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the last few days there's been a couple of girls, maybe ten or eleven years old, running rampant up and down barton road. the first I caught of them was a while back. I was walking down the street with a friend, when the two of them suddenly shoved brutely past between me and my companion and ran down the street, overturning trashcans, jumping, shrieking like goblins or possessed monkeys.

then, the other night, I spotted them dolled up and hurling insults at a pair of jovially drunken lads, maybe 16 - 'you peeeenis!'

then today. I turn the corner onto barton road and there they are. one of them blonde, corpulent and quite plain, the other dark-haired and clap-your-hands, oh-isn't-she-cute. while the plain one holds back, the cute one approaches - this is clearly a practised schpiel - and exclaims, in an exageratedly polite manner - 'oh exCUSE me. I know this is TERRibly rude, but could I PLEASE borrow a pound so I could take the bus home?'

yeah right. I struggle not to laugh. 'that's really what you're going to spend it on, is it?'

swift as a blunt knife, blondie interjects. 'no actually, we're going to spend it on cocaine and marihuana. is that ALL RIGHT?'

heh. 'fair enough. won't get very far with one pound though.' I give them 98p in pocket change, just to ensure that all their parents' attempts to instil civic ethics come to nothing, and wave them off.

now in the stories, you should always give money to urchins because good things will happen to you. in my case, five minutes down the street a car chock full of teenagers vrooms towards me and - as if in slow motion - I watch a girl climb halfway out the window of the car with a beer-can in her hand, take careful aim, then throw it directly at me. I dodge the missile, give the crazy little bitch the finger and watch them race past, laughter floating out of the windows.

the next urchin that comes along gets a kinder-egg full of broccoli.

pure genius. I want to have that blog's futuristic, sleek-yet-clunky babies.

for once, the dishearteningly insipid background soundtrack of the nero's in market square is not made up of thin, whining men with wispy facial hair crying about their broken hearts for a mass market audience composed of affluent teenyboppers and emotionally retarded kidults with no cultural tastebuds of their own. instead, it has been replaced... by fischerspooner!

after years of frequenting this establishment, this really is an astonishing turn.

found this job while browsing around yesterday morning. the subject matter is interesting, it fits into my increasingly bizarre portfolio and I think it would give me quite a lot of liberty to conduct fieldwork in my own way. drive around the country exploring graveyards? I love graveyards, I could do a lot worse than that.

the downside is, basically, being based in sheffield for three years in a relatively low pay bracket (24k), with no guarantee of disciplinary stimulation. also, while the PIs emphasize ethnographic methods, they also throw around terms like 'longitudinal study' - I might end up a fuzzy theoretical monkey in the number-crunching zoo.

ho hum. still. I'll apply and see how it goes. always useful to get a sense of how potential employers evaluate my profile.

sunday to tuesday, two days in norway moving heavy things up a cliff. got back utterly wretched. for god's sake, counting the london book fair last week, three 6am arisings in less than a week! and as I near thirty, for whatever reason, my tolerance for air travel is lessening alarmingly. a two-hour flight can leave me knocked out and sub-par for days, sometimes. still, satisfied of the karmic benefit derived from the endeavour. for some reason, the airport at stansted smelled of fresh manure when I got back.

then today, introduced a fellow doctoral presubmissive to the joys of openoffice relative to word, evil microsoft word that never lasts more than 60 days on any laptop I ever own before going cuckoo. my current thesis draft is in lovely lovely .odt format, editing it feels like a breeze of fresh open-source air. and the pleasure is in the detail - I mean, when I open it the program remembers the point where I was in the document the last time I closed it! if you're editing 90 000 words plus, this is no matter for trivial scoffs.

pleasant distractions make the waters less choppy for the last few days; in quiet moments I'm still on an odd wavelength though. on the side of my self, occupying an unfamiliar viewpoint.

for example. this morning I decided to disinvest - for the time being at least - in my planned full-scale ethnography of alien abductions, in order to favour more pragmatic matters. there is something nagging me for attention at the intersection between techniques of animal control - genetic and violent, traditional and otherwise - and modernizing institutions, regulatory frameworks etcetera. I keep thinking about a letter the national reindeer herder association wrote last year to the department of agriculture, explaining why they didn't mantain a reindeer sperm-bank to ensure genetic diversity. if pursued, this might lead into a whole field of 'black box' animal anthropology - from slaughterhouses to primate labs, kosher slaughter to transgenic bioengineering.

