I've been the luckiest girl recently, the girl who has had the most brilliant weekends in the world. This weekend my dearest Katarina was here and I spent pretty much all of it with wonderful people, looking at beautiful things, drinking and chatting and riding my bicycle. I took today as a holiday from work too, to make it last longer. This was probably the best decision I've made for a while. Today it was The Sunniest Day. I went to the docks with Don and took infrared photos, then rode my bike with Patrick and we sat in the most fantastic tree and drank beer and a bottle of prosecco and flew his kite. It got stuck in a tree but he climbed it and succeeded in a daring rescue. I've got sunburn. Everything was beautiful and now my legs hurt.

Today is a good day for this song.
The Decemberists - Summersong
Last weekend was great too, I'm far too sleepy to write any part of everything, but one definite highlight was that I met a boy named Ferraby Lionheart, and I bet not many of you can say that. He is a wonderful shy sweet small boy from California in the USA and he had a lovely red jacket. He can sing and play the guitar and the harmonica and he can whistle, I liked him very much. I would have liked to have taken his photograph, but I didn't have my camera. I should've told him so.

Here is a song that he sang, it made me cry a tiny bit because I was thinking of Stoop. Give it a listen if you like aching bouncy poetic just-a-boy-with-a-guitar-type songs.
Ferraby Lionheart - Youngest Frankenstein
Today is the day that we listen to track #8 of albums, apparently. The eighth track of Radiohead's In Rainbows is House of Cards and it is a wonderful wonderful thing, as I have written before on this very page. So that's one you could add to this little playlistlet if you like, off the top of my very sleepy head.

The girls of summer are making my damn palms sweat.

Good night and sweet dreams to you all.

Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into one or the other, according to his needs.
In his right pocket are to be the words: 'For my sake was the world created', and in his left: 'I am dust and ashes.'
- Rabbi Bunam of Pzhysha

To sort of continue my thoughts of the past, the disinterment of forgotten selves from the long-ago, but without actually going ahead and writing about the year 2000 (er, or finishing 1992, I will do it, I'm just busy today and there is a lot to write):

What were your first favourite songs? What do you remember listening to, or have been told you liked as a youngling?

My mum says that The Lovecats, by the Cure, was probably the first song I ever heard outside the womb, on a little radio in her hospital room. The single came out 13 days before I did. I love that song to this day and it will always make me think of my mother and smile.

A bit later I would watch their video, Staring at the Sea - The Images, over and over again. I probably sang along to the first track, Killing An Arab (it is about Camus' extremely short and electrifying novel L'Etranger, obviously), when I was rather too young to have done, but my favourite was Close To Me. In the video they are all in a wardrobe which falls off a cliff, it's a bit strange. I also remember being big into Jimmy Somerville and Bronski Beat (favourite track: probably their cover of I Feel Love), David Bowie ("Heroes", though it would be about two decades before I would be able to sing it altering the lyrics to be a paean to a certain Tottenham Hotspur manager, the other week. I might add that Spurs have two particularly heroic players named King and Keane. The rest writes itself, really), Madness and The Beat.

The song that makes me think of my dad the most is Happy Talk from the musical South Pacific. He used to sing it to me throughout my childhood, it was my lullaby and soon became an essential component of car journeys.

They took me to the Glastonbury CND Festival in 1984 where, aged about seven or eight months, I would have seen the Smiths, Ian Dury, Joan Baez, Fairport Convention and Elvis Costello. Coolest baby ever. I am also told I was learning to talk at the time, and impressed them with the word 'mud'.

When I was very young I can just about remember loving My Baby Just Cares For Me by Nina Simone, Annie (I'm Not Your Daddy) by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, and a song called Blue Canary by rather odd Anglo-Japanese pop combo Frank Chickens. Also, 99 Luftballons (99 Red Balloons) by Nena. My parents remember me happily 'dancing' around the living room in that wobbly toddler way to it and making my mother cry, because it was the 1980s and Chernobyl had maybe just happened or was just about to and she was pregnant with my brother and they were all frightened and thinking what sort of a world have they brought this dear innocent chubby-faced child into.

By the time I was old enough to play vinyl records myself I would listen to Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths, and oddly enough, the soundtrack to West Side Story, on heavy rotation. I also got into Iggy Pop and the Clash about that time, or maybe slightly earlier. And I think the first CD I remember, in around 1990 when they were an exciting new technology, was They Might Be Giants' then brand new album Flood.

Now show me yours!

Walking home tonight, it's dark again and my feet are wet but it's not so bad now. Remembering people and places and things; remembering warm snuggled-up nights and bright shining days and the words we said and the sweet smiles on the faces I love so much. Taking a deep breath of the rain-washed, dirty city evening air, and simply enjoying it, the sharp sensation of everything all at once happening all over the place to everybody right now; the feelings of everything suddenly right and ripe and real.
*     *     *
Don and I went for a walk in the woods yesterday, in the morning sun, and were home in time for lunch. It was brilliant. There are snowdrops all over, and everything is just getting ready, gearing up to start growing again. Full of promises and potential. This could be the start of something. This could be the start of everything. I love those moments where you stand right on the brink, right on the edge, and breathe in and time just stops for that instant, you try to hold on to it. It's about to begin. It's any minute now.

   



   
I should've said above, but I would like to think that the correct soundtrack to these images and this mood is Maps - It Will Find You. Or Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come. Or The Flashbulb - Miles and Miles. Or anything you like or nothing at all.

The stuff in my head just now is much much too big to write about (sorry that sounds Dramatic, it's not, it's mostly just to do with my voluntary work and things), but yet I want to write. So how about this, borrowed from panic_bird, instead -

Pick a year and I will write about my life during that year.

I was born in November 1983, so be sensible.

Why am I awake on a Sunday morning? I do not know. Interpol (the band, not the International Criminal Police Organization) confuse me, I really REALLY like this one tune, Obstacle 1, but I sort of hate all of their other ones and think they are totally booooring. British Sea Power's newish album Do You Like Rock Music? is good. Also about music, on this page you can watch lots of Death from Above 1979 videos, it is extremely pleasing in quite a sexual way.

