It’s that time of the year again. Or something. I have a new blog, which you can find at Jumbled-Words.com. No reason, really. I certainly don’t have enough readers to warrant it. What can I say? I wanted a shiny but cheap present for myself, and that did the trick quite nicely.
Update your bookmarks, blah blah blah, you know how that goes. Also, if you left a comment that I didn’t reply to lately, head over to new blog and take a look there instead!
Shiny, shiny, shiny…
If you write the same amount every day you need to write 1,667 words to hit 50,000 by November 30th. I always go out hard, because I need a buffer, but I have never in my life written nearly 4k in one day before. And really? It is not a good idea. It’s a very, very, VERY bad idea. It is totally possible to write that much in 24 hours, but it’s going to hurt afterwards. Trust me on this one.
So, I’ve spent today mostly staring into space. I did go weaving for a few hours, which was nice and gave me a nice break from the computer. Which is, as you can imagine, crucial. Thing is, when you walk away from the computer you tend to end up re-writing scenes in your head, and then when you return you have to read over your last chapter and add in the changes you have only done in your head. They were for the good of the script, but ended up costing me about 300 words, that I am saving for later.
(Does every writer have a doc called “leftovers”? Because I do.)
As you can see today’s progress was a lot less. I only barely made 700 words, but thanks to my lovely words from yesterday I can go to bed still being on plus. That makes me very happy.
  
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| 4,348 words / 50,000 total 9% written |
There have been some really excellent posts on NaNoWriMo on different blogs today, and because my brain is still broken (ouch) I am copping out and linking to them here:
1) Scott Westerfeld writes about a very interesting technique, which is JUST writing dialogue at first, and then go from there. I’ve never done this, although I am known to just add basic narration and then go back and add details later, and found it very interesting.
Read his post here.
2) Justine Larbalestier writes about the importance of throwing caution to the wind and just WRITE. About calling it draft zero if you want, because seriously, there will be (probably) a million drafts before it’s ready for the eyes of a publisher anyway. The important thing, she writes, is that you write it, however bad it is, because if you never finish that first draft you can never work on the second or third or fourth or fifth. It makes me happy that she is a non-planner, just like me.
Read her post here.
3) One of my favourite writerly blogs is written by Maureen Johnson. Today she wrote a brilliant post about the importance of the suck monster. I must quote:
There is no way of putting this delicately, so I am just going to shove it out there . . . if you are in high school or are otherwise just starting out, MUCH OF WHAT YOU WRITE IS GOING TO SUCK. This is because you learn to write while writing. So for a while, you have to embrace the Suckmonster. Hug it close to you. Love your Suckmonster, because your Suckmonster is going to help you get where you want to go.
Read her post here.
4) Finally, because I feel that links should be collected together I am putting a placeholder here. Because I know that Tansy is planning a blog entry about awesome things. She is busy GETTING HER WORDS DONE, and so it hasn’t been written yet. Check back later for the link to it!
Possibly I will keep adding links to think post throughout the month. Because I hatehatehate when good links are all spread out and you can’t get a feeling for what how and where they are because you need to click a million posts just to find them. I’ll have to think about that, when some of my brain power has returned.
Not sure if I’ll do NaNo post every day, but for today I am totally copying Tansy and doing an OMG-first-day-of-NaNoWriMo-post. I always go out ridiculously enthusiastically to make up for the week-two-blues that always always ALWAYS comes along (for me). Because I started early my total goal is 53,000 words before November is over, but counting in those 3k I wrote before today gives me a very shiny graph indeed, saying I’ve already finished 10%. So, I’m putting aside the first two chapters, and am not counting them at all.
 
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| 3,807 words / 50,000 total 7% written |
(HOLY FUCK, nearly 4k in one day. Well, two, as I started just after midnight yesterday, and I don’t call an end to the day until I go to bed, and thus got two evenings into this first day, but still. Four chapters down and I feel like I possibly is starting to figure out what I’m doing here.)
