been chasing Wolfe for years because of this fear of status and willingness to drown in work for the joy of doing it. If it recovers my health, so much the better but I am a rather disruptive child when I want to know something.

I am thinking that Mrs Wolfe, the fictional character that I am creating, will not be complete by October and that I would be better to complete this project and write about it rather than bother to speak to him. To hell with the original book, nobody cares about the planet or their own welfare anyway, even the people that pretend that they do.

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The Great Thing about Nonentity

The great thing about being a nonentity is that you don’t have to worry about what you say. You can say anything at all, nobody is listening. I had to take the website over from the website manager a few months ago, and since then have had to try to figure out how websites work from scratch. It has only been close to back to normal for the last week, so I have no idea when it plummeted in numbers between then and now. There was quite a serious gap, so basically Ina had to be restarted from scratch.

Whilst I am quite fond of some of my old posts, I see that I waste a lot of posts talking about personal stuff. I tend to think it might be of use to somebody, but perhaps it is just a bore. I actually got more retweets than readers for the last post!

Facebook and Twitter seem to be phasing out the free sharing of posts altogether. To make things worse, Twitter are banning authors, in particular, from promoting their posts. The ‘eat shit and die’ blog entry about healthcare was mistaken for hate speech, and so Ina is no longer allowed to promote anything at all on Twitter.

Good news for more mainstream advertisers, but what use is Twitter to me now? It seems that unless you are posting several tweets, with a variety of hashtags, you will not reach very many people. Between the two of them, Twitter and Facebook are streamlining more visible content to reflect bland material. I am sure that this is very helpful to the producers of bland material, but it does not seem to me that it is particularly diverse.

I guess the answer is to be more bland and less quirky, which is a crashing bore. Perhaps it is time Ina died a death and became Brenda Bland?

I will use this slow phase to catch up on building the Youtube channel, and considering more of a strategy for the blog. Wittering on about a niche author that hates me anyway would seem rather pointless.

Am up to 5 miles per day, which is amazing considering my first walk, of a mile, was incredibly hard. Evidently there is some stiffness that you resolve simply by doing it. Pretty sure I will not be going to Wolfe’s event anyway as it is probably pointless and will just get me annoyed.

Spoke to a woman in the market today who told me that there were 200 kinds of dementia and that there was nothing you could do about it. She laughed at me when I said I had kept mother going for this long by pretending there was no problem and constanly rehabbing. Her sister, who has dementia, is 58. It struck me by this woman’s disparaging anger towards me, and the illness, that attitude is very important to remain well as you progress with the disease.

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Hounded by the fictitious Mrs Wolfe

Hounded by the fictitious Mrs Wolfe

She has tired me out today. She insisted on a 3 hour trip to the hairdresser, which I have never done in my life. I look very different, but I notice, because I am actually looking people in the eye, that they are viewing me more positively.

I have never considered just letting my whackiest thoughts guide what I am doing before. This is a queer sort of fun. Progress so far is a weight loss of 36lb, radical new hair and two almost nice items of clothing.

Pending radical decisions include completely changing the way I dress – I tend to wear men’s clothes. Not sure I will let her away with that one as for one thing, it is very expensive, and for another, it is over-egging the pudding to wear women’s clothing when your breasts could easily knock someone out regardless of what you wear.

Now I am to walk sixteen miles a day. I am tired just thinking about this. Two weeks ago I would have said a swift no way to that one as it would have involved intense pain. Today I am just thinking – yeah maybe next week. This week I might do five. If you don’t like it that is too bad, Mrs W.

It is probably time to start work on the next book whilst I slowly work on these games. I also have a very unpleasant meeting about my mother coming up next week. Mrs W can take care of that I think.

In the meantime I shall just have another look at this weird hair she gave me.

She does have moderately good taste, I guess, for a crazy person.

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Thoughts on the David Wolfe UK event October 2017 issue

Today I had to drive down to Carmichael, a village in Lanarkshire to pick up a new lawnmower. The old lawnmower was not very old at all but was designed by Germans who apparently believe that lawns consist of only one type of grass, not much use when you have three lawns on a hill. When the self-propulsion pegged out, I heaved a sigh of relief and got rid of the Einhell junk. Who designs a lawnmower that cannot cope with grass, and cannot collect it?

Anyway, I got to thinking as I drove down, as my satnav redirected me onto some horrific ring road which involved circling my house in ever increasing circles about three times on the way there, about what I really wanted from the Wolfe event, were I to move heaven and earth to actually get there.

 

Apparently my first priority was to establish that I am very funny via a series of hilarious and pointed greetings. Who cares? I can be quite cruel too, especially when you are being a total dickwad. Wolfe is well aware of this, so if he responds that he does not want me to attend, it is my own fault as well as his for being a plonker in the first place.

 

I spun this out in my head, to the point of actually having the conversation I have been waiting to have for the last seven years. That conversation is actually about work, what his aims are, and how my unused academic material could be used to give him the kudos required to make more of the European market. Why do I even still care about this?  He certainly doesn’t.  He is quite happy, good for him. He probably still sleeps on Shazzie’s floor when he is over here and is incapable of moving on to adult life anyway.

