Yes we can: a generation wakes up from post-9/11

Barack Hussein Obama just got elected the next president of the United States.

His address spoke of progress and unity, of the equal power of individuals, be they black (like him - yes, the president of the United States is black), female, straight or gay, a term that speaks to me of my own personal journey. He promises a vision of possibility that I cannot turn from in skepticism.

I can't stress how much witnessing this is humbling and incredible to me, a moment that I will carry with me as living, breathing history. This man is being elected to lead a country many miles from me, I know that this should not matter to me in the way it does, above and beyond the politics of my own nation, but the fact is that in a world that gradually becomes more and more international, Obama promises a unique rallying cry that can be heard across the globe.

"Yes we can," and finally the 00s - the 'naughties' - in the States, Britain and much of the world, have transitioned from the political mire that thus far defined them, moved away from obsessions with the attacks of September 11 and from the baby-boomer trans-Atlantic special relationship of Blair and Bush, and onto a new era.

Welcome to the future.

Phosphorescent

Can you really continue to emit light, after the the source of the excitation is taken away? I don't know if I have this property. I think I'm more like a blinking computer light at night - lit by the mains, showing dormancy but indicative of potential, and constantly darting back and forth between light and darkness.

Having been fully converted the ways of red wine, I have allowed myself a night of 'me time', too, to follow my flatmate's example. Lying, self-consciously in the foetal position, watching Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder kiss, and contemplating the subjectivity of mental disorder (note the word 'disorder' - it doesn't work in the reverse, like mental wellness complements mental illness - mental order doesn't exist), sat, as I am, on the Subjective Sofa, I am beginning to wonder just how mentally ordered I am. 

I'm not a spacially ordered person - I clean sporadically and then alternate between aggressive overreaction to messiness and an unattractive, hippyish faux-fondness for my own mess. I also employ the bait and switch technique of tricking myself into believing that an action of cleaning will be limited to a small area before I claim that having started, there are bigger fish to fry. 

I'm clearly bad with rejection. I keep people who are magnetised to me at bay, and attach myself to people who keep me at a standard repulsed distance. I speak so fast that my mouth often gets drunk on the words, slurring them out as my brain does a u-turn to pick my prostate form from the social roadside. 

The flatmate that suggested 'me time' to me recently talked about the possibility of going to a therapist about their social anxieties, and now I'm just wondering if the mentally well are the ones who shouldn't be seeing therapists. That's trite, and cliché, and not particularly related to what I wrote before, though. So I will conclude instead that I think that sometimes the me I have discovered with this time, the me I spend my time avoiding, is a lot less well than the one avoiding it.

Roots and Memories

So it turns out, I'm something like a half English, three-eighths Scottish, one sixteenth Irish (I really can't claim that I'm practically Irish any more), and one sixteenth Welsh. Well, one sixteenth from Cardiff, I'm sure many people would tell that makes me as Welsh as a deep-fried Anne Robinson.

It's been genuinely fascinating reading my grandmother's notes on her family, the Caithness Youngs and her in-laws, my mother's rather less appreciated partilineal Gaulds. A lot of my background is actually in Cape Town and old Northern Rhodesia, what is now Robert Mugabe's stale coffee cup Zimbabwe. How would I go about picking out elements of my life to paint a picture? I feel as though a more accurate portrait of me is a reflection of the media I've had wash over me; that I can orient a map of myself by pin-pointing what TV I turned onto on mid-nineties Saturday mornings, which provides a stark contrast to the foot-loose Youngs of the older generation, who spent their youths emigrating like they were on the run from the law. Now if you go abroad, you fall into clichées of broke youths discovering themselves in a haze of pot and south Asian train tracks.

If from beyond the grave my grandmother can share with me a memory of our parents ushering us out to witness the utterly uninspiring passing of Haley's comet, then I feel hopeful that my memories will equally tell an interesting story in the future. I just hope that I won't have to wait til the comet next comes around.