This week has been a good week for sociability (I saw good people I already know but don't see enough of, went on my first 'Friday pub' night with my not-very-new-any-more work, and also met some very nice new scientists. I really wish I was a scientist) and also good for food and especially for being fed.

( nom nom nom: a little list, and then there is another one )

I've just been out for a walk, I went all around town. I like walking aimlessly sometimes. During the week it's always dark whenever I'm not at work, so I don't really get very much sunlight therapy and I've been having SAD all over my face, I even had to leave a party early, although it was okay really. There've been good parties for the last three weeks actually. Last week's one was probably my favourite because it was Stoop's birthday so he was there. Long after he'd fallen asleep in Bob's bed I stayed out with Lucy and Tom and ended the night buying caramel shortcakes at Scotmid at 5.30am. As I was walking home I enjoyed the feeling of owning the streets because nobody else was around, and the pavements seem much broader when you're on your own. I also enjoyed that it was not raining or even particularly really windy, not half as much as it had been. I was wearing my new robot t-shirt which might just be my current favourite one, it's definitely in my top three. I was listening to a playlist of all 1051 tracks on my mp3 player, on shuffle, which has become something of a habit with me lately, and it kept playing 'go on, stay up all night' tunes like Simian Mobile Disco and Róisín Murphy and She Wants Revenge. When I got into my street it was playing Get Myself Arrested by Gomez. That seems like a secret message to tell me to stay up all night if ever I heard one. So I went into the flat and got my tripod and camera and went out again and messed around taking photos under the wonderful artifice, the soothingly orange sodium vapour spillage of street lights.


06:18

I quite like the idea of my life being lived 'on shuffle', using the shuffle function on my mp3 player because I can never decide exactly what I want to hear. It definitely affects the moods I have and what I think about, and on occasion, as above, even the decisions I make. A bit like in that book I haven't read, The Dice Man. I imagine. Sometimes it seems really sympathetic, like once I was thinking 'everything's a bit shit really' and it played the song that don made for me, Not Just Want But Need You, which is pretty much the best thing ever and can't really fail to make me feel better, even just in a 'this tune exists for me and me alone and without me it would never have been made' way, which is actually pretty special as things go. And another time I was just coming home on the bus and watching the rain outside the window, and it put together a pure neat little 'watching January rain falling in the streetlit dark through a foggy bus window' playlist for me:
Björk - Alarm Call
The Flashbulb - Counting Snow
The Flaming Lips - Mr Ambulance Driver
Gomez - Make No Sound
The Cure - Homesick
Tricky - Search, Search, Survive
I kinda couldn't have made one better myself, except that I realised I would have to add that Blind Melon record on to the friendly, glowing little device because of course it was missing No Rain. This has now been rectified.

So this walk I was on today, I walked all down Victoria Street and Grassmarket and then down that cool little road that goes right under the Castle rock into West Princes Street Gardens, right here. There are big tall lovely trees there, although they are all stark and naked of course at this time of the year, and I walked up the hill a bit to give one a hug. I like Princes Street Gardens although it's not very natural or anything; it was there that I decided I was going to accept the place at Edinburgh Uni if I got it and come here and live here, more or less. I've got lots more good memories of it since then, sunny and rainy and windy and snowy and indifferent and dark. So I was touching this tree (which incidentally is another one of those activities I don't get to do enough of sometimes - there's one in Grassmarket that I like a lot, from back in the day when I worked down there, but they'd gone and put up this stupid fencing around them for some reason so I hadn't been able to go near it) and suddenly realised that the hill was all studded with the first snowdrops of the year. As I walked on through I saw budding bright yellow crocuses as well, and two magpies in a tree. The sun was shining, rather weakly and milkily, but shining. Everything seemed quite empty and cold and expectant and they'd been round and given the willow trees haircuts and for some reason - could it really have just been the weather? - all the benches were tipped over backwards. Then my mp3 player, which I will have to think of a snappier wee name to call it because that is really getting to be a clunky thing to type, played Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying by Belle and Sebastian. If you do not know that song, it sounds like a bit of a downbeat title but it's actually sort of more 'ironic', much as that is an overused term, it's more about how innocence and life is pretty awesome considering. All these things are a sign, all these things mean that spring is just around the corner and it's going to be brilliant, I can't wait.

Anyway I'll have to go now because don's watching Boogie Nights and that film is fucking genius so I want to watch it too. I just got paid. Should I buy these cute green boots?

( think of it this way, you could either be successful or be us )

So now, for the first time really, I get to ride the bus to and from work every day. It takes about half an hour. It's great because I can listen to music, or read my book (Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky), or just do my best activity which is looking at everything, noticing things, and smiling at people passing in the street (it's great, also if you do it to cuties it's sort of like a really low-risk flirtatious activity because they're out there so they can't actually start talking to you. Genius!) I also sort of write a fashion column in my head about what all the stylish ladies are wearing, and sometimes guys too. I also read what other people are reading, over their shoulders. This is how I am becoming more aware of newspapers, and in particular the ones which have never before really been present anywhere in my life - certainly not in my home or my friends' homes or anywhere in my peer group at uni or anything; the rags, the 'red tops', the gutter papers, or prolefeed.

On the bus today, then, this one woman had made the mistake of buying The Sun. She was just sitting there with it closed, either looking at the front page, or not looking at it because whoa whoa, it was just simply insane! If you want to see an image of it there is one here, or I can give you the beginning. It actually, genuinely says "A SUN READER WRITES: We're witnessing the downward spiral of Britain. Decent members of the public [gotta love those guys!] are being murdered by feral youths on our streets." Then there is a reference to Rome under Nero. For serious. Heaven forgive me for saying it, but with it being Monday morning, and the grey-skied January rain on the window and everything, and the long faces of the commuters, it all just sort of made me laugh... I did wonder whether there had been any actual news in the night, but am forced to conclude not really (other than the biggest stock market crash since September 2001 obviously), this conclusion particularly reinforced at lunchtime when I was unfortunate enough to witness the front of the quite unbelievable Daily Record: (MAP OF EVIL! Exclusive Every Single Red Dot Exposes Paedophile Activity In Our Midst / THIS map will chill the blood of every parent. Each of the red dots covering Scotland like a rash marks an area where paedophiles are trading vile child porn movies on the internet.)

