As Fi Bows to Peer Pressure

I’m in a wee bit of pain this evening, and was going to spend the next 15mins ranting about it, but I have this idea it might get a boring. Imagine me going “pain . . . hurts . . . whine whine . . . pain . . . hurts . . . whine whine” - you get the gist. I fell down three times today - once is fairly common with my joints as they are but three times tends to shock them into pain. Lovely.

Merry Christmas! It’s been wonderful to hear news from around the world with Christmas letters and emails pouring into my inbox.
 
This year has been an interesting but very fun year for me. I have (in no particular order):

• spent New Years with my lovely sister
• attended the ANZAC Day dawn service at Hyde Park Corner followed by the service at Westminster Cathedral
• organised three national conferences for work and run around the country trying not to look flustered
• been to the Red Bull flugtag in Hyde Park
• held a surprise birthday picnic for a friend, involving me pretending to have been proposed to (she was completely convinced by this)
• been to the Nelson Mandela birthday celebrations in Hyde Park
• spent a day in the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot
• travelled around parts of France and Spain for holiday with my LSE friends,
• attended the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen with my mum and her friend Kay (was so wonderful to see them both!)
• spent a weekend with pastorate at the Malshanger Estate, owned by Colman’s Mustard man but part-gifted to church
• helped out on the Worlds End council estate with my church posse - we painted most of one flat in one day. It was madness!
• attended too many of the BBC Proms and made lots of new promming buddies - favourite was probably the Dr Who Prom I think :o)
• been to Ireland with 7 friends from pastorate for the weekend
• been to a Madness concert (80s ska/crazy band from London) followed by a Christmas pantomime the next night
• had loads of lovely Kiwi friends visit and/or stick around

Quite astonishingly, I have now been in London for 2 and a 1/4 years and feel like a proper little Londoner. I’m very lucky to have a wonderful little flat in Zone 1 (near Russell Square for those that know London) with an Aussie girl and a Swedish guy. I am really lucky to have plenty of spare time to pursue other interests.
 
I am really enjoying being more involved with my church, Holy Trinity Brompton, and one of the highlights for my pastorate (a small goup that’s not so small) has been involvement in a homeless shelter over the Winter months. I’m also involved in a start-up charity that will be setting up a halfway house for women coming out of Holloway Prison and looking forward to our first major fundraising event in mid-February. In a moment of total work boredom I also agreed to be a voluntary project manager for a major youth development charity based in Toronto, the wonders of the internet mean I can do this virtually. It’s fabulous to have time to do all these things and in some ways this makes up for the less interesting parts of my full-time job.
 
Next year holds a number of delights - the most exciting of which right now is a trip home for a month in March/April. It’s my first trip home since September 2006 and I am really excited at the thought of seeing friends and family again. If you’re keen for a catch-up, I’d love to see you. Send me an email and we’ll organise a date/time.

For a few photo highlights of 2008, visit my Webshots photo site and head for the “Best of 2008″ album.
 
It would be lovely to catch up with as many as possible while I’m home next Easter.
 
Have a Happy New Year and I hope to see many of you in three months or so.
 
Love and hugs,
Fi x

It’s the reason for the lack of blogging, the reason for the lack of sane responses to emails, and I’m going to blame my insanity on being silly busy for most of my life.

So here’s a list, half to remind myself of what I’m trying to complete, and half for you to see what I’m up to:

1) Pastorate - my church divides itself into large small groups known as pastorates. They’re a necessity in a church of 3,000-4,000 back when there was only five services on a Sunday. There’s now seven. We meet every second Tuesday at church for some prayer, teaching, and food. It’s a solid evening. Anyway my pastorate are a fairly socialable bunch so we have fairly regular nights out together and enjoyed a wonderful weekend in Ireland last month. Apparently I’m something resembling an outreach officer for the pastorate, which brings me nicely to the things that we do on the other Tuesday in every two weeks…

2) St Matthew’s shelter - provides shelter and food for 35 homeless men and women in London on a Tuesday night. It’s part of the West London Churches Homelessness Concern and the shelter rotates around churches in the West London area each night of the week. I pull along 5 pastorate members every other Tuesday to help with setting up, serving food, and building relationships with some of the most amazing people I’ve met in London, who also happen to not have anywhere to sleep.

