Out of ideas

I, naturally, spent the weekend recovering from the extraordinary delights of, basically, flicking the dust-bunnies out from the hindermost parts of my brain and leaving them on display all over the internets. Hello! What did you all do?

But I had a think, while lolling in an undignified manner and/ or trying to get my Sims to snog each other on the laptop [And getting Sims was possibly the most cretinously unproductive act of your life, young Reed - Ed]. And I thought thusly:

1. I must really do something about the blogroll. The blogroll is starting to smell. I must add all the new interesting people and places to it, and I must rearrange it into less amazingly pretentious categories.
2. I must actually talk to people, because there is actually a line between ’shy’ and ‘antisocial’ and personally I seem to have wondered so far over it I’ve ended up in ‘has issues’.
3. I’d like to write more fiction. No, let me rephrase that. I bloody well must write more fiction. I have a very untidy heap of paper scraps, torn from note-books during meetings, like as not, that are all over ideas for short stories. Now, I had never really written much in the way of short stories before, so this is either a New Development or, more likely, the result of having a seriously battered attention-span, especially when I’m supposed to be writing policy documents with it. Do you care? Is this going to fizzle embarrassingly after one go? [Yes].
4. And I need to read more Proper Books. I mean, really, current haul seems involve a great deal of detective fiction I am not quite getting on with, and not nearly enough, say, Jorge Luis Borges, who, after all, damn it, was a Librarian.

Aha! Directions! I’d rather been missing some of those. How nice to find a few under the dust-bunnies. God bless NaBloPoMo, and all who sailed in her.

You get up late, because you have the morning as study-leave. Studying. Oh yes. Once you’ve realised you have no clean shirts, and had a half-hearted dig through the laundry mountain, and put a wash on, and then realised that this is of no use whatsoever as nothing will be dry in time, but hurrah, you can wear the annoying shirt that rides up every time you so much as breathe, giving everyone a splendid view of your scarred belly-button. And then you have a shower. And then you play about on the computer. And only then, you do some of that studying, healf-heartedly, with many many tea-breaks, Can you remember any of it? Can you buggery.

You get to the office, slightly late, with great wobbling piles of work waiting for you – literally, as you spent yesterday evening building a wall of book-boxes all around your chair – and you turn the computer on, and, after a while you’ve had two IT guys in to look at it and you’ve all had a go turning it off and on again and then everyone else pops up like gophers to say, ‘actually, I can’t get my email anymore,’ and there is a strange smell of burning plastic from the server cupboard, and then you have a two hour shift on the issue desk explaining to each and every student that yes, the computers are a bit slow today (and you feel you probably jinxed by turning up at all) and it’s raining, now, and you had meant to walk to the station to make up for the amazing slobbiness of the rest of your life, also, your trousers fit really weirdly these days. Even more so now that you’ve got sodden walking to the bus-stop.

The point of getting out of bed was what exactly?

Aha, but I have secret weapons especially for this kind of eventuality! Are your socks wet? Take them off, drink a large gin and tonic.

Are you feeling the mental grey crushed sensation of an entire day/ week/ month of non-achievement? Successfully complete NaBloPoMo.

There. Warm rosy glow all round.

Two more posts to go, and I stab myself in the palm in a freak knitting accident.

I have no idea what happened. I was smirking gently at the television [or, not paying attention - Ed], and knitting a sock. I put the sock down on the armrest of my chair. Vigorously. I had no idea it was possible to put one’s knitting down with excess vigour, but there you go. Hand, being irresistible force, meets 2.5 mm needle playing immovable object.

It really hurt.

Now what?

[Ice. Alcohol. That kind of thing].

[Also, I feel I must make it perfectly clear this wound is a small puncture wound with some bruising, and not, as Reed is making out, an impalement of any kind of remarkable dimension; and the only horrifying thing about the whole incident was her language.]

I went to lectures, I went to work, I met a friend after work, we had dinner, I trundled home again late in the evening, I have a post to write, oy vey. Did I mention I had a beer with my dinner? Attention-span now completely carbonized for the rest of the evening.

And it was a lovely evening, thank you for asking.

Also, no one at work annoyed me today. It has to be a Sign. Prepare the underground food depots. Man the inflatable life-raft pumps. And so on.

Oh, and one more thing, just before I apply pyjamas to person and make the heady choice between the three types of toothpaste now colonising the bathroom sink:

In honour of William Blake’s 250th birthday:

Remember the recent furore over Eurostar’s ‘cheeky’ advert for London? Seen the picture of the widdling thug? Yes? Now look at Blake’s painting Ghost of a Flea.

Am I the only person who has spotted this?

Last week of NaBloPoMo, and what have we learned?

….

Anything? Anyone?