Things I’ve learned today:
1) Redheaded characters is on a list of biggest YA novel clichés I tripped over today. I have two in this story alone. Cough. Oops.
2) I cannot write a book without adding at least one gay character. This time I added three. And counting. (Anyone who knows me is now saying “is that NEWS to you?”)
3) Fish and chips shops are called “chippy(s)” in every day (British) speak.
4) It’s ridiculously hard to write a character that DOESN’T READ.
5) On the other hand, writing somebody that doesn’t follow the usual skinny-beauty-standards, is fun.
6) Writing tweets/IMs for fictional characters is addicting.
7) Writing in real time is the most fun I’ve had in a long time. That is, my book is taking place in November of 2009. In the next chapter Arsenal is going to beat Liverpool in the Carling cup! (As we did Tuesday this week.)
I think that is all. Oh, wait, one more thing…
Favourite sentence so far:
Could’ve been worse, I guess. I could’ve been named Romeo. Or Heathcliff.
PS. Sorry about the four million updates of this post. The bandwidth fairies killed my first word meter, and what fun is NaNo without pretty graphs? I hunted down another one, took apart the code, uploaded the pics to my own server and that should do it, I hope. Unless the bandwidth fairies go after me next.
A few things:
Some days (okay, every day) I hate my limitations. At present time they apparently lie at “leaving the flat more than twice a week”. Which, uh, means exactly what it sounds like. This week I left it four times: for a meeting with social services, to buy groceries, to have my blood drawn and to take a walk. I had to skip weaving, because I was already on overtime. I took a walk instead, but I couldn’t make myself stay outside more than ten minutes.
So, if you know me, and I haven’t returned your call (or your e-mail). I don’t hate you. I just don’t have the energy to do more than the bare minimum. I had high hopes for this new medication, but it’s no better than the last. Well, that’s not entirely true. It doesn’t give me strange side effects, and it does take the edge of the depression – this is the first autumn in years that I have even noticed how beautiful Sweden is, I never had the ability to look outside my own head before. It does very little for the anxiety, though, even though it’s commonly prescribed for social anxiety and I am on the max dosage.
Need other shiny pills.
I read this blog post yesterday (link in Swedish), about somebody who has a problem taking phone calls cos she has a hard time understanding people when she can’t see them face to face. I thought that was just me. Apparently it’s possible to hear what’s being said yet having to struggle to understand the words. Apparently I’m not alone about sounding like a complete idiot on the phone because I can’t think quickly enough when I don’t have things written down (emails and texts) or speak to the person directly (in person).
That made me feel a bit better, I have to say.
Gearing up for NaNoWriMo. I wrote the first chapter of my project over a year ago, and just didn’t have time to write the rest. And today the first sentence wrote itself, so to speak, so I guess I’m just going to have to count 50,000 words from wherever I may be when the first rolls around. This project will be quite a challenge; it’s about a sixteen-year-old girl struggling with dyslexia. She also has a crush on a certain footballer and everyone thinks her best friend is a lesbian, but she really is hopelessly in love with a boy that doesn’t know she exists. There is also a brother with other problems altogether. Yes, it will be fun to write pure YA for once.
(At least I don’t think this one is going to be any sort of spec fic.)
Also, did I mention that I don’t know the last thing about dyslexia? Ah, that’s what edits are for, isn’t it?
Picture taken on my walk today. It’s really, really, REALLY tall pine trees, in case you were wondering. I shall stare at it when I need inspiration for evil edits of Eld, that I am still working on. So glad I put it aside for a few months, it made a world of difference!