3) TakingItGlobal - youth activism and involvement in communities worldwide. I’ve been involved forever and a day it feels like *but* I am now a voluntary project editor for them, which works nicely as I can do it virtually and whenever I have time. With over 2,500 projects worldwide registered with TIG, I help in all sorts of ways. It’s a blast!

4) Paid employment - I am currently employed as a policy assistant for the established Church in the pastoral and closed churches division. It pays the bills and allows me to do lots of other stuff in my spare time. I don’t intend to do it forever.

5) Halfway house - I’m helping with a start-up charity that will setup a halfway house for women coming out of Holloway Prison in London. I do website design stuff and pretend to be fairly au fait with all things IT. I also now organise fundraising events because I like organising and event management. It’s fun and I find it oddly relaxing.

6) Swimming - I theoretically swim 3-4 times a week, depends on the week, depends on what I’ve got on, depends on silly things, but I love my new Aquabeat so it keeps me fit and happy.

7) British Labour Party - I am a new member of the British Labour Party and will be helping to ensure that the Tories don’t win like National at the next Brit election. The New Zealand election result made me realise that I am quite definitely a centre-lefty, not a ‘centre-right with a little bit of Act thrown in or good measure’ person. I am looking forward to getting back into campaigning.

Christmas with the London whanau - I have a family here, we’re a strange bunch of misfits jumbled together from all sorts of situations, but I love them all dearly, so I am throwing a Christmas party for my London whanau next Sunday. Cooking for 15-20 people is the fun part :o) Some of us are also heading to “A Celebration of Christmas” at St Paul’s on Thursday.

I think that’s it for now. Those are the things you’ll hear me talking about most often. I am loving being involved with a few NGOs and charities, and having time to do that is really precious. I’m off to Wales for Christmas and will spend New Years with a few of my LSE friends celebrating what I hope to be a very exciting new year.

[Edited 10 minutes later - The answer is, of course, no, but sometimes giving up seems the obvious and simplest solution . . . you understand?]

There’s a lot of maybes in this. I’ll keep mulling it over and let you know . . .

Facebook - Primary social networking site
MySpace - For those people who refuse to use Facebook (checked on a monthly-ish basis)
Bebo - I refuse to use this at all regularly as it drives me bananas but I have the page for those Kiwis who still haven’t moved onto Facebook yet.
Orkut - More of that social networking. It’s Luiz’s, Livia’s and Dany’s fault this time (you know I love you guys!)

Webshots - All my photos are here.

TakingItGlobal - youth activism networking organisation/site (and a special one for me - I’ve been involved with them for a while now)

LinkedIn - Professional networking - imagine your CV online.

Twitter - Micro-blogging service

Last FM - UK based internet radio and music community site. Necessary for expanding my music collection.

Goodreads - A book version of last.fm, brilliant for finding more books to add to my shelves when my non-specific shopping becomes dangerous.

And of course this baby - my blog - which I update as often as I can (read - less often than I want to).

I realise this makes me somewhat of an internet geek :o)

I get angry at silly things and when I’m tired and/or stressed my anger gets out of control and I do things that hurt other people. I also do things that hurt myself. Neither of these are good situations and I don’t want to be this person anymore. I was telling Adam last night in an email how much I need to learn patience and I think possibly self-control needs to be added to that too.

I am passionate and intense and while this can be a huge positive in the areas I want to work in, it’s been hugely draining for the other person in many past relationships. I don’t know how to deal with this.

I expect a lot from certain people and am easily upset when they’re not there for me. This makes me a nightmare friend sometimes. For other friends I am scared of letting them in because they have so much else to deal with - it feels like my problems will only weigh them down.

I like to think I’m strong and mature but often I feel the complete opposite.

I try very hard to be perfect and fail miserably all the time and seem to take this failure far too personally. If I was meant to be perfect, I wouldn’t be going through the mess of being human, right God?

I let people take advantage of me because I’d rather do that than compromise friendships and this makes me a bit bitter sometimes. I need to be a little more careful and almost selfish sometimes.

I guess this list could go on but I wanted to write what I was thinking so I’d have marker in the sand for this . . . and maybe one day someone will look at it and realise they’re not the only one who screws up and occasionally feels like they fail at life.

Tomorrow I go to Paris for the beginning of my second summer holiday but these are the thoughts that are clouding my mind. I wish I had all the answers for being happy, and strong, and slow to anger, and everything else, but I guess it’s the learning these things through a slow, and rather painful, process that makes us the people we are.