Out of ideas

Saturday. A whole Saturday with nothing to do in it but watch the laundry dry. I should be cooking up a very long and eloquent post about something important, like Charlotte’s post on AIDS - I mean, I have the time.

I also have a headache and freezing-cold hands and feet. And a mouse in the flat (damn all rodents to rodenty hell). And an uneasy feeling I ought to be studying. There is always an ‘ought to be studying’, though and I am getting very good at ignoring it. This will probably bite me on the arse at some unspecified time, no doubt in conjunction with a deadline.

NaBloPoMo, I suppose, means you get to watch me being uninspired, gloomy, dull. Lucky lucky you.

While lying in bed under a heap of toast-crumbs this morning, I distinctly heard someone on the radio announce that Norman Mailer had died. When I went over to the BBC News site to confirm this, I also saw them front-paging a story about how Kate Moss, whoever the hell she is, mistook David Cameron for a plumber. I can’t think what I am more grumpy about, that we’ve lost that irascible old marvel Mailer, or that the BBC puts such sleb-flavoured foam on the same front page.

Though, possibly, the Nation does need to know just what a colossal dork Cameron actually, cheerfully, and self-confessedly is.

I have had a horrible bloody day - the sort of day that starts with a headache and ends with shouting at people and crying into my gin.

Obviously the only remedy to this is more gin. I shall go and apply it forthwith.

I was playing with the NaBloPoMo Randomizer this morning, as one does when one knows very well one ought to be making notes on Library of Congress Subject Headings. (And, yes, Ed, you are quite right, most posters seem to be graduate students in the throes of essay-avoidance). It was a fairly amusing experience, if slightly heavy on the cute pet pictures.

I noticed, at some point towards the bottom of the coffee mug, that I would read several posts on some blogs, and click away from others within three seconds of landing. It occurred to me I had no clue as to what was triggering the instant dismissals, as the subject headings were preying on my mind, and therefore there was no conscious reasoning going on [then or ever - Ed]. Not that preying ever equates to me picking the book up again, and, frankly, the subject headings will have to do better than that if they want a share of the caffeinated goodness that is my full attention.

So I went back, to see if I could see whatever it was I hadn’t wanted to see in the blogs I dismissed out of hand. And here is a list of the most obvious and immediate offenders. Dear God, but I’m a cruel and sneering bitch.

1. Multiple exclamation marks. I don’t care if Nyarlathotep himself turned up in your front room with an entourage of maddening flute-players. Multiple exclamation marks make you look like a teenage girl who has run out of Ritalin. Stop it.
2. no capitals. ever. because the shift key is sooooo hard to press, oh yes, especially when pressing something else with another finger of the same hand, though i see you can press it neatly enough when you need to tell us just how exciting you are finding nablopomo!!!! LOL!!!!
3. Sentences that are capitalised and punctuated perfectly normally, but ‘I’ is in lower case. This does not make you look modest and self-effacing. It makes you look barmy. And not in an interesting, blue-haired, Jim Carey attracting way. If you want to self-efface, you could always not spend three paragraphs describing your favourite breakfasts.
4. Religion. Sorry. I may well be missing out on the most fascinating and heart-warming reads of my life, but the phrases ‘our church’, ‘my husband the pastor’, ‘allow Jesus into your heart’ and ‘living according to G-d’s Law/ Scripture/ Plan’ induce a spasm of near-epileptic helplessness in my mouse-hand.
5. Photo-essays on how you have tidied your hair-accessories/ made cookies/ tidied your lounge, complete with before and after and before with family and after with family and before with pets and after with pets. If you want me to look at that many views of your furniture, you need to have set fire to it, or at least have stacked it on the lawn.
6. Spelling ‘Austen’ (as in Jane), ‘Austin’. Instant dismissal. Instant.
7. Blogs entirely dedicated to telling the universe how lovely, cute, special and precious your kids/ spouse/ doggies are. Because I am a bitter and twisted old hag.

Also, work sucked poisonous green bunnies this afternoon, everyone is either off sick or out of temper, our new suppliers have now screwed up twice in the same order, and for a part-time girl I seem to be doing someone else’s full-time job on top of my own, which, now that I think about it, violates at least one law of physics.