I noticed it was a full moon tonight, and genuinely did wonder whether there might be something in the air - or water - making these bizarre smut-peddlers even more rabid than usual; I swear they're not usually that mental over nothing, even when DI'S A WHORE, SAYS HER MUM and all that. Then I went home and checked up on what is clearly the best source of news - CBBC, mofos! In all seriousness I do think Newsround is insanely good and valuable and I am only slightly ashamed to admit that I actively look up things on there for a nice, friendly, simple explanation when I feel like I've missed a few tricks, usually because the story is so bloody boring (like that one about Labour funding and dodgy Geordie businessmen, unfortunately they don't even cover the boringest ones). And there you have it:
Experts used some complicated maths to work out that Monday 21 January is the day when people are most unhappy.
Naturally I couldn't resist that link 'Click here to tell us if you feel sad', which takes you to a truly wonderful page where children aged around 10 broadcast their moods to the nation, like so...
"I am not feeling sad today. Actually, I woke up feeling really excited, and I don't know why!!"
- Lauren, 10
"I'm not depressed today! It's my 13th birthday! Maybe I can be depressed tomorrow because my birthday is over! But not today!"
- Hannah, 13
"We have tests today."
- Jenny, 9
"I think January is the worst month because all the plants are dead and it's always raining."
- Jack, 13
"How strange!! I was feeling sad yesterday but I'm happy today, I loved it."
- Faatima, 10
"I woke up today and did not want to go to school. At school I had my worst lessons."
- Sam, 10
"I am actually happy!"
- John, 7
"I am just as happy on a Monday as on every other day. I love Monday!"
- Ibsor, 10
"I am a bit sad, but I can always think of something to make me happy."
- Maeve, 9, philosopher
Advanced, forthright, signifficant or what! I FUCKING LOVE NEWSROUND! Also, they should get these kids to write the entire internet.

As for me, well, the servers broke at work and the IT boys had to stay all day and were still there at 6 when I left and had a working lunch where our MD went out and bought them bacon rolls, so everyone was sort of stressed and not in the best of moods. And Bob's company owe me money and yeah, the sky was really ridiculously grey and it rained all day so I didn't see my tits, as in, the birds who live outside my window. On the plus side though, I listened to a fantastic, super-cheerful, song just after I woke up (Feel What I Feel, Lo-Fidelity Allstars), I've got a nice new haircut, I wore green, I had hot chocolate, my brother texted me, Don is great, and I saw the prettiest girl.

I think Maeve, 9, Bray, Ireland would agree: truly, life is good.

Oh yeah, here's something I wrote when we were down London.

November 18, 2007
     I went to Tate Modern with Don and Martin. We looked at Shibboleth, the Doris Salcedo crack in the Turbine hall, and raised our eyebrows; made lots of jokes along the lines of ‘kids, don’t do crack’; noted trying-not-to-sound-surprisedly how many people there were, late on a wet Sunday afternoon, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising. There are a lot of people. I took a couple of photos of people interacting with the fissure, because everyone else was.
     We looked through a crowded room of Surrealists, particularly Magritte and Ernst. I was excited to see a couple of Ernst’s landscapes/cityscapes, including a beautiful one I’d never seen that was oddly 3d, made out of cork, Dadaville. There were lots of other things there too, I especially remember lots of curvy organic shapes, some tiny little bronzes by Henry Moore, mini-Moores, not sure if they were studies or plans for larger pieces, maybe he just made them and I’d never seen any of them before, bronze would seem an odd choice of material for preliminary studies. An interesting one was roughly ovoid with three sharp points, curling in on itself like claws, the tips almost touching but not quite – a real sense of frozen movement and of electric urgency. Then on to a room of Bacons, through a really interesting set of tiny, tiny, infinitely delicate etchings by a chap called WOLS (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, as I scribbled in my notebook), who died young before he’d ever actually printed many of them. They were amazingly varied, angular shapes suggesting dark cities alongside curly, botanical-looking, loopy little figures that reminded me of lost hair, the individual lines as thin. Bacon, of course, very powerful and angry, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion very Silent Hill, which of course actually came later so what I mean is those things in Silent Hill are very Bacon, and so they are.
     After that, of course I wanted to see the Rothko room so we trooped on over, through some lovely abstract stuff – Ishi’s Light, a tall Anish Kapoor, stands welcomingly in the first room. It’s a curved sheet, like a topless, bottomless egg open on one side, it’s a cross between an egg and a revolving door: it’s matte white on the outside and shiny dark within so that the room and everyone in it are reflected, refracted, into this stretched column of light that shines right in the centre, moving to one side and another as you do. Kids run inside and push it in a way that makes me, as such a recent warder, draw a sharp breath, so it’s nice to remember that I don’t have to tell anybody off today. There are large red canvases on the wall facing it and they all become part of the inner, mirror-image, light show, it’s a beautiful and a calming thing. ‘Interactive’ in that quiet Kapoor way, not the trendy way that makes me think of ‘proactive’ and gag, but in the way that recognises that everything, all art, two or three-dimensional, is interactive if you choose to make it so, that there’s always a fourth dimension to everything, a fourth wall. I think again of the word ‘reflective’ and its meanings.
     The Rothkos are as brilliant as I could’ve hoped, mesmerising, multiplied, suggestive and intricate, the colours vivid and visceral, the scale of them dizzying, you feel like you might fall forward into the dark parts, like you’re standing at the edge of a lake or a void. I am happy to have come and to have a little time to stand and stare, it’s a luxury in London to be able to feel this aware of the space around you. I feel a kind of clarity of the senses, something like focusing through fog, something like bonds or cataracts, distractions, falling away; it’s something I’ve felt at the most sublime moments of those Sunday concerts in St. Giles’ cathedral, where sound and space come together so beautifully, I suppose maybe that’s what people get when they pray.