Currently there is a veritable shit storm going on in the Swedish blogosphere, related to ComHem, which is an internet service provider here in Sweden, and one I have no affiliation with. I have however worked in a call centre for nearly two years, albeit for another company altogether, and would like to say a few things about working in that environment. Because while I sympathise with the people that have problems that never get solved? It’s generally the company’s strict policies that the employees HAVE TO abide to, however stupid they are. and believe me, nothing makes you feel more like an arse than having to explain to a person that “yes, I know you have moved, I can see it here in our system, but for some reason it has not been carried through to our billing system and nobody in the whole wide world seems to know why, and I have no idea if it will work this time, but I’m going to try to push it through once more”. It’s not fun to have to sit there and act like a moron. Really. It isn’t. But as a customer service rep you don’t have that much to work with, not to mention that you don’t know everything.
Cos, okay.
Generally you get two weeks of training, sometimes less. At the end of that time you are supposed to be able to successfully work five or six different programs, answer random questions and field cranky customers (of which there are many). That is not to say that some customers aren’t right. They are. Most are. But many aren’t. A few examples of people I spoke with:
a) A person who refused to give me his customer number, because he had put it in before being transfered to me. The fact that our software that put that specific information through was malfunctioning at the time he did not care about. There was much yelling when I told him I couldn’t help him because I had no idea who he was. Cos, you know, he put it in there, so I had to have the info!
b) A person who refused to let me transfer him to the correct department, despite me knowing nothing about his specific problem. I ended up having to run down two flights of stairs, finding a person who did work with that particular issue, that I then had to drag with me to my phone, where she took the call. Despite having her own desk and phone two floors down.
c) A person who swore up and down that her sixteen-year-old son would never call a phone sex line, EVER IN HIS LIFE, yet refused to write a letter to us, desputing it officially. And then got upset when I told her that I could not remove the offending calls from her phone bill, because you were only allowed to do that once without a proper written complaint.
d) A person who claimed that his dog ate his wallet (yes, seriously) and thus he couldn’t pay the bill this month. In his file I could see that he had claimed the same thing every month for the last year. When I told him I couldn’t hold the bill until next month he yelled at me for twenty minutes straight.
There were, of course, also people that made your heart hurt a little. Such as:
e) The old, old lady who anxiously called to ask if it was true that the government could listen to her thoughts through her phone. She had called dozens of times asking the same thing, I could see in her file.
f) The woman with Down’s Syndrome or similar, who had changed her phone number 25 times in the last month, because people kept prank calling her. And none of the 25 people that put in the orders previously had told her that it may be more effective if she asked her number to be made private; as it was it was set to telling the caller the new one when they called her old number.
g) The clearly delusional person that asked me to add to her file that she was really queen of Sweden, and that her current name was just a fake. She had about a hundred notes in the same vein from previous calls.
And so on.
Add to this the fact that a customer service representative is under constant press to be productive. A call is supposed to be finished in four minutes or less, during eight hours of work you are only allowed to be set to admin for thirty minutes, which means that you have to do calls back-to-back-to-back-to-back, finishing up the admin from the previous calls as the next customer states their problem, which makes it very hard to focus properly.
The place that I worked at had a top-list, that is, they wrote on a white board the ten people who had taken the most calls the day before. On top of the list was always, always, ALWAYS the person with the least competence. The one that fucked things up, “accidentally” hung up on customers with difficult, time consuming questions, the one that had no qualms about doing a half-arsed job, day after day after day. The rest of us spent half our time cleaning up the messes after him, yet he was the one that received praise and gifts from our supervisors, for being so effective and productive.
And let me explain a few things about the stuff people most commonly complain about, no matter if the company in this case is a phone company, a internet service provider or what have you. For some reason this section came out in present tense despite me not having working in this field for seven years.
1) You have to put in your customer number before being relayed to a person, and yet the first question is “what’s your customer number”. This is called double-checking information. Do you honestly think that every single person that call put in the correct number? Really? No mistakes? At all? Also, do you really oppose to somebody checking that your account is actually yours before doing any changes? How pissed off would you be exactly if somebody mistakenly cancelled YOUR account, and then said “oops, the customer I meant to help put in the wrong number and I didn’t double check, cos the customer always puts in the right digits in the right order”? Also, I cannot even count the times our software malfunctioned, and not putting thorough the information that the customer had dutifully put in.
