I just found this blog post in my drafts. It’s from June 25, 2012. Pretty much a year ago.

Not much has changed. I like to think I’m getting a little better at the carving.

I’m a morning person.

It feels weird to say it — wrong, even. I don’t think we’re supposed to exist. Maybe it helps that I’m not a morning person stereotype: I don’t bound out of bed with a smile on my face at the crack of dawn. Typically, it requires an alarm and a cup of coffee to get me going.

But once I’m going, the morning is awesome. I find it easy to be engaging, creative and productive in the hours between having my first cup of coffee, and getting sufficiently hungry that I need to eat lunch. Once lunch has passed, I become decreasingly productive until evening arrives and any activity I participate in had better not require active use of the brain.

Recognizing this, I used to set my alarm to be the first person in the house to wake up each morning. This would give me the better part of an hour to do things by myself — edit photos, write my blog, and take care of anything that needed taking care of.

But this is a thing of the past. Now Maggie wakes up so early that it is effectively impossible to give me time to myself in the morning. That time to myself is important – no, essential – to any productive creative process I might have.

So writing on the Big Bad Blog has dried up. A new photographic backlog is forming in Photoshop, full of images I have not yet had a chance to edit. And I try to compensate.

Compensation occurs generally in the evening: in search of time by myself, I start to these activities after everybody else has gone to bed. This has two consequences: Crap and exhaustion.

Crap is what I produce when I’m trying to write something at midnight. At best, it means a dozen or more re-writes (which is ridiculous for a blog that used to update ten or more times each week). At worst it means a trip straight to the trash can.

Exhaustion comes from staying up too late. I can get by on six hours of sleep, so it is not too bad. But it means that I miss those rare opportunities when I could have been the first person awake. When I could have time to myself, during the productive part of my day, to write and create.

It also means that I no longer read between going to bed and sleeping. This reduces both the quantity and quality of ideas that pass through my brain, thereby reducing the range of my hobbled creative endeavours.

So I remind myself that all this is temporary. That soon my trouble will be that Maggie is impossible to rouse in the morning. That time for myself in the morning will return.

And in the meantime, the solution is not to stay up until 1:00 failing to write in my blog, but instead to carve out a little bit of time in the morning, on the rare days it is available, and spend some of my productive hours for myself.

Image used in this post is of the Defusable Clock.
The clock can be purchased via that link, but it may not be the best alarm clock to take with you on an airplane.

We are now nearly a third of our way through the thirty song challenge. All we need to do is sort out challenge #10:

A song that makes you fall asleep

Only one problem. Music doesn’t make me fall asleep.

I can sleep to music, mind you. There was a short period of my life where I would play music when falling asleep. Or I would drift off on the commute to work, with headphones on.

But it was never about the music.

That said, there is a song that I would drift off to, quite often.

And I know this, because immediately upon completion, the next song would come on, and I would be suddenly jerked awake.

Two days ago, as I was walking home with Maggie, I noticed something was amiss with my right sleeve. Peering towards it, I found a cuff without a link.

This cufflink no longer has a partner.

Normally, losing things does not bother me greatly. If I bought something, the thinking goes, I can afford it. If I can afford it, I can replace it. And anything that doesn’t fit into that category – a car or a house, for example – ought to be insured.

But this lost cufflink doesn’t fit that mould; it’s a bit unique.

Here’s the story I was told.
Or, perhaps, this is the special mangled replication of the story I was told, produced by my memory and brain:

Before I was born, my mother did her fair share of traveling. And on one of these trips, she came back with a couple of Turkish coins, which she gave to my grandfather. My grandfather had them made into cufflinks. And when he died, the cufflinks came to me.

So the cufflinks are now a heirloom. They’re not just a piece of jewelry, but a connection to my mother and my grandfather. A bit of each of them, and a bit of their relationship, all in these little things that hold the end of my shirt sleeve together.

If you live in Wapping, or have visited it recently, and have found a cufflink that looks like this, please leave a comment and I’ll get in touch.

The UK is slowly making its way towards allowing consensual marriage between adults, no matter who those adults happen to be. This is a good thing. Without qualifiers. It is just good. The current state of things can be simply summed up as “unjust” — or, to put it into British Political Terms, “not fair”.

But as the slow march towards equality continues, people continue to out themselves as bigots. That’s OK. Bigots are a part of life, and so long as bigots are increasingly marginalized, and bigotry continues to be less acceptable, they can serve as a barometer of our progress.

But sometimes the bigots are not inconsequential voices. Sometimes they are members of parliament; people who author, debate, and/or vote on laws. Bigoted MPs are not good. And some of them are saying things that truly piss me right the fuck off.

For instance, there was this article on the BBC, in which Defence Secretary Phil Hammond says:

There is a real sense of anger among many people who are married that any government thinks it has the ability to change the definition of an institution like marriage.

This anti-gay-marriage argument is one of the most common, and it is absolutely infuriating.

First, Hammond cannot even manage to make it for himself. He feels the need to disassociate with it, and claim it on the behalf of “many people”. So the whole thing begins with a bit of doublespeak, so that he can distance himself from the opinion when people call him out as a homophobe. Good politics, perhaps, but cowardly.

Secondly, it implies that the value that (some) people see in their marriage does not have to do with their partner, love, family, or commitment. It has to do with privilege. It states “I value my marriage because my ability to be in it makes me feel superior to other people.” Instead of a simple, straightforward dislike of people who are different, it is a belief that societal institutions that disenfranchise a segment of the population are good, right, and moral.

That, to me, is far more horrific.

Finally, I’m married. And I have never felt entirely comfortable being part of an institution which continues to enshrine inequality. I’m part of a “many people who are married” as well. Only, unlike Hammond’s “many”, mine believe that our marriages will gain meaning by being inclusive. My membership in the married club will be made all the better once the club is no longer exclusionary.

Today, the BBC published another story, of course. We can probably expect to see these every day between now and the first gay marriage in Britain. And each of them will feature Conservative politicians expressing their homophobia couched in terms that are meant to hide it.

And bravo to the Conservative politicians pushing this through despite this opposition. It can’t be easy for them.