     As we leave, we pass under the spindly-legged, sharp-edged Louise Bourgeois spider and the sky’s darkening over the Thames, blue giving way to black that seems to soak, inky, upwards from the horizon. The city’s full of soft colours, warm uplighting casting gentle glinting shades on the Gherkin and London Bridge and some financial buildings, I don’t know what anything is but it’s just for looking at tonight, it’s for our eyes only. There are these streetlights, orange glowing globes, and then whitish, pinkish, green or blue tinges to all the other lights, it’s as if my aesthetic sense is rejoicing, the dark Rothkos having unlocked, reawakened something dormant, a sense of pleasure in the world, or perhaps in me. The glow of sodium vapour in the rain; more inwardly the glow of seeing beautiful things. The air’s not so cold now.
     On the Tube, the beautiful everything continues – there’s this sweet grungy-gothy-punky kid biting his chipped-black-polished nails across from us where we stand, his golden brown hair falling from under his hood about his face in sinuous, relaxed locks that curl at the ends as unreal and graceful as smoke. On his chest there’re little undotted question marks of hair, on his chin too he’s displaying his burgeoning manhood, he wears a necklace on a silvery chain, I can see the clasp, which has slipped down on his right-hand side, but not the pendant.
     A round-headed, solemn-faced blonde toddler sits in a buggy and kicks her squat, stubby little legs with an air of importance and of curiosity. She’s got these sparkly, cut-glass or plastic ‘jewels’ on her squarish little shoes, and infinitely smaller, more ephemeral and beautiful, rain drops glittering in her hair and on her fleecy pink hat.
     There’s this absolutely gorgeous, tall guy sitting nearby, he’s got close-cropped hair so as not to distract from his lovely, smooth face with its slightly soft lines, kind of angular but kind of voluptuous at the same time; his nose and ear are pierced with simple studs shining, he’s mixed-race and has these stunning dark eyes with fabulous lashes, I wish there was more light in here so I could see them look more lively, see the little ever-changing reflected lights dancing in them and echoing the flashes of light you get from his jewellery, but he’s mostly looking at the ground. There’s a tiny hole in the seam of his blue jeans, noticing it makes me realise I wish I could see more of his body, I wish there were more holes generally. Peep-holes I suppose. He’s got a dark shirt on over a white t-shirt, if he would even just roll up the sleeves...
     Then there’s a youngish, curly-haired couple – brown eyes for him, blue eyes for her – laughing together, she’s so pretty when she looks up at him and smiles. She’s not really much to write home about when you first look, but then she brings out this amazing great big grin that just lights up her face and the whole tube compartment and the whole day, like flicking a switch. He obviously says something funny and she just loves him for it, you can tell, it’s brilliant. She’s wearing a snug, cosy-looking, vintagey high-necked check coat and there’s a button hanging loose on its thread at the throat, it swings from side to side with the movement of the train and with her laughter.

I've been wanting to write something here - and also address everyone's thoughts on the great sex/art debate, which were really interesting to read but it seems like I was too lacking in energy to articulate my responses yet, which sucks of me and I am really sorry - and it's not as if nothing has been happening, why, just this weekend I had an amazing weekend from Darjeeling (Limited, The. With Stoop. It's awesome, sort of like The Life Aquatic on a train with more sex or something) to the stars (Patrick, Chris, Will, Vajid and I saw the most fantastic meteor possibly ever, which made it totally worth freezing our junk on top of the Crags for three hours, although I wonder whether it was worth how utterly ill and befuddled P seemed after he rolled down a hill - thankfully not the Crags, this time in PSG - after 2l homebrewed cider and some beer and some wine...) to a sweet night out with the best of friends (Aythan's and seemingly everyone else in Edinburgh's and the pub's birthday, from the kebab shop to the Hoose to the Hive). Man I love ridiculously long and overcomplicated parenthetical sentences! Lovely. So, yeah, it's not even as if nothing's been happening. ( What it is )

But then Ailsa had the awesome idea of making a wee photographic review of the year. That is perfect both in terms of how ridiculously many photos I take and in terms of how little I feel like writing, or am able to write well, right now. So I'm afraid I obviously had to steal it, cheers A! The only thing is, I'm not exactly sure that I can choose just one per month... well, let's see. [Spoiler: no. 36 small photos lie beneath.]

( oh, but maybe in the next world )

I actually feel really quite cheered up now, excellent! I wonder whether it was the happy memories, the light therapy, the lovely cup of tea or the combination. It's all good.

Now, it's not exactly often that I write about omg hot celeb gossip upon this page. Or anywhere. Or, generally, know what the young people are up to and who or what is going on at all in the twilit world of popular cultural divertiments such as 'Celebrity Love Brother Island' and 'Strictly America's Next Top Pop Idol' or matters of that ilk. Ever. So bear with me for a wee bit here while I digress and say a few words about the popular, admirably-lunged party girl about town, Amy Winehouse.

I've sort of got what you could call a thing about Amy Winehouse. I remember I picked up this book of matches advertising Frank, I think in the student union or something, at least a hundred years ago and it was in this drawer in the kitchen for ever, so that when I finally got round to hearing one of her tunes sometime last year I thought "oh, it's the girl from the matches" and also "gosh, she's quite good isn't she?" Around the same time, don showed me a photo of her (pre-bulimia), and we agreed that her physical charms were also considerable. It wasn't until about spring this year that the Thing really developed. I remember I was still working at V&C, and wasn't particularly happy, and Amy Winehouse's life was evidently going a bit bonkers as well because I remember having office-chat with Pad about it when he was still there. Then I must have read some article about her or something, or wikipediad her, and for some reason found out that she is younger than me by 48 days.