Having spent the entire day doing pointless, non-NaBloPoMo things like hauling self to the supermarket and back, forgetting to do laundry, actually working for money, and going to the movies (Stardust, thank you for asking, no doubt I’ll spectacularly fail to review it at some point), I have now landed at eleven pm, with a post to write, nothing I can think of to write about in less than an hour, and a general consciousness that I really am rather asking too much of the Gentle Reader if I expect him or her to, you know, fill in the gaps and imagine any of this is witty, apposite, or worth the bloody effort to read, let alone write.

Sorry.

Damn.

Sorry.

What the hell has that Editor been doing? What the hell has she been doing? I go away for oh, so very few days, and she drags out the old poetry files [The turquoise ink files, no less - Ed] and, oh God, the humiliation.

*Outburst of sobbing*

[As much as I enjoyed it, I also did it because I thought your poetic development over the past seventeen years might be of some little interest.]

You have got to be joking. Poetic development?

[Well, from very formal, if astonishingly sentimental, adolescent maunderings, to aggressive sub-Plath free verse, to very formal, if completely anal, adult reticence]

*Long pause*

Now, look, it is possible I have a great deal to say on the matter, at some point, if all else fails, but I have just spent five hours on an assortment of trains, and while I did indeed get a seat, it was near a man who drank beer, belched, and whistled, so, if you don’t mind, I will pour myself a very large gin, slap the Editor upside the head, and go to bed.

Reed is back tomorrow.

Good, I say. Good. I don’t care for this ‘generating content’ lark.

How about another spot of juvenalia, while she can’t burst in and stop me? She wrote this one when she was barely 18, and falling in love with her future husband. Also blond, by the way.

Everyday I love your absent image
Hurts dully; and I have never cried for a man before,
I have never cried,
Though you are missing,
Though
Without you I am only myself,
As self-sufficient as glass, not
Needing an image to reflect,
Without beholding being nothing.
And I burn for your superimposition, I
Burn for the hands and voice
That make me ring through like a glass bell that
Ring me like a stone into clear water,
Alive,
To frighten silver fishes out,
Away from the sun-pierced centre,
Away from the shiver of bubbles,
Away from the place where only we are
Necessary as air or water.

Reed has long since given up vers libre, as she now finds it affected and embarrassing (oh, she’s so going to kill me when she gets home!). Me, I don’t know. A certain lack of counting syllables and considering rhymes for ‘orange’ can be excusable, surely? In any case, whoever brings Walt Whitman into the argument first wins.

No yawping, barbaric or otherwise, by order of The Management

Reed is still not back. Lord knows what she’s doing. Gallivanting, I shouldn’t wonder, or possibly even frolicking.

But as she’s not here, and left me in charge, I think I shall do something truly evil (heh heh heh) and dig out her early poems. And, oh, look, here it is, perfectly preserved (in turquoise ink, mind you) - the first serious poem she ever wrote for her own satisfaction and no one else’s.

She was fifteen when she wrote it. Not only fifteen, but fifteen at an all-girls’ boarding-school. And above all, not only fifteen and nunnish, but she had just lost her virginity to a handsome blond boy, and while she did indeed spend a few weeks feeling crazy in love, and while that particular memory is still one that makes her smile smugly to herself (lucky bitch), said blond boy did wander off into the hazy outer distance shortly thereafter. He was but the first in a series of handsome blond muses. What is it with Reed and blonds? She prefers brunettes, or even bald men, if you consult her list of uber-crushes*, but invariably ends up going to bed with blonds.

So, the first serious love-poem of her life.

Remember, she’s fifteen. Be gentle.

I shall spill my heart out to the winds,
I shall misspell love-poems for none to see,
And in the stillness of midnight,
Breathless and blinded by moonlight,
I shall make your name a rhapsody.

I shall spill my heart out to the winds.
I shall turn and see your eyes change colour
Like water, like a shadowed lake,
Blue and green the rippled wake,
Like the first hushed breath of summer.