last year when I needed colourful daydreams to get me through the thesis, I thought the subject would depress me. now I'm not so sure.

and the streak continues, defiant. walked into the institute this morning to find it closed, deliberated for a bit and decided to go in the back entrance. literally in the door, I bump into a significantly unresolved figure from last year just as she is leaving cambridge - regular readers including flats will probably remember the incident I have in mind. the person in question has moved elsewhere, is going for fieldwork on another continent and was only in this part of the world for a few days.

we have a civil, quite enjoyable chat - about mirrors, native autoethnographies, performativity, the role of theory in writing. she even laughs at some points, as do I. before she heads off she wishes me good luck with everything, and I wish her the same.

if I thought I was about to die, I'd say someone was going out of their way to organize resolution for my earthly issues. as it is, it all just feeds into this building sense - not so much of a chapter closing, as of the first part of a novel.

events also feed into this sense of temporal concentration, that events are condensing and happening all at once. all around me, relationships are breaking up, people are getting pregnant, dying, going to hospitals, having babies, leaving their wives, experiencing abrupt and uncontrollable personality changes.

all this is very odd. I wonder what will happen next.

[more]

and I think I'm starting to understand the private theology of my relationships in a slightly different light. uncertain and hesitant, yes, but still distinct.

on one level, I'm pretty fiercely self-minded. a lot of people consider me a paragon of autonomy and independence. this is not untrue, but it is also at odds with other aspects of my identity. it has been so far, at least.

on some level, I still crave a form of recognition from others. not in the sense of approval, but in the sense of being recognized for what I am - being understood, comprehended, grasped and, perhaps most importantly, accepted. in a way that I only dimly perceived myself, this has been an animating force, driving many of my relationships. much of my disappointment, bitterness, sadness and frustration with significant others has come at moments where I realized they were too self-centred, too unperceptive, too dim, too caught up in their own anxieties, too different from me - and that therefore for whatever reason they could not provide this understanding.

a mirror game of this, a subliminal externalization of the golden rule, has been that I devote myself to understanding my significant others as I seek to be understood myself. I think many of my exes will attest to my ability to do this - ex-liaison said she had never been with anyone who saw her as clearly as I did. perversely, however, my ability to do that has been limited by inextricably rising disappointment and frustration - as I understand others more, I realize more clearly that they will not satisfy me in what I seek from them.

importantly, this is an impossible demand. what I crave, on some level, is an infinite and perfect understanding of myself, mirrored in another. in fact I want the other to understand me better than I understand myself - to confirm my own self-understanding and improve on it. this craving is not something of the mind - it is a thing inchoate, shapeless, emotional. it sits in the tensions of my solar plexus, the permanent tightening of the abdominal muscles, parts of the spine, my breathing patterns. increasingly, in recent years, it has created a kind of intolerable tension. between the logic of a relationship itself, as it unfolded in everyday events, and the logic of my structure of needs and expectations as these carried over through time.

most of the time I have resigned myself on some level to not being understood in this way. to having deep crevices and niches of the psyche that never saw the light of day, and were never brought into interactions with others. this has created a kind of hermetic, closed self. the central trauma of the ex-liaison was the way in which she brought these submerged things into the light and conversed them. for a while, she really did create the effect that I had met this impossible other, who understood me perfectly. I felt this viscerally, it touched me in ways I had never expected to be touched. of course, the breakdown was therefore caused in no small part by the inevitable dashing of my own impossible hopes - hopes that I had no chance in hell of controlling, because they were so unclear to myself. they carried me like a rabid elephant carries a sleeping man through the jungle in the middle of the night.