This knowledge shook me up a little, to be honest. She's a big famous jazz diva, I thought, she's written things that millions of people love to hear, she's having this big moment in the spotlight, and here I am, sitting in the office, reading PC Geekly because I'm bored and they haven't invented Facebook yet. What's going on? I know it doesn't make a lot of sense, I know there have been other people who've been younger than me, people have lived and loved and died younger than me, but somehow I felt like people like her shouldn't be. I suppose because 'people like her' would be people like Billie Holiday, Edie Sedgwick, maybe Nina Simone, and they were always older than me, mostly dead before I was born. Because she's classic? Or just because she had done so much more than me - sure, done so much more drugs and blokes, you might say, but she's created, succeeded, achieved more than I probably ever will, too.

So then I started comparing myself to Amy in my head every now and again; I started to think of her as this kind of parallel-universe quasi-sister or something, as though she were someone I could have been if everything had turned out differently. We're both 24, after all. We're both from North London, and we're both Jewish - in fact my family know her family, it's quite weird how much all the British Jews, apart from the frummers, seem to be connected although I suppose it's just that there are not very many of us. In fact there are fewer Jews in the UK than Jedi, which I find quite entertaining really. She's got one of those odd surnames that sounds like it's Anglicised probably from Weinhauser or Weintraub or something Eastern European, my family's name used to be Rosenberg. We both like girly shit like doing our hair and make-up, and shoes, and tattoos, and we both got our noses pierced when we were 14 and feeling rebellious. We both like guys with black hair and blue eyes - she wrote very well about this, about lust and having to work with someone you find attractive (not that I would know about that, obviously, cough, but I imagine it's like what she says); see Amy, Amy, Amy, the last track on Frank. We both have pretty good racks, if you don't mind my saying so. And I think maybe we both feel kind of ambivalent about how our lives are going at this point, like there are highs and lows, and like 2007 hasn't been the greatest year for us, and life's been getting a little crazy and out of control.

So in many ways, yeah, I feel sort of like the fat, boring Amy Winehouse who can't sing. Aaaand it's at about this point that I generally start thinking maybe I shouldn't always write these thoughts down and hash them out to their logical conclusion. It's kind of like she's been there for me as an awful magic mirror, as a sort of benchmark of troubles. So, a while ago I was starting to get a little bit worried that maybe I drink too much, then I thought 'no, Amy Winehouse drinks too much!'. I worry about my weight sometimes - Amy Winehouse has serious eating disorders that make her look like a scary skeleton lady. I worry about my relationship, my friends - Amy Winehouse has some no-good, double-barrelled fool of a husband, whose ass is incidentally in jail, to worry about, and he may possibly have hit her and she has his name tattooed on her boob (really.) and she hangs out with Pete Doherty. I felt like I was disappointing my parents when I quit my job and had difficulty getting a new one - Amy Winehouse's mum wrote an open letter to her in the News of the World, for Christ's sake. (In which she asks her to come home and have some chicken soup. Damn straight! When I had 'probable' glandular fever I went home and my mum cured it with chicken soup. Mum's chicken soup is the fuel of Jews throughout the world. That's not a joke.)

It's not schadenfreude, I feel really bad for her and I'm not happy to see her going through all that dreadful stuff and I hope she has fun with at least some of it - it's just that it's become this thing that sort of helps me to put my problems in perspective sometimes. So now the year is drawing to an end, I don't have a steady job but I've got an interview and some articles to write and one of them's about fashion inspired by The Lost Boys, and don and I are doing great, and I've got cute red shoes and that's all pretty awesome. And Amy? There are horrible pictures of her wandering around the streets in her bra in the middle of the night all over the gutter papers, and she's wearing what looks like a tacky, white plastic rosary (again, I say: Amy, really.) with it, and god, she just looks so sad that it breaks my heart. So, maybe I will write my book and become rich and famous and fabulous in my own good time; maybe I won't. But for just now, being the fat, boring Amy Winehouse who can't sing seems to be kind of working out better than being the real deal, and so that's how I shall stay.

I am learning to ride a bicycle.

Oh yeah. Don't ask me how I managed to get to the age of 24 without learning earlier, that's what everybody asks; I just did, alright. My brother and sister can't either. My dad did try to teach us when I was about 12 or so; it didn't work, I guess I was a bad combination of too stubborn and too scared. Now it's different, my stubbornness is actually helping me in a way, I'm approaching it as a kind of challenge, so I'm thinking 'huh, riding a bike, anyone can ride a bike, I bet I can too'. Also my very dear friend Pad is helping me. Well, actually he deserves more credit than that. He is not just 'helping me', he is: almost solely responsible for bringing bicycles into my consciousness, proselytizing about his whenever I give him a chance; definitely the most constant source of nagging/promising to teach me ever since he found out I couldn't, at least a year ago; single-handedly undertaking teaching me in a series of early(ish) morning lessons on the Meadows; selflessly allowing his beloved bike Marin to be mishandled, wobblingly ridden and fallen off by me, in what he calls 'low rider' mode which is where he's changed the seat to cater to my smaller proportions; running along behind me holding me up, being encouraging and apologising when he touches my bottom; tirelessly explaining every principle of bike-riding physics and engineering that I think of questions to ask him about, and even the ones I don't; providing emotional support and tough love and absolutely not allowing me to quit; incredibly patient and tolerant and lovely and cheerful in the face of my cowering, wibbling, sulking, falling, bellowing and cursing; generally going far above and beyond the call of friendship duty; actually quite possibly a saint.

I have had two lessons which probably total about three hours of attempted riding. Lesson one was on (skanky, wet) grass and included steering, braking and pedalling, but didn't include sitting on the seat because he had forgotten the Allen key to lower it and my feet wouldn't go all the way around on the pedals otherwise. Lesson two included starting (it's really difficult!), stopping and actually riding in straight lines, on concrete and grass, slightly uphill and slightly downhill, and changing gear. And falling off. And an 'emergency stop' because a dog was about to piss on Patrick's bag, haha, awesome. Anyway, I rode on Middle Meadow Walk for, I'd say, maybe 20 metres without Padular support. He said 'I let go there for a moment!' and I said 'NOOO WAAAAY' and he said 'WAAAY!' and I said 'waaay?!' then he did it again and ran along beside me waving his hands so I could see them, then I said 'wwaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH' (this is my usual cycling sound) and he held on again until we got to the top bit where I stopped quite smoothly and dismounted gracefully and did a happy little jig.
( i want to stay this way forever if you don't mind )

flesh, n., the muscles covering the bones; the body apart from the soul; mankind.

flirt, v., play at love-making; --n., trifler in love; foolish, giddy girl.

flux, n., motion of fluid; that which flows; continual change; --v., make fluid; melt.