2) When something is malfunctioning, they always act like it’s MY fault. Many, many people who call have forgotten to put the cable back into the wall after cleaning, or don’t try to restart the computer before picking up the phone. Or, their kid hid the embarrassingly high bill and hoped that it would go away, which, you know, it didn’t, yet it’s somehow the company’s fault that the phone is turned off. Also? When you lie about it? I CAN TELL.
3) The queue is always too long. Dude, WE KNOW THAT IT IS. We have likely spent all day answering phone calls, the entire time with a big fat red number on a screen telling us how many people there are waiting for us to pick up the phone, and how long they have waited. We have the phone calls coming in automatically, one after the other. I’m not saying that the big shiny companies shouldn’t hire more customer service reps, they most likely should, but really? I’m doing all I can, and I’m doing it as fast as I fucking can. So if one person out of the hundreds of calls I took in one day didn’t tell me how long they’d been waiting? That made my day.
Eh. I could say a lot more. I am just feeling rather scattered at the moment, and am not making much sense at all. One thing though – every single person I worked with back then has since quit, moved on to another field of work, and sworn to never ever work in a call centre again. Sure, these companies have stupid policies, I can’t defend things like telling a customer to go in on a website to check the speed of their internet when their internet isn’t working in the first place, except for the suspicion that it’s probably something they are REQUIRED to say. Because, yes. In some call centres you are required to follow a flow sheet, that tells you exactly what to say, in what order to say it and what words to use when you say it.
Believe me, it’s painful to be the person people take their frustrations out on. Really fucking painful. But at least it pays the bills. Sort of.
Swedes take few things as seriously as their tvättstuga, that is, the laundry room. There is one in every apartment complex, using various ways to book a time slot. Older ones, like the one I used to live in, has a calendar outside the laundry room where you write your name on the time you want to use. Newer ones use fancy computerised systems. One thing they have in common, though?
They’re free. And there’s several washers and driers and (which I was absolutely gleeful finding out) sometimes a whole ROOM to hang your clothes in, with a fan thingy to dry them.
I don’t know if it’s a sign of me finally growing up, finding the existance of a tvättstuga so exciting, or if I just need to, you know, get laid or something, but oh man. The American laundromat has nothing on the Swedish tvättstuga. Let me paint a picture for you to illustrate the difference.
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Exhibit A, an American laundromat:
First, there’s a room (obviously), filled with washer and dryers. More often than not it’s so hot that you’re unable to breathe, yet the only form of relief is a ceiling fan, moving so slowly that it barely stirs the air at all. There are layers of dust on top of the washers, the ceiling fan and every horizontal surface in the room. And some of the vertical. If you’re lucky it’s an attended laundromat, which means that you can exchange money for rolls of quarters with a (usually) cranky old man, who will shoo anyone out that lights up a smoke while folding their laundry. Yes. I’m not kidding. It happens. All the time.
Of course, most laundromats are unmanned, meaning that somebody comes there to unlock it in the morning and take the quarters put in the various machines during the day. Most of them have a high ratio of working vs. useless washers and dryers. Sometimes you can tell, because somebody has taken the time to carve DON’T USE or SUCKS ASS or NO HEAT into the door of said machine, using a key or a knife. A lot of the time you can’t, until you return, find your laundry still dirty (if it’s a washer) or wet (if it’s a dryer), and realise you’re out four to six quarters and about 45 minutes.
There are a few mostly clean tables to fold your clothes on, and usually there’s a gas station next door, which means that you have somewhere to buy a drink. People go sit in their cars with the AC cranked up while their machines work, because it’s too hot to exist anywhere else. This means, of course, that the air is thick with car fumes, the whole time you’re there.