in the past I've resigned myself to the impossibility of these hopes. the question that presents itself to me now, instead, is why do I even harbour them? what is this need in me to be recognized and seen, where does it come from? and I think the answer has to be my own uncertainty about the reality, the solidity of certain aspects of my self. the need to be validated and confirmed in matters that I perceived to exist only dimly, uncertainly. an insufficiency of myself, which made me depend for my own existence - in certain regards - on others. my own displaced centre, shifted onto unsuspecting others. seen like this, the charade seems absurd. who cares? I am my own arbiter, in these as in other matters.

at the moment, entire patterns of events, experience and thought that stretch back to my childhood and earliest memories are appearing in a new and connected light, in their entirety. and in their entirety, they feel like a loose tooth that has decided to fall out. not out there yet, but the foundations have been rocked and if I probe it with my figurative psychic tongue, it feels deeply unfamiliar. overall this is a very strange feeling.

I refer to this as a theology, because it echoes very strongly ideas of the christian faith, for example, that I never understood. in the light of this, I can understand the practice of confession better, not to mention the incomprehensible pleasure of being seen, at all times, by the all-seeing eye in the sky. I can understand the pleasure of imagining every detail of one's life to be observed, because it echoes the ideal observation of the child by the parent - probably the closest thing to an all-encompassing greater understanding we ever get, in life.

to be seen is to be recognized, and to be recognized confirms your existence. if something is seen, it exists - and I know that to me, my own inner life is as opaque as they come. the impossible urge is to have someone else clarify and confirm the things that I struggle to ascertain myself. if you will, it is the flip side of the panopticon.

I dreamt last night I was being berated by an old friend - by flutter, in fact. we were sitting on a lawn, and I was sheepishly trying to make some point about disappointment and people changing in ways neither they nor I understood. in the dream I was all wrinkled up and child-like.

she dismissed me with an annoyed frown. 'no but you've got to see past this, it's about the person!'

effectively what she communicated to me, in the way people do in dreams, was that my concern with people changing in this way was just a symptom of my own short-sightedness.

that is, of my inability to let go of the accurate and coherent but superficial mental maps that I made of people, and reach for the inchoate logic of the shapeless things that moved beneath. which were also part of who they were, however obscure and incomprehensible their movements might seem.

the I Ching gives me hexagram 64 - before completion - with a changing yang in the second line: he brakes his wheels. 

flames across the water. the forces are aligned but the transition is incomplete, the fox has not yet crossed the frozen river. cautious precision, careful differentiation is in order.

the promised result is hexagram 35 - progress. expansion and clarity, the sun rises over the earth.

an uncomfortably apposite diagnosis, as almost always. sometimes I really fucking resent that book.

through to the end of my teens, I was a very confused human being. I shifted, I fluxed, I expressed strange new sides of myself. if a few months passed, I could be an almost entirely different person - often to the pain and detriment of people who were close to me. for myself, this made me neurotic - I knew I was weak and lost, unreliable, and that I could form no lasting attachments because I could not predict how I might change. forming bonds was a way of stabilizing myself, I guess relationships operated as a kind of anchoring point. for a long time I sacrificed the wrong things in relationships, out of a strong sense that I could not hold onto them outside a relationship. essentially, I was schizotypal - insofar as man is the animal that can make promises, I was not a man. not on the emotional level, anyway. worse, by the standards I use today I was not a even person.

I can pinpoint precisely the point at which I committed fully to becoming such a person. it came after a long period of invisible efforts - years of yoga, psychedelics, gruelling meditation regimes, disappointing gurus, self-seeking. it was a summer party in oslo, I was 21, in a toga, having a slightly drunken conversation with an old friend. one who had suffered closely at this fickleness of my fluxlike persona, and who had eventually a few years before decided that I was too unreliable, too "fucked up" [her words], to form any attachment to. wisely, she cut herself loose and let me drift. down by the beach, we were examining some rocks at random. I think we were looking for polar-bear-shaped ones. in a moment of clarity, I said to her that I had reached the end of the rope. I had located myself, if not at the centerless centre, at least in a position where from now on I would cease to shift so randomly and begin to become more of what I already was.

she smiled and said if it was true, it was about fucking time.

