I stopped following daily news years ago. The vast majority of news stories are superficial, irrelevant to my life, and filled with negativity. I don’t buy newspapers, don’t watch the news on TV, and most days don’t open a news site either. (I keep up with the big stuff by reading The Economist to make sure I’m not completely ignorant of what is going on in the world.)

My news avoidance has become more pronounced over the past year. Firstly, of course, I have less spare time. But now I also find myself actively avoiding the news, because so much of the headline news is about bad things happening to people.

Some kind of wiring deep in the brain must change when you become a mother. I find it almost impossible to read/see news or books or movies about children being harmed or dying. Getting sick, run over, mugged… The closer the children are in age to Ingrid, the more the stories affect me. I feel tears coming up, and a sense of vicarious grief / panic / distress. I have to turn another page or walk away. If I don’t, I can all to easily imagine what it might feel like to have that happen to my child. And I cannot face that. I stop myself the moment I feel my thoughts going in that direction, because if I continue, I will be overwhelmed.

I’m officially a year older today. As with all my recent birthdays I sort of knew it was due some time soon, but then in the rush of everyday things I lost track of it, and again it took me by surprise when the day arrived. Fundamentally my birthday isn’t that important to me. Even so, it could have been an excuse for a party, but almost all the people I might have wanted to celebrate with are in other countries, so this was just another day. But all this talk about birthdays has made me think about cakes, so I think we might compensate for this tomorrow and buy a small one.

I’m a year older than I was last year, which is of course true for all days… but today the digits rolled over and my new age starts with a 3. That actually makes me feel a bit old. My mental age, the age I think of myself as, has been “mid-20s” for quite a long time now. So inside I’m not aging by a year but by over 5 years, overnight. That’s a bit of a shock.

Another statistic: there will be (or has been) a point some time this summer, I don’t know the exact date, when I will have spent half of my life living outside of Estonia. 15 years in Estonia, 9 in Sweden, 6 in the UK. Hmm, I just noticed: if I wanted to continue the series, I should move to a new country this summer and stay there for 3 years.

When I am too busy, I easily forget meals. I don’t even notice that I’m hungry, or sometimes I do notice but just tell myself that I’ll eat “soon”. Then I suddenly realise that it’s two o’clock and I haven’t had lunch, and my stomach is growling and my blood sugar is far too low. As a result I’ve had trouble keeping my weight – if I don’t take care, I lose weight. (While that may sound like a good thing if you have the opposite problem, trust me, it’s not.) I’m taking special care now that I’m breastfeeding, because I need to eat enough not only for myself but also for Ingrid.

Two things help me make sure I get enough food. One is to ALWAYS have food at hand. If getting food means interrupting whatever interesting and important thing that I’m doing to take the lift down to the cafeteria and queue to get a muffin and then get back up, well, that’s just too much work and won’t happen. But if all I need to do is to open a drawer, the equation changes. Of course this only works if I actually want to eat whatever I have at hand, so there must be choice, which is why I have a well-stocked snacks drawer at work. There’s always at least two kinds of cereal bars, and one or two kinds of dried fruit, and I usually bring fresh fruit or yoghurt with me every morning.

The other is to remind myself to eat. I actually have reminders in Outlook at work that simply say “Eat”. One at 11, one at 13 for lunch, and one at 16. My colleagues have been laughing at me for years about these (different colleagues over different years) but it really works. I call this my food and sleep clock, or in Swedish mat- och sovklocka. (The food and sleep clock was invented by Skalman, a green turtle in a Swedish children’s comic. He listens to his a bit more slavishly than I do, though. I don’t fall asleep in the middle of the day.)

I never swear. Well, never is a slight exaggeration – I know I swore in public once about 2 years ago, and I’ve probably done it a handful of times at home during recent years as well.

The thing is, I just don’t get the point of swearing. To me, swearing is an expression of impotent, inarticulate anger. I am not angry very often; if I am angry I’d rather do something about the cause than swear about it; and if I want to express my anger then I usually have something more specific to say about the cause than call it a f***ing f***er.

I keep wondering why other people swear. What satisfaction does it give them? In my experience swearing doesn’t even defuse the feeling or the situation, it just winds people up more.

Memories fade fast. In my brain, positive memories generally fade faster than negative ones.

It’s been three weeks since I read a book of fiction. Whenever this happens, whenever more than just a few days pass between books, I start to forget how good it feels to read. Starting on the next book, even choosing a book to read, begins to seem not worth the effort. I have to remind myself that I like reading, and tell myself to just read a teensy little bit. Once I do that, the joy comes flooding back and I keep reading the book and finish it and pick up the next one and the next. And then I am baffled as to how I could possibly have forgotten that warm feeling.

The same happens with working out. It is so easy to think about what a bother it would be to find my clothes… and to pack… and to go to the gym or sports club… and how tired I will be afterwards… and forget just how good the activity itself makes me feel. But I know from experience that once I am there, I always enjoy the activity. Whenever I have forced myself to go despite this lazy reluctance, I have never regretted it. I have never ever come home afterwards, thinking “I was right about that… I should just have stayed home.”

Even with activities I really enjoy, like reading books or doing yoga, that first step can be really hard. I have to consciously fight the inertia. The initial effort almost manages to outweigh the more distant pleasure. (The discount rate for that pleasure must be massive!)

The one thing that helps most is habit and scheduling. It is a lot easier to go to the yoga class when it is a fixture in my calendar. It is a lot easier to cycle to work when I have done it daily for… five years? or is it six?

Another trick that works is taking a tiny first step. Pick up a book and open it, without committing to actually read it. Just look at the first page. Once I get that far, the momentum is usually enough to carry me along.