I am all these things and more.

And I am going to Newcastle to see my brother and then to London to see many wonderful things, and then I will be back next week.

And I can't stop listening to Death from Above 1979! Black History Month is, like, the single funkiest thing that's happened in my life this year. I feel like saying, AYTHAA-AAN, why did you not tell us that this band were fucking amazing and we all had to drop what we were doing and listen to them RIGHT NOW before they split up? Then I remember that I think Aythan did sort of try to do that but I was too busy (I typed 'busty' by mistake there not once but twice. How telling.) making fun of his pink t-shirt. I am sorry, Aythan. I am sorry, pink t-shirt. I am sorry, Death from Above 1979.

And did you know that we just lived through the largest recorded outburst by a comet‽‽‽ It was 17P/Holmes. I didn't see it but just knowing about it makes me feel happier, I am rather easy to please in my own quiet way.



The noun stargazer has 3 meanings:

Meaning #1: someone indifferent to the busy world
Synonym: lotus-eater
Meaning #2: a physicist who studies astronomy
Synonyms: astronomer, uranologist
Meaning #3: heavy-bodied marine bottom-lurkers with eyes on flattened top of the head

True romance.

So I had my wee chat with the Careers Advisor today, it went over an hour and she gave me some good tips about my approach, CV, speculative applications and networking and all that stuff. The other thing I gradually realised was that 'careers advisor' != 'superhero', so she did not actually SOLVE MY LIFE and tell me what to do to make everything perfect and lovely for ever after. As I had sort of hoped. Ho hum.

I know, as Aythan so rightly said, that it's not as simple as going

I know this is what I want to do

how shall I go about doing it?
But at the same time, when one can't even get to that first part, it can be a bit, I dunno, immobilising. It's like if the world of work was a big ol' lake, or sea I suppose, stretching out in front of us, rather choppy in places, but calmer in others, with tides and currents and whirlpools and dangers, some sea monsters for good measure, why not - and you're supposed to leave the shore in whatever craft you can muster, a few of them are streamlined jet-powered powerboats and things, some are romantic old tall ships with pretty names, most are rickety little lifeboats and rafts and you hope that you can start off in one of those and get picked up by one of the sleek vessels you can see shimmering further out, quite a few of us are just hopping onto lily pads or stepping stones to try and make some kind of progress... and I'm just standing here on the eroding shore, sinking slightly with each day that passes, just looking out over the scene and feeling uncomfortably flummoxed by the way everything keeps moving and shifting around and I can't keep my eye on any one thing for very long, and losing a little bit of hope every time something sails by without stopping to ask if I'd like to join the crew, who either smile and wave their handkerchiefs gaily from the deck or stare gloomily from dirty windows as they pass me by.
It's like I have this feeling that there's this job out there that I could do and I'd enjoy it and be really good at it and productive and make people happy and everything would be great... but I don't know what it is yet. And I'm scared of closing doors that might lead me to it, but I'm also scared of staying where I am, stagnating, and getting older and poorer and everyone thinking I'm a dilettante and a person who is lacking drive and direction and all those other things you're supposed to have at my age. Aie.

So obviously, I'm going to ask the internets.

( why yes, yes I AM still going on about all that boring old 'careers' nonsense and this is entirely self-serving and probably not very exciting at all )

Also ROBO-MOTH is fucking cool, melding insect, machine for win! Seriously now, that technology is totally mind-blowingly amazing. I wish I was smarter, then maybe I could be a robot scientist like Paul and get to play with Lego all day possibly help paralysed people and amputees and stuff. Oh no! Another fine career opportunity!

Also this is really quite shit. And if anyone knows about any good protests or actions that might be going on against This Sort Of Thing they should definitely tell me about them.

Also and finally, I REALLY LOVE COLIN MURRAY.

My dad paid for me and don to go up to The Enchanted Forest in Pitlochry last night, it were great! Here is a Text Portrait all about him.

( Portrait of my father )

ALSO, unrelatedly, an awesome picture of octopus wrestling. Cruelty to animals never looked so manly.

I've been quite worried recently about what I think might be a wee bit of a lack of ambition, or direction, in me. Confidence, too, and general buoyancy. I guess it stems from the fact that I know I can't afford to go back to uni or get any further training, really, unless I get some money in the bank first, but it's hard to motivate myself to feel any genuine drive to do that uncomfortable middle bit... and I'm not entirely sure, exactly, what it is I'm going to do when I can afford it again, I've got a couple of ideas, but mainly I just know I want to be learning all the time again, I just know I was happier in academia, I'm not so happy here. I get excited every time there's a job like an 'internship' or 'apprenticeship' going, that's like a halfway house: both learning and earning, but then I don't get the job and I feel really rubbish again. AND I'm getting old! less than a week till my birthday, I am not very excited about it yet, I wish I was more.

SO. In my anxious state, I made an appointment to see the careers advisor back at the ol' uni (in two weeks - I am totally unsurprised to learn that they're busy, I think perhaps the world is sort of set up to make idealistic graduates feel this way) and also signed up for one of those careers matching aptitude quiz things, as someone suggested the other day. The results are quite interesting... but this just made me laugh, apparently one of my top five ideal careers is...
Footwear Designer.



OBVIOUSLY.
I don't even really understand how it realised how much I love shoes! Honestly, I'm sure there wasn't a question 'how would you like a career that involves... loving the shit out of shoes and seriously, thinking about shoes ALL DAY LONG?' Now I just want to buy shoes! Goddammit, I'm skint already! This is Not Helping.