 

I then got to imagining setting up an actual meeting, and when I got to the imaginary meeting, he turned up with at least one dry looking hippy chick with the intention of humiliating me again. (hahaha the fat chick is here to see me) When I took this idea further to making my gooseberry departure, I realised that my wanting to see him was nothing at all to do with lugging on his lingam, and everything to do with recovering my face.  This, going by past experience, would not suit him at all as he has a great love of being totally disrespectful right up until it turns out that you are a lot smarter than he expected you to be, at which point he runs.  If this is how I think of him, why am I wasting my time on this?

 

Prior to my having this reality check, I was thinking optimistically that he might actually be quite pleased to see me, he may have grown out of being a plonker, and that things might end up OK between us.  Not in a grand romantic sense, but at least he would understand that my attention seeking novels are just that and I do not actually bear him any real ill will.  He seemed to have big difficulties with that.  Most of my rather acerbic material prior to the books was aimed at getting his attention rather than harming him in any way.  (it is all removed now, so don’t bother looking)

Now that I have realised that I am trying to save my face, and this is still about Facebook blocking and me feeling small, I feel like an idiot.  Why do I even care? If I want to write my tiresome book, which still will not sell as Ina is still pretty much a nonentity, I have to write it regardless.  He will soon lift anything useful if he bothers reading it. (highly unlikely)

It is all extremely tiresome, and getting me nowhere.  Why go to all the trouble of getting there, with a no refund policy and the likelihood that he will freak out?  There has been no acknowledgement from the organizer that they even have my enquiry, never mind a response, so I am thinking it is likely that they will not respond until it is way too late anyway.

See how reality differs from positive thinking, anyone? It would have been nice if my imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary, but he decided against it some time ago.

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Thoughts on the David Wolfe UK event issue

Today I had to drive down to Carmichael, a village in Lanarkshire to pick up a new lawnmower. The old lawnmower was not very old at all but was designed by Germans who apparently believe that lawns consist of only one type of grass, not much use when you have three lawns on a hill. When the self-propulsion pegged out, I heaved a sigh of relief and got rid of the Einhell junk. Who designs a lawnmower that cannot cope with grass, and cannot collect it?

Anyway, I got to thinking as I drove down, as my satnav redirected me onto some horrific ring road which involved circling my house in ever increasing circles about three times on the way there, about what I really wanted from the Wolfe event, were I to move heaven and earth to actually get there.

 

Apparently my first priority was to establish that I am very funny via a series of hilarious and pointed greetings. Who cares? I can be quite cruel too, especially when you are being a total dickwad. Wolfe is well aware of this, so if he responds that he does not want me to attend, it is my own fault as well as his for being a plonker in the first place.

 

I spun this out in my head, to the point of actually having the conversation I have been waiting to have for the last seven years. That conversation is actually about work, what his aims are, and how my unused academic material could be used to give him the kudos required to make more of the European market. Why do I even still care about this?  He certainly doesn’t.  He is quite happy, good for him. He probably still sleeps on Shazzie’s floor when he is over here and is incapable of moving on to adult life anyway.

 

I then got to imagining setting up an actual meeting, and when I got to the imaginary meeting, he turned up with at least one dry looking hippy chick with the intention of humiliating me again. (hahaha the fat chick is here to see me) When I took this idea further to making my gooseberry departure, I realised that my wanting to see him was nothing at all to do with lugging on his lingam, and everything to do with recovering my face.  This, going by past experience, would not suit him at all as he has a great love of being totally disrespectful right up until it turns out that you are a lot smarter than he expected you to be, at which point he runs.  If this is how I think of him, why am I wasting my time on this?

 

Prior to my having this reality check, I was thinking optimistically that he might actually be quite pleased to see me, he may have grown out of being a plonker, and that things might end up OK between us.  Not in a grand romantic sense, but at least he would understand that my attention seeking novels are just that and I do not actually bear him any real ill will.  He seemed to have big difficulties with that.  Most of my rather acerbic material prior to the books was aimed at getting his attention rather than harming him in any way.  (it is all removed now, so don’t bother looking)

Now that I have realised that I am trying to save my face, and this is still about Facebook blocking and me feeling small, I feel like an idiot.  Why do I even care? If I want to write my tiresome book, which still will not sell as Ina is still pretty much a nonentity, I have to write it regardless.  He will soon lift anything useful if he bothers reading it. (highly unlikely)

It is all extremely tiresome, and getting me nowhere.  Why go to all the trouble of getting there, with a no refund policy and the likelihood that he will freak out?  There has been no acknowledgement from the organizer that they even have my enquiry, never mind a response, so I am thinking it is likely that they will not respond until it is way too late anyway.

See how reality differs from positive thinking, anyone? It would have been nice if my imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary, but he decided against it some time ago.

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