I didn’t realise until I returned to Sweden that you’re actually not supposed to dry all your clothes in the dryer. There, you don’t have an option. If you want them dry, you toss them in the dryer. End of story.
Some laundromats have people with various mental impairments hanging around near them, because it’s the only way they get to talk to people. I still remember the one guy who spoke to me for three hours straight, his speech so garbled that I didn’t realise until the end of those three hours that he had been repeatedly asking me if I had a pretty cunt.
(I’ve always had a hard time understanding people with heavy accents, strange speech patterns or odd sort of turns of phrases. Even in Swedish.)
A lot of the time it’s just women coming to these laundromats, yelling at their numerous children through the (always open) door the entire time. Once, though, I saw a thug help his mama fold the clothes of his entire extended family, or so it seemed, judging from the amounts of clothes. The only part I liked about laundromats was that – you always saw little glimpses out of people’s lives, the smallest little snippet, and it made me want to make up stories about them, hoping that they were at least somewhat accurate.
I never found out if they were, of course.
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Exhibit B, the Swedish tvättstuga:
As Swedish people love their rules the inside of the door is usually plastered with rules, warnings, and in some cases passive aggressive notes about the tenant who dared not to clean the lint out of the dryer after they used it. Because oh my God, if you don’t clean after yourself you will bring down the wrath of everyone in the house.
In my current building these notes are in Swedish, English and a tricky alphabet type language, I am guessing Arabic. Persian, possibly. Because I live in a suburb with a lot of immigrants. It made me oddly happy to see that. I don’t even know why.
But. You do get the laundry room to yourself, provided that you have remembered to book a time slot and don’t accidentally go there on the wrong day. (It has happened, let’s just say that much.) There are no damn quarters to feed the washer and dryers and if one of them stops working it’s more or less required by the landlord to replace or repair it.
Some places have this rule that if you don’t start doing laundry within 30 minutes of your time slot’s beginning, anyone else can snap it up. And don’t you dare using even ten minutes of the next person’s time. That will not be appreciated.
So, it doesn’t cost money, there are no broken machines, you have to follow the rules or so help you God. There’s no buying drinks, no hanging around for hours because you can’t trust somebody to not steal your laundry while you turn your back and there’s most definitely no smoking indoors. But… it’s kind of boring. Really boring. Nice, efficient, ordered. Very, very Swedish.
…
And I kind of love that I know that it’s not like that everywhere. I can appreciate the calm and the un-broken machines, the lack of cigarette smoke and dust and loud children, yet somehow wish that my clothes-folding would be soundtracked by music or a storyline I never would’ve thought about, had I not seen this person or that come into the laundromat while I was sitting there. Because Swedish tvättstugor (yep, plural looks like that) are always quiet, void of people and you get shit done, but it’s not exactly entertaining while you do it.
Two very different worlds. And I love you, dearest tvättstuga, I really do. I just find it really hilarious that Swedes have to be so strictly ruled at all times. Sometimes in three or more languages.
The best thing about writing as much as I do right now is that you start reading books in a completely different manner. I think I first realised it when I was reading Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small Quartet (also, I can’t figure out if it’s actually a quartet of books called Protector of the Small, or if it’s a quartet of books called Protector of the Small Quartet, and it’s making me twitch). At some point through the third book (I think) a character is killed off and I remember thinking “Wait, what, she killed him off? There better be a good plot reason for that, or it’s just stupid.”
Sadly I have to report that I am still only halfway through the fourth book, so I have no idea if there was a plot reason or if it was a not so great decision in an otherwise pretty damn awesome series of books.
Reading becomes something very different once you use it to see how other writers create characters, how they describe them, how they write dialogue and how they create plot. It’s quite interesting, and I am now unable to read books without taking note of these things. (I also love taking note of editing mistakes, and once noticed that a minor character changed name halfway through a book, from Natalie to Natasha, or possible the other way around, something both the author and the editor had missed.)