since then? I think I have remained in the work of becoming what I am. I may lose the thread sometimes, but eventually I know I will find it. if I change, it is in ways that I understand and that follow intuitively from what I am, from what I am going through and from how I frame my situation. I know my problems and challenges at any given point, I know what I have to work on and what I have to work with, and I know also that there is an infinite obscure mass that I fail to recognize, 'out there', but which becomes revealed piece by piece. this is a relaxed discipline, but a discipline nonetheless. essentially, despite my lackadasical exterior, I am in the process of fashioning myself rigorously into the kind of person I want to be - and which I intend to become. of course, that person changes with each step of the way. and perhaps my emphasis in this respect - on clarity, coherence, intention, self-knowledge - is something that I will need to reconsider at some point. but not for a while yet.

perhaps this brings me to the core of my disappointment with the ex-liaison. someone I considered kin in spirit suddenly changed into a complete stranger, an alien stranger, between my fingers. I was dragged shocked and blinking into a light that I didn't comprehend. at the time. now that I see it more clearly, I can't begrudge her her confusions: I feel somewhat sorry for her, her lack of centre and her herculean but directionless effort, but I'm not angry. how do you push a stone uphill, if you don't have solid ground under your feet? but I am still almost irrationally disappointed by the very same thing, when it happens. I am disappointed by people whose change comes upon them without awareness or prior warning, leaving them no choice but to roll with it.

maybe this is my own fetish. it think it arises from a deep-seated urge to engage with a 'real' person. if someone reveals that they are not in command of their own psyche, that things rise that they can't control, it makes me feel on some level like I've been with a sock-puppet - while the real mover pulled strings behind the scenes. I guess this is unfair, because ultimately none of us are in control and we're all running scared from the lions and tigers and bears. still.

I think it takes me back to what I said at the beginning. what do I seek in relationships? why do I seek them, or find myself in them when I'm not seeking them? for a long time when I was young I sought in relationships something I lacked in myself: stability, a stable core, continuity. I think on some level this pattern has continued, in a sublimated form - not that I seek and construct stable relationships because I am unstable myself, not anymore, but I think I still seek in them qualities that I think I lack in myself. I use relationships to improve myself. this is the reason why I am prone to disappointments that I don't dare recognize as such to myself - for fear of my own arrogance - when they do happen.

perhaps this has reached a point where it needs to stop.

I need to shift and rearrange my focus; simply because people invariably disappoint me by the standards to which I hold myself. and the reason for this is that I seek certain kinds of fulfilment and learning in relationships. I need to recognize that I have hit a point in my own trajectory where this thing, these qualities that I am seeking for myself are no longer to be found in other people. I am my own better judge. maybe I need to stop using relationships as self-development props, or maybe I need to slacken the reins, change the terms on which I do it: as long as I fail to recognize it, this is a pattern that binds me as surely as any other and I need to free myself of it.

the point is neither as arrogant nor as conceited as it sounds. if I stop considering other people as my equals, superiors, teachers in this strict draconian sense, it may be that I can begin to learn other things from them instead. and take freer pleasure in their presence. conversely however, there are also other more uncomfortable questions that this raises.

good dream last night, full of space and frontiers. there were mountain hamlets made in bindungswerk and grey stone, towers with elderly men, a beach full of stranded jellyfish, sandy cave systems. the thing that has kept coming back to me through the day, however, is this. at one point I was travelling down a dusty road with some dream companions. I think it was in an open-air sandbuggy or a jeep. en route to wherever we were going, we met a small baby on a monocycle. the baby had a light green face and it passed us indifferently, pedalling away.

in the dream I knew the baby was powerful, a recurrent and legendary figure in those parts.

the thing that has kept bugging me throughout the day is that I feel like I ought to be able to place it somehow. link it to a trope or a myth or an archetype of some sort. but I just can't.

I think my iPod is in sub-telepathic communion with me - or at least, the shuffle algorithm is. out of 4600 randomly compiled tunes, it keeps playing the right ones. the ones that flow through and turn the world transparent as you walk, lighter than air, spine tingling, synchronized.