Oh well. When I was halfway through the questions, for some reason they insist on showing you the half-formed career suggestions at regular intervals, and one of the top ones was 'wig maker', which has gone now. Yeah, I'm sure they're always in demand. Imagine if my innate vocation was to make wigs! That's mental, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. More for my own reference than anything else really, the top 21 are...

( i don't need you, i want you )

I don't want this to turn into, like, a blog about Radiohead and how much I love Radiohead and every entry to mention the fact that Radiohead are great or anything, BUT I do have two things to say about Radiohead. Who are great. Firstly, I finally succeeded in going to the Merchant Street, evening-into-night branch of the lovely teahouse the other day (I had been thwarted on the three previous occasions for reasons too long and illogical to enumerate) and not only was it every bit as lovely and sumptuously-furnished as I remembered, and not only did I have a pot of genmai cha that was really fab and didn't go bitter after a while at all, and not only was there a Marx Brothers film, I don't know which one, playing silently on the wall-screen, BUT ALSO they were playing Weird Fishes/Arpeggi. And in fact the rest of In Rainbows. I have been listening to it near-constantly and, I don't have the words, it just is very, very good indeed.
What we need more of is teahouses with Radiohead in. And science, obviously. And shoes.

Secondly, I was just walking around New Town on a misty morning and feeling a bit glum because it was Katarina's last day in Edinburgh. Then How to disappear completely was on my mp3 player, and I was thinking, I have listened to this song a million times and loved it since the first time I heard it, but I'm not sure I ever really knew what he was singing, but that line sounded like 'I walk through walls, I float down the Liffey'. And wouldn't it be weird if I, a girl from London, was just walking around in Edinburgh, realising that I'm listening to a dude from Oxford, singing about the place that I'm sad because she, a girl from Helsinki, is going to? Looks like that is the case. Now it will be not only one of my top sad songs ever, but also a song that makes me think of her, and that's nice in its way. Then I turned a corner into Dublin Street and thought, I wonder how often coincidences really happen, and how often they're subconsciously decisions, or how often they just go unnoticed. Hmm.

Don and I'll be at the Ark to see Kling Klang tonight by the way! Probably!

I am still listening to all the tracks on my mp3 player (there are 1056) on shuffle. Today on my walk home it made me listen to Black Box Recorder - Child Psychology (it’s on that page, about half way down though) followed by Eels – P.S. You Rock My World. Yes. So I wrote this.

I’m turning the corner into ----- Street as a man called E intones “and I was thinking ’bout how everyone is dying”. The quotidian countdown of streets away from my street, my home and my boy, of roads left to cross and corners left to turn, just down the hill now, cross this road and one more right turn then left through the door, up the stairs and I’ll be home. I am thinking about how everyone is very serious; I am thinking about how I am always worrying; I am thinking quite a lot about disease, presently, which makes sense, and about money, which never did. I am thinking about sunlight and about leaves, I suppose you could say about how every leaf is dying; I am also thinking about love and thinking that I can’t wait to attend the two weddings I’m going to attend next month (although I don’t know what to wear) and go to London again, and that I love this song. I know the words, of course, but don’t fail to get a little shiver down my spine at the next line, “and maybe it’s time to live”. A guy cycles past, up the hill, with a bag over his shoulder which has two of those amazing ‘bird of paradise’ flowers (Strelitzia reginae) sticking out of it, bright orange, red and black and beautiful. The appearance of this man pleases me greatly. He’s maybe fortysomething and a little heavy-set for my tastes, and he’s wearing a waistcoat of some kind and I do not generally approve of such garments, over a loose top which is the same odd, warm salmon-faded-orangey colour as a pair of trousers that I vividly remember belonging to Dr. Paul Vogt, my erstwhile supervisor; those trousers were so strange, intriguing even, and evidently memorable: it has been well over a year now since I saw him last. I half-sort-of wish I’d ever discussed them with him, I start to think idly in my head how you start a conversation about trousers, it’s not like I’d have wanted to say “so, Paul, what possessed you to buy those startling trousers?”, and as I think about it I laugh at myself, at the very idea; Paul and I were both far too shy. I like that when I start to laugh I realise that I’m smiling broadly already and not for the first time on this walk home. I hope that the cycling man saw my smile, because I think it was probably for him, but don’t think he did, he looked like he was concentrating. Maybe it’s more difficult to ride a bike uphill. Soon I shall find out. I continue to think about trousers and wonder whether I shall ever see Paul again. I think that lots of garments have interesting little stories behind them, or maybe it’s that if you are interested enough in a person, it’s just good to know lots and lots of things about them, because then you’ve more little connections in your brain about them, everyday things that remind you of something they said; more reasons to think of them again. Maybe that’s why it’s nice, when you like someone, to talk about everything and anything and nothing in particular. Maybe it’s why it’s nice to be very interested in people, generally. I know I was very interested in Paul, but sometimes I think I am just interested in people, and I like that.

I know it’s lame to be writing on livejournal on a Saturday night, but I’m working tomorrow - it's my last day! Also don is watching rugby for some reason. Boooooooorrrrriiiiing. The best thing is this dude, although let’s be fair, they are all pretty freaky. In actual sporting news (i.e. football), I feel really sorry for San Marino.

European Championship Qualifying: Group D Table
[...]
7 San Marino P 10 W 0 D 0 L 10 F 1 A 50 GD -49 PTS 0
That's right, they have a goal difference of -49, that's genuinely tragic! Poor little fellers.

I wrote this yesterday but didn't have time to post it because of my voluntary work training. I've only two sessions of it left, it's actually been amazing.