I shall spill my heart out to the winds.
I shall beg of them to let me rest
Curled like a petal in the peaceable dawn,
Part of a rose, still folded and warm,
At the heart of the quiet, my head on your chest.

*(Oh, very well, Johhny Depp, David Tennant, and Patrick Stewart)

[Reed wrote this in less than 20 minutes, on Thursday the 1st of November, in a complicated recess of the labyrinthine university library, near Paleontology. There were pigeons roosting on the window-ledge, iridescent in the autumn sunlight. And workmen drilling next-door. Possibly knocking Dutch literature through into Law Studies - Ed].

The man is patient, kind and good.
Yes, there were others I have kissed
Who seemed to promise that they would
Be one of patient, kind, or good,
So I should make it understood
That there’s a reason why they missed:
This man is patient, kind, and good,
Unlike others I have kissed.

This is the Editor, refusing to put on a stupid accent for the purposes of this post, as, frankly, swathes of italic are a bugger to read.

So. Reed has cheerfully announced to the Universe she is NaBloPoMo-ing, oh yes. And then she dumps the responsibility for making it happen in my lap, mine, by the way, the lap of an editor, and I am not, may I point out, a writer, and off she waltzes to the other, blogless, end of the country.

Damn her.

Also, this dearth of posting the NaBloPoMo was supposed to break? Do you know what her excuse is for not posting much these days? She hasn’t the time now that she’s studying full-time and working part-time. Oh, really. No time. Well, let us unpack that concept a little.

There are 168 hours in a week. Let us say Reed sleeps, or, at least, lies quietly in a darkened room, for seven hours a night, or 49 a week. That leaves us with 119 waking hours to play with.

She is actually in classes or lectures for 13 hours a week, and is at work for 14 hours. That leaves 92 hours. Commuting is unavoidable, has to be done five days a week, and takes between one hour and one and a half hours each way. Say, on average, 13 hours a week lost to being pressed into a complete stranger’s parka-clad armpit. That leaves 79 hours. Reed has to drink tea, and brush teeth, and dress, of a morning, and being uninclined to sleep like a normal mortal, it takes her a good hour to wash one face and put two socks on. So we’ll take seven hours away for reluctant morning faffing. 72 hours. She also has showers and eats three meals a day. Say four hours washing, four hours eating. 64 hours. She also cooks, cleans (very occasionally), does laundry, washes up. Four or five hours a week. Say four, because she’s lazy. 60 hours. She also goes to the supermarket, whenever she can’t force her husband to go instead. 56 hours? 58 hours?

Say 56 hours. 56 freshly minted hours a week to do as she damn’ well pleases. Even I admit she needs to spend some of that studying, and when she was Having an Essay last week she did indeed spend most of that studying, and oy vey, the whingeing. But what does she do with the rest of it? This time she doesn’t have to spend writing and blogging?

She has coffee with friends. She reads books. She dithers. She listens to the radio and knits. She - oh God! - has taken to faffing about on Facebook, and I very much wish I’d nipped that one in the bud. She reads other people’s blogs. She occasionally comments. She participates in various fora. She stares at squirrels. She watches entirely too much TV. Her husband has gone insane and brought home Myst IV and Myst V and I will never see her again. And meanwhile the poor blog sits here, covered in a vasty growth of carpet-fluff.

I’d bloody resign if I could.

Dear all, it is the first, oh yes, the very first day of November, and this is the first NaBloPoMo post.

And it occurred to me, or, rather, my husband occurred it to me, that we are going away for a long weekend tomorrow, to see old friends and yomp about on moors and possibly even sing out loud in public. There is a distinct lack of broadband access and general bloggy time in this schedule.

Oops.

So, the Editor and I sat down, or, rather, I sat down and drank cappuccino and the Editor paced about in an offensively impatient manner, and we decided [you decided - Ed] that I would leave the Editor a heap of odds and ends and she would do with them as she saw fit, as long as something appeared every day in my absence, and then that wouldn’t really be cheating. As such. I mean, something will be posted every day, so, that adheres to the spirit of the old whatsit, doesn’t it? [I doubt it]

That’ll be OK, won’t it?

Please?

[This is absolutely not a good start, is it?]