One of the things that I find fascinating is unusual forms of narrating. This doesn’t only go for books, I am also a total sucker for movies that consist of cut up pieces that don’t make sense until you’ve seen the whole thing. Or should I say “used to be”? I can’t concentrate on the screen long enough to watch anything over 20 minutes anymore, and mostly find TV to be noise, and not background noise, like music, but grating, screeching, agonising noise that makes me want to kill someone.
Which means that the only TV I watch is The Guild (google it, it’s five minute episodes about a group of role players, featuring Felicia Day and occasionally Wil Wheaton, who apparently got sneakily hot) and How I Met Your Mother. The latter I like just because of the unreliable narrator. An excellent example is this one, although I have to say that I’m sad that I couldn’t find a clip of the episode where he constantly replaces “smoking pot” with “eating a really big sandwich”.
I don’t even own a TV anymore (in fact, I just had a very interesting conversation with Radiotjänst, trying to cancel my TV-license, to which they were very skeptical and ended up wanting to send a person to control that I really don’t have a TV, after asking me repeatedly “but how do you watch TV, then?”), so let’s return to books, shall we?
A while ago I read this awesome blog post with Sarah Rees Brennan. She is the author of the lovely YA urban fantasy novel The Demon’s Lexicon, and her main character is very different from many books that you read about. Far from all, I have to say, since people are writing more and more books which deviate from the usual pattern of the curious narrator who needs every step of every day explained to him (so that the reader knows what’s going on), but okay. Bear with me here.
Nick in The Demon’s Lexicon is nothing like that, which makes for a very awesome book indeed. He’s the sort of boy who keeps his swords under the sink, is no stranger to dumping a body in the river before going home to eat dinner, is constantly annoyed that people talk so much, hates explaining stuff to the newbie hanger-ons that him and his brother acquires and is basically… um, unpleasant. (And disturbingly hot, obviously, as dark, broody boys tend to be, but I think that goes without saying.)
In the blog post I mentioned above Sarah (who I don’t know, but damn, her name is long, so here I go first-naming her anyway) says the following, which made me giggle like a maniac:
High fantasy and urban fantasy and paranormal romance and all the slip-sliding books in between, he’s there: tall, dark, silent and surly, knowing a lot more about everything that’s going on than the hapless protagonist and usually, since to live in a genre novel is to live in interesting times, excellent with any weapon to hand.
He’s become so popular that he’s been watered down: mad, bad and dangerous to know becoming ‘Seems a little mean at first, but on the look-out for love: particularly enjoys long walks on the beach and talking about his feelings!’ On my four hundredth go-round with a book involving Mr Tall, Dark and Diet I thought to myself that someone should bring the original undiluted version back, and really think about what made him compelling and made him tick. And that we shouldn’t be seeing it from the point of view of a girl much taken with the muscular thighs and meanness, or a guy haplessly protagonisting behind Mr Tall and Dark’s sword, but from inside the head of That Guy, to see what he was thinking.
Besides ‘why does everyone else talk so much,’ I mean.
And that post pretty much sums up her writing, both in her books and her blog, by the way. Should you need another blog in your endless RSS feed.
In short, Nick is an interesting narrator, and after reading that one, I have been on a pretty much constant search for more books with quirky, unusual or just inventive sort of narration. So, I’ve been waiting and waiting and WAITING for the publishing of Liar by Justine Larbalestier, which I finally received in the mail a few weeks ago.
There was drama before it came out, because of the whitewashing of the cover, but it has pretty much died down by now. It’s an interesting read though, and I believe I’ve written about it before. At least once.
Anyway.
Micah is a liar. She lies about everything, just because she can. On the very first page she says: “I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies. No omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it.”, which pretty much says it all.
I think we’ve all known a teenager like that, and while some seem to find Micah unpleasant, she makes my heart hurt because she reminds me of somebody I used to know.