Oh, very well, I’ll go first. I have learned that:

1. I am a shocking-bad commentator. I keep thinking ‘Oh, I’ll come back and say something later,’ and as we all know, later never comes. Shame shame shameshameshame. Bad Reed. Nasty Reed. Reed who doesn’t deserve any bloggy friends at all.
2. What is this all consuming urge to be amusing and why does it follow me about so?
3. There is no need to do monster-long posts every single day. Snippets will do. Snippets possibly even preferable, as who in heck has time to indulge my random fits of Essayism?
4. I can go for a whole month and have very few profound thoughts indeed. [You learn this only now? - Ed].
5. Sleep is Good For You.

The thing is, I’m feeling a little underwhelmed by the NaBloPoMo experience. Oh, I don’t blame NaBloPoMo, it’s a very cool idea indeed. I just don’t think I’ve been doing it properly [Not that this isn't a fear that haunts your every waking moment in any case]. I have been treating it as a duty to wedge in amid a host of other duties, mini-crises, and regulation quantities of faffing. Surely, if I’d've taken it seriously, I’d've produced something desperately moving or searingly honest or even plain vaguely interesting by now, like other people have.

As is, I am feeling a tad deflated.

[Shall we create a new category in the side-bar called 'Whining'?]

Helen has tagged me. I am obediently obeying the tagging imperative. Did you all want to know seven more weird (in my opinion) things about me? That I haven’t mentioned before?

Ah well. It’s NaBloPoMo. I need blog fodder. Up with me we all shall put.

1. I am so, so scared of singing in public it isn’t even funny. It’s not even that I can’t sing, because I keep a tune fairly well and can hit the high notes and everything. I was once in choir. I think, even, I could sing in a choir now without dying. Just as long as no one listens to me. At all. Ever. I blame my family for this. Having been in the choir, I used to trundle round the house warbling like a song-bird, and was gradually ground into a heap of frantic splinters by being told to shut up that ungodly row every single time. When I wasn’t being mocked mercilessly for my pretentions to tunefulness. You see, in my family, you can either Do, and Do beautifully, or you Do Not Do. There is no try.
2. I like maps. When I am rich [When, she says, poor little eejit - Ed], I shall decorate the walls of my library with antique maps. Is that weird? Not very. Bother.
3. I do not like Darjeeling tea. Not even expensive and glamorous Darjeeling served in fine bone-china cups, not even seriously brewed Darjeeling in a mug with plenty of milk and sugar. Don’t like it. Sorry. Prefer china tea. Apparantly this makes me odd. Jolly good.
4. To me, Baileys tastes of defeat. I simply can’t stomach it. The very last election that Labour lost, I was a few weeks short of my 18th birthday and unable to vote. My older sister and I sat up all night, watching the exceedingly depressing results come in, and drinking Baileys. Went to bed glumly plastered, woke up with a head like a brass band drum, and the Tories had still won. Ah, but we had faith in the left, once.
5. Have I mentioned that I am terrified of slugs? Yes? Oh well.
6. I loathe discos, night clubs, general loud music, overpriced booze, and the expectation that I get up and boogie in a sea of migraine-inducing flashing lights and other people’s sweat. For a student, that is now deeply weird. Heh heh.
7. I’d love a pet Pterodactylus elegans.

I think I’m supposed to tag seven people. Err. Right. Seven of you, consider yourselves tagged.

It’s S’s birthday today. He is 231 in dog years, and therefore highly deserving of breakfast in bed, a day at the art galleries, and all the peach bellinis a man can drink. So he got them.

S and I met when we were both seventeen, and both dating other people. One of the other people was my sister. Umm. Yes. And so she introduced him to the family, and I looked at him, and my very first thought was ‘Ohhhhh, damn.’ Because he was seriously ever so much cuter than my boyfriend, and he was dating my sister. Damn was quite polite for what I felt at the time. And then he turned out to be not only cuter, but funnier and sweeter as well, and my heart was melting like butter on a hot plate, and then, and then, my idiot sister dumped him, the fool, and I took a flying leap at him and we have been An Item almost incessantly ever since.

In this day and age this is quite, quite amazing.

As is he, bless his mad viking ginger beard.

Insomnia finally won the arse-kicking contest. This morning I got out of bed and walked heavily into the bathroom door-frame. Twice. I could see at least four door-frames before me, which wasn’t helping, also, I think I may have said something irritable. There’s a sort of lost half hour in which I seemingly did not manage to do anything at all even when I wasn’t looking, and then it was half-past seven and I was still in my pyjamas and oh God my head.

Determined not to be defeated by mere chronic lack of sleep and a head like a tumble-dryer full of bricks, I washed my hair. Alas, even clean hair was not really improving matters beneath the hair, and I had, indeed, become completely nothing but a headache. Even my knees were having a headache. There was no Reed. There was merely a head full of ache.

So I went back to bed.

Got up again after lunch, feeling only semi-screwed, with alas a mouth like a camel’s underhoof and a desperate urge for tea. Distinct improvement. But never sleep on wet hair if you can help it. I think it ate the comb.

And believe me, I know exactly how lucky I am that I can take a day off and spend it in splendid solitary bedness.

[So she says now. I suppose she got the hysterical out-break about missing classes off her chest earlier - Ed]