*     *     *     *     *
October 3

My first duty when I arrive in the morning is to remove the remains of yesterday – of yesterday’s visitors, who strolled through these rooms and shed receipts, bus tickets, hankies, sequins, hair and skin: mostly skin, if the school yard science that dust is made up of dead skin holds true. So, this skin, I politely remove it from my room with a big flat red brush, then remove the big flat red brush; downstairs with the vacuum cleaner I suck out all the skin of today and into its bag it goes with all the other skins from all the other rooms, disturbingly grey, something you wouldn’t really want on your nice clean live skin now, away it all goes to be disposed of and now the rooms are clean and ready to receive a fresh round of visitors, new shoe-clicks echoing around the tall spacious halls, new old skin, new old unnecessary hair. For now it’s empty and so quiet: the floors dully, approximately reflect the paintings on the walls, the brass shines, the air conditioning hums.
In the bathroom I am the master and commander of shiny, miniature turbines, powerful jets of hot air exist or don’t at a wave of my hand. The gallery, like all the modern buildings, is full of such things, many machines for moving the air around.
The rest of my duties for the day are to oversee, and occasionally limit, the interactions of those many shedding people with images of other people – representations of the dead, the beloved and the forgotten: two-dimensional things, just canvases really, with patches of light and dark. In my mind’s eye I see them like a mass, the visitors, the humans, shuffling forward unlit and greyish, many little pieces coming away at the edges, slowly disintegrating a little more at every step: an unending procession of them, a steadily dissolving tribe, ever less clearly defined and delineated, ever shedding, ever losing more of these tiny pieces of themselves which fly away on the breeze like ash, and never even realising.
Yesterday I read a story (while I was coating my fingernails with hard varnish, incidentally, making them deep maroon and glittery, making them resemble some unlikely, precious mineral which exists in my head) of a young woman who spent her wedding night performing a bizarre turn-based strip-tease with her new husband, a terrifying monster; when he had removed his nine skins she, naked too now, whipped his raw flesh with many whips soaked in lye, whipped until she could whip no more and then washed him in fresh milk and took him in her arms to sleep. She did it to save her own hide, having no better ideas, but she got the traditional extra bonus reward for her courage in such tales – a beautiful and wise young man, a prince, freed from his misshapen old body, lay there with her naked in the morning.
After that I climbed a big hill with a lovely young man of my own time and town, and didn’t really say any of the things I’d meant to say or the things I’d thought perhaps I ought. The things we do for love; the things we do for lovers. He said he wasn’t sure which things had happened in reality and which only in his dreams. I wondered whether this said more about his reality or about his dreams. When we came back down he led me down a prettily-painted little lane, showed me a giant snail made of concrete and silvery metal squares; told me it reminded him of a girl he used to know, the girl who’d showed it to him.
I wonder should I admit to anybody that sometimes, a bit like Patrick, I get the strange overwhelming feeling that it’s really impossible to know what is real and what is not; that sometimes I get the feeling that almost everything everyone says and does is a lie; that sometimes I get the feeling that, deep down, they know that?
*     *     *     *     *
The visitors are lovely really, in fact, Sarah was in today! That is the second time I have known a Sarah in the exhibish. So yeah I don’t really truly think all those things, sometimes you have to do this thing called poetic licence. Which is also the name of a rather nice shoe company, by the way. (Phwoar.) I mostly like them, the visitors I mean, I quite like working there overall really. I have drawn nineteen visitors and one warder. Today a Norwegian lady took my photograph, she is my colleague’s mum, so that’s nice. Also I got some free gloves, which are nice and stripey, because the shop person bizarrely didn’t charge me for them (I think it must be because the universe owed me a pair of nice stripey gloves, though, to be honest). I have to sleep now.

You can tell it’s Thursday when you’re walking to work sort of perhaps a tiny bit late AS ALWAYS, and then in the middle of Princes Street some kind of a freaky backdraft thing from a bus going by makes your skirt fly up around your waist like in a sexy Marilyn Monroe standing on a vent style only not, not at all, and also under your stupid uniform you are wearing pink underpants with cherries and strawberries on, and rather nice lace topped hold ups. Man, Thursdays are so baws. The gallery closes at 7 only nobody seems to know that so the last two hours just get quieter and quieter and then it goes all twiiiiliiiiight zoooooone. And then everyone comes in at quarter to 7 and you're all like ARGH I just want me tea. On the other hand I think I did have nearly three hours of breaks today because we're short of staff... cos that makes sense.
( worky lists )

I bought an amazing coat in a charity shop, the whole time I was choosing it, trying it on and deciding it was amazing and buying it one of the charity-shop-ladies was having a heated discussion with a customer about somebody called Engelbert Humperdinck. What sort of a name is that?! An awesome one, that's what sort! Unfortunately, I gathered that he was singing the music that was playing, which was pretty awful. Still though! I wonder if every time I wear that coat, until something else memorable happens in it, I’ll think "Engelbert Humperdinck". Like how when I got my lily tattoo, It's A Rockin’ World by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros was playing. Class.

In other news, Being a man is better than being a woman, part 415894731893
I saw a thing the other day for this new-fangled 'Logical skincare: Recipe for men'. Basically they’ve got make-up for blokes now, but that’s okay, because it’s logical. Logical skincare. How much better would my life be if the mad products that have been constantly advertised for me to buy and plaster over my face, hair, legs, and whatever else had been advertised on the basis of their propensity for valid inference and demonstration in philosophical arguments?! Lots, that's how much. I can’t actually argue this point any further because I'm wearing highly illogical make-up. Bollocks to it.

In other other news, Martin, my awesome little friend from high school, just got married to a hot Belarussian girl and sent me photos. They are so cute I actually almost cried. I don't think any of you know him but it doesn't matter, it’s just that they are pretty much the happiest thing in the world. I sent them tea and biscuits as a wedding present, because what the world needs now is tea and biscuits. No, not just for some, but for everyone.

Me me me me me. So, following on from this, also this week I heard (or read on facebook, okay, whatever) that my brother had read the book and been 'sort of inspired' by it. He likes the idea of what he called '(verbal? textual?) portraits' and wants to do some himself. So when I actually sat and thought about it, I realised that I liked this form, the attempt at snapshotting, capturing some of the salient features about a person with a handful of words. A related - or possibly the same - genre or form could be the explanation that goes with a photographic (or drawn, visual anyway) portrait: Pointing to the people in the picture you say, 'that's me', 'that's my brother', 'that's just this guy we met; he was sweet; he was Australi