The whole book is written under the assumption that you cannot trust a word that Micah says, and yet you find yourself believe what she says, over and over and over. Until she starts to admit what wasn’t true. What she’d made up. And even then you can’t be sure that she did lie about that or if she’s just lying about lying.
It’s so very interesting to read, and what’s even more interesting is the spoiler thread over at Justine’s blog. Do not read it unless you’ve read the book, you will regret it, but once you have… go over there and read the theories. They are almost as interesting as the book itself.
I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed these two books as much, had I not been reading them from the point of view of a writer, but as it is I loved the hell out of both of them. And people need to read them already (especially Liar!) so I have somebody to discuss them with. Seriously.
In random news I updated my bio, I have an entire blueberry pie in my fridge and have an hour until I have to go celebrate my grandfather’s 89th birthday. So naturally I need to go all political.
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I read so many feminist blogs (currently Feministing, Shapely Prose, The Curvature, Blue Milk, Feminists With Disabilites, Hoyden About Town, Shakesville and possibly a few more) that I have no idea where I skimmed an article that basically stated that the reason for so many women taking some sort of antidepressants has to do with the fact that they are more likely to struggle quietly until their mental impairment has reached such levels that just therapy no longer cuts it. It annoys me that I can’t find it (and believe me, I tried), because that link would be perfect for this little rant.
I believe that’s true a lot of the time. That looking at how much meds that are being prescribed is the wrong way to go about it, because if we did get the help we needed at an earlier stage, we may be able to avoid this. Instead it somehow becomes the patient’s fault, for not being “normal”. You have to be really fucking sick to get adequate help, and don’t even dream of going on sick leave. Oh no. That makes you part of the problem. That is, if you even qualify.
(A small parenthesis: I’m currently applying for money from the social services. I did it where I lived previously, and now I’m doing it again. Seeing as it is the same authorities, just different parts of the country you would think that the two inch thick pile of paperwork I submitted the last time around or the paperwork I have turned in every single month since I was first approved would be great as a starting point. It’s just that it isn’t. They’re apparently doing things differently here, which means that I have to re-submit three months worth of income, expenses, every bill, my lease, my electricity bill, etc, etc, etc. I also have to sign paperwork stating that I do not own a house, a flat, a car, have any stocks, savings or anything frivolous. Yes, having a car to drive is apparently frivolous, and if I had one (which I don’t), I would have to argue my needs for it, or be required to sell it before they gave me any money at all.
This is, no doubt, the most humiliating experience ever. To stand there and say “no, I own nothing of value, I have no partner with an income, I have no children, I don’t have a driver’s license, I can’t support myself because I have a chronic mental illness, can you help me, please?”
To which they reply “You have to take any job offered to you to be eligible for help from us. Unless, of course, you have a note from a doctor.”
I do. And just hearing somebody utter the words “you have to take any job offered to you” gives me insane amounts of anxiety. To the point of having to hide for a day or more. Seriously. If I could work, do you think that I would go through this procedure? Do you think if I qualified for money from Försäkringskassan, I would call social services?
No, I wouldn’t.)
The reason I don’t qualify is that I lived abroad for so many years that the aid I would normally get from them has run out. You have to have worked for at least six months within the last five years or something like that, to be eligible. It’s just that now our conservative government is changing the law. Once it goes into effect you cannot be on sick leave for more than three years total. At that point you have to either be put on a pension or go back to work. Swedes can read more about it here.
The article speaks about doing evaluations throughout the sick leave, to assess the ability of the sick person. That sounds good, right? It’s just that I don’t believe that it can be done in a good manner. I can tell when I tell somebody “I can’t go outside for more than two hours at a time” that they don’t believe me. Of course I can, what’s going to happen if I try?
I’ll tell you what happens. I will snap at you. I will become angry, ungrateful and likely run like hell. If these two hours are up while I’m in a shop I have to back up against the nearest shelf every time somebody comes into the aisle I’m in. I can’t stand in line without feeling like my heart is about to pound its way out of my body. And afterwards I’ll need a 3-4 hour nap just to recover.