Yesterday I finally picked up a book again and I finished it today. I’m now going to start on the next one straight away so I don’t waste another three weeks without books!

We’ve been watching the first season of Buffy in the evenings. (It’s been years since we had a TV so we generally don’t see any TV series when they actually run.) There was one episode where people’s nightmares became real – not only for them but for everyone. One of Xander’s nightmares was about a clown who had scared him during his 6th birthday party.

It made me think about my own nightmares. I don’t have nightmares particularly often – generally only when I am fevered or when my brain is otherwise totally knocked out of its orbit.

One nightmare that I used to have, but don’t anymore, was a childhood one that survived for many years, like Xander’s. It makes sense that a childhood nightmare would survive – we are most vulnerable to nightmares when we are children, small and powerless in a large and scary world. In that dream the world is a child’s drawing of a forest. A very young child’s drawing, with trees that are green circular scribbles and tangles on top of a brown stump. And I am running through that forest while being chased by a child’s drawing of a monster: a big black circular scribble. In fact I never see the monster but I know it is there, and I know what it looks like. I remember having that dream already over 20 years ago.

Two nightmares that I have occasionally had in more recent years both also involve running. But now I’m not running away from anything – I am running towards something, or sometimes simply running but despite my enormous efforts I barely move forward. In one variation I feel like I am running uphill through treacle and against the wind: I feel constant resistance that slows me down. I lean forward, into the resistance, until I am leaning so far that I feel like I should fall forward, but I never do.

In another variety I am again running but my feet don’t get a grip. In this dream world running is done by pushing the ground backwards underneath me, only it’s like I cannot touch the ground. My feet are moving but simply passing just above the ground without any friction. In an effort to move I lean forward (and often the ground obligingly tilts up to meet me: I often end up running uphill in this dream as well) so I can also grab the earth with my hands and pull it backwards, almost like running on all fours, except there is no weight on my hands or feet as I hover above the ground and pull at it.

It makes me think of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”. The dominant feeling is that of frustration.

It’s interesting, I think, that my nightmares are so abstract and so similar. I am usually not running towards anything in particular. Sometimes there are other people running as well (and they never have any trouble getting a grip on the ground!) and sometimes not. Sometimes there is a world around me – trees, a path, something – other times not. Generally it’s just me trying to run.

Far less deadly than knife-wielding clowns or giant spiders!

My grandmother (I only ever met one of my grandparents) died several years ago. In one sense we weren’t very close in the end, because by then we lived thousands of miles apart and only met once a year, and I’m not very good at keeping in touch with people who are far away from me. But at the same time we cared about each other, and she was dear to me, and I still miss her.

Recently I’ve found myself thinking about her more often than I did previously, in the few years just after her death. Because I keep thinking about how she would have loved to meet and hold Ingrid. And despite the utter improbability of it, I like to believe that somehow she can still see us and that she occasionally looks in our direction and smiles at Ingrid and me.

As I said before, I’m an atheist, and I think the likelihood of a God is infinitesimal, and the likelihood of an afterlife of any description is only marginally greater. But there is nevertheless something that gives me “belief in hope beyond reason”, to borrow an expression from Scott Atran (quoted here in the NY Times). I have no reason to believe that my grandmother still “exists”, but I cannot help thinking and hoping that perhaps somehow she does, after all.

Perhaps it is because I cannot imagine what it is like to be dead. My grandmother always existed, how can she suddenly not be?

From the same NY Times article:

We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues.

Some people seem to get stuck in a certain era in fashion. Look carefully and you will see people who are still wearing 1970s clothes (or as close as they can get) or still have a 1980s hairdo – not because they think retro is cool but because they truly think that that is what things SHOULD look like.

Other people get left behind the technology train: they cannot and will not learn to operate a VCR, or refuse to use mobile phones.

I think I might be on the verge of missing the technology train. I don’t get the point of the things the younger generation is doing. I can see the point of blogs, of PSPs and wifi and digital cameras and wikis. But most of the Web 2.0 craze that has some people so excited just puzzles me. Tumblr? Twitter? Yahoo Pipes? MySpace? Who has time to fill these sites with all that junk, and who cares?

Am I growing old?

It felt good to be working again, to do something productive and interesting.

It felt good to be digging around in code. I enjoyed myself.

It felt strangely familiar, as if I hadn’t been gone.

It felt bad to be so in such a rush. Not a minute to spare in the morning (from getting up to getting to work), 20 minutes to spare in the evening (between Ingrid’s meal and her bath).

It felt bad not to be able to spend more time with Ingrid. I feed her and then I have to leave her – no time to stay around and play or cuddle, because even as it is the two feeds take a good 40 minutes out of my working day.

It felt strange to not really know how she is doing during the day. At home I see and hear her all the time, so I always know how she is feeling. Tired? Grumpy? Bored? Active? Sociable? Now all I get is a quick summary… A distance between us that wasn’t there before.

Time does not move at the same speed all the time. I remember thinking after the first few weeks of maternity leave that 6 months was an eternity, and then thinking the same again halfway through. Then, with about a month and a half to go, time sped up and the days started disappearing fast. I think it’s mostly because the days are far less tedious now, because Ingrid’s company is much more fun than it used to be.

Now during the last few weeks I have suddenly become really busy, discovering all sorts of important tasks every day, and even though I’ve been trying to get things done before I go back to work, my to do list is growing rather than shrinking.

Today I took a day off from baby-watching and left Ingrid in Eric’s care for the whole day (except I kept the milk bar open). Just knowing that I don’t have to worry about anything – that she is being taken care of, that I can ignore all her noises – meant that I could focus fully on whatever I was doing. I got more done during two hours this morning than I normally do in a whole day. I can totally understand parents who take their children to day care even when they are not working.