---

there are some signs in the air. coming up from london on friday I had a great conversation with an iranian epidemiologist on the train. I was standing at king's cross, considering my options: the 21:52, or the 22:06? 13 stops or 15? which one gets there first? then, behind me: 'you're from wolfson, aren't you?' large, curly-haired, bespectacled man, olive complexion. I said yeah. 'which one are you taking?' I made a snap decision for the 21:52, and he followed me. en route, we had a great conversation - spanning euthanasia, world politics, medical practice, memory, disillusionment, coincidence.

his father died of myocardial problems last year, and he carried some guilt about a black notebook he'd purchased just before - father's unlucky colour, had it contributed? long story. drawing on my extensive experience of such things, some examples of people being paralysed by their own beliefs, I suggested that this was a line of thought that would bring nothing good. he thanked me, said he knew for sure that there was no one else in college he would have been able to discuss the subject with. no kidding. for myself, I'd never met an iranian before, his perspective on global politics was interesting and went some way to dispelling my aversion to the pod people.

---

then, on sunday, I was thinking about finding sai baba, looking up modes of overland travel to get there - somehow, the idea of flying to bangalore seems to defeat the whole purpose of a pilgrimage. it turns out that most overland routes to india go through iran. hm, I thought. at least I have a contact now. after attending the easter service of the living waters congregation, charismatic pentecostals down in the south east of cambridge, I wandered about for a while. on a whim, I decided to drop by my ex-liaison's house for a cup of coffee and to see her housemates - I used to do this last year, before things went so dark. I expected her to be in london, which she was, but I stumbled straight into the first course of a delicious five-course al fresco easter meal; they invited me to stay and I ended up spending the rest of the day there. very pleasant.

sitting in the garden between courses, I mentioned my thoughts about going to find sai baba to my two companions. I'd known both of them for a good while, but as it turned out not as well as I thought. in fact, one of them was iranian - my second ever iranian - and the other had an aunt who was a close devotee of sai baba: close enough that she had even received a new holy name from him. herself, she had spent her entire childhood being smeared with holy ashes in a house that smelled perpetually of incense. whoa, I thought to myself. I picked their brains for a while, between courses, and gleaned some apposite information.

after a while, the ex-liaison turned up with her new boyfriend; amazingly, and I don't really understand this myself, I found myself harbouring no awkwardness or ill feelings towards either of them. the evening flowed smoothly and without hitches. strange how things work out, sometimes.

I don't need to speak when I order at nero's anymore. when the coffeeman spots me at the back of the queue, he raises either two fingers or four with a questioning look. two means a double espresso, four means a grande latte with two extra shots. I agree by nodding, or I raise the alternative number of fingers. then I either raise my right hand and point downwards with the index finger, meaning 'stay in', or I make a motion over my shoulder towards the door with my thumb, meaning 'take away'. by the time I get to the till, my coffee is there waiting for me: I just hand over the money and my loyalty card for stamping.

I kid myself that there is some mutual satisfaction in these transactions. I know they please me.

peaceful and untroubled most of the day. probably still high on a vibe of non-domesticity. I think myself into corners sometimes, judging myself by private standards, and I forget how unfettered my life remains compared to those of my peers. how much of my time remains my own, and how free I am to pursue my own interests. silly human that I am, it is useful sometimes to see myself mirrored in the eyes of others.

even the staunchest independents I know seem to have slipped into benevolently normative forms of adulthood - with their five-year fertility plans and their mortgages. surprised that I don't want children, surprised that I don't want to cohabit, surprised at the lackadaisical character of my projections: 'yeah, I think I'm going to find this holy man in india that materializes rolex watches for his followers. I'd love a holy timekeeping device. if not, there is a small island tribe in the philippines that traps and cooks nautilus squids, and I've always wondered what they taste like...' surprised, surprised. surprised.

so instead of making busy plans, I wandered about town, located a few old friends scattered about the noosphere and decided to try attending the 10:30am charismatic easter sunday service of the living waters pentecostal congregation, down mill road. easter should be an intense time, and I've always wanted to see a genuine case of glossolalia [hm. I'm sure there's someone out there that feels like commenting on this...]. I promise, I shan't spontaneously let myself be baptised. I think.

then I bought some clothes. new sandals, linnen pants and two non-baggy t-shirts. all black, believe it or not, but form-fitting. makes me look like a stylish scarecrow and realize what my ex-liaison kept saying is true, I do have rather good shoulders.