I can’t meet up with people two days in a row. No, not even if it’s family.
I can’t even answer the phone on bad days.
I can’t go buy a litre of milk, unless it’s very late and almost no people around.
I can’t do my laundry.
I can’t take out the rubbish.
In short, my limits are kind of ridiculous, and a lot of the time people act like it’s all in my head. Like I could do it, if I just try. And sure, I do. I do go grocery shopping. I do my laundry. I try to spend time with my family. But it has to be on a good day, and if I push myself too hard, like, two family things in one weekend, I will likely need a week or more to recover.
Going on an official meeting, like at the social services unit, or a doctor’s appointment, is the same. And I may hold on to my sanity right now, but it’s not easy, and the only thing that keeps me out of a hospital right now is my boundaries and being strict about them.
So, yeah. I really resent that so many people with this sort of problems will be shuffled over to social services come January 1, because the politicians have decided it’s better for them to be given opportunity to re-enter the work force. Which, you know, is a good thing. Except when you have to do it because otherwise you will either have no income at all or have to lay your life up on display for social services and possibly move, sell your car, use savings you may have saved up for some specific purpose, it’s not. Because of the insane pressure that comes with HAVING to work to survive.
I bet that a lot of people will go back to work despite being in pain, having extreme anxiety or what have you, spending all your energy on keeping up with work and thus have none left for family, cooking or a social life. Is it a life if you spend all your free time in bed, unable to even cook yourself a meal or answer the phone, because all your energy goes to doing your job? And maybe, despite all of this, you will be fired, because you simply can’t do it well enough.
The article says that this “rehabilitation guarantee” is aimed especially at the two biggest groups of people with sick leave; those with physical impairments making it hard to move around, and those with light to medium mental illnesses. These two groups make up nearly two thirds of all people on sick leave.
The article concludes:
Already this year 30,000 people are expected to receive care and rehabilitation thanks to the rehabilitation guarantee.
Which sounds good and all. But knowing how the American model works I am extremely dubious. There, you have a five year cap on this sort of aid, at what point you “should” be transfered to social security income. It’s just that, well, that is only for people who will never be able to return to work. Ever. People who are able to work part time or who have an illness that comes and goes are totally helpless.
I know people living off the money given to them by their adult children, because they can’t work, don’t qualify for sick leave and can’t get social security income. Call me crazy, but that sounds exactly like what we’re setting up here.
The (supposed) hypomania has left the building. Instead I’ve got bucket full of (without a doubt) depression. That was a fun week, though. Now I shall return to my regular programming of sleeping too much, eating even more and snap at the people who (for some reason) love me.
Also, overdose on parantheses, anyone?
On the upside:
a) Got my entire iTunes library organised before it happened. Complete with tracking down the albums for each song and finiding pics of them for artwork thingy.
b) Got one of two curtains hemmed as well, which was a lengthy process as Ash the kitty insisted on climbing it as I was sewing.
c) Started editing Eld again. I go back and forth between feeling “This is not all bad”, “How do I set fire to it without scorcing my computer?” and “Seriously, historic fiction? You hate history, are you INSANE?”
d) Game today! Possibly I told my mum she couldn’t come over until I had watched the soccer…
e) Soundtrack for the first Lilo & Stitch movie is ridiculously calming, though. Sadly YouTube does not have the “Wanna listen to the king? You look like an Elvis fan.” clip, so you’ll have to make do with this one. Some of you will recognise my old default icon on LJ from this one!
(And yes, the door has been nailed shut by Lilo so her sister won’t get in. At what point a social worker shows up to check if her sister is capable of caring for her as their parents are no longer alive.)
I believe that is all for now. I could keep going, but I’m just depressing myself here. Almost time for NaNoWriMo!
