supermarket think

Thinking on my till:

there's no one here. was it something i said? time's flying today. do heinz beans cost more than own brand? is it cheaper to buy a breadmaker and cheap ingredients?
i should call exeter uni.
i need to buy swimear. think a tankini and short would be more modest + make me look less fat.
should buy jam doughnut at lunch.
i should buy more clothes from here. they're proper cheap.
they sell wooden shelves here for 98p. gotta get me one to put over my bed. books and dvds. no more cd cases in my bed...
is there a co-op in egham?
living ethically is expensive, not possible at uni. no more organic food, fairtrade, additive frees, innocent drinks, ecover washing up stuff..
i never used to pick clothes based on modesty.
would i be able to put up the shelf myself? me, with a powerdrill?

thinking: i always think that i've never changed. the thought, the prayer, that i haven't changed a bit. why has it been eighteen months and i'm still exactly the same? sometimes it's more: ok, so it's been eighteen years and i'm still the same.
but no. the thing is that some stuff is still the same about me. i still talk too much, swear too often, attention seek. i still spend far too much of my time thinking about boys, still get crushes on authority figures. hah. still get insecure, still have those weird moods, 'down phases' where i cease to function for a day or two. sometimes, there's still this awful sadness, very familiar, as if it's always been there and i'm just rediscovering it.

said the exact same thing to tom last year in drama. did this weird lesson on artaudian theatre, scary stuff. exercises like making yourself hyperventilate, stream of consciousness writing, improvising this weird, primal kind of physical theatre. awesome, pretentious, pointless, terrifying. everyone thought it was weird. a couple of people took the piss but it affected me really badly. like catharsis, i guess. i let out a lot of emotion that lesson and i said to tom, doing that stuff brought that feeling, like a sadness that i'd forgotten.

gotta love stream of consciousness writing. if you can get fast enough, if you can scribble your thoughts so fast that you're barely even thinking them before they're on the page, you'll spell out things you didn't even know you were. sometimes great. sometimes freaky.

patrick savastano just walked past, holding hands with some girl. the girl he was with before was a stunner. this is a big step down. you can tell he thinks it, he's ignoring her. he's watching his ex-girlfriend as she's working on another till while the new girlfriend is reaching for his hand. nice little image there.

i wonder what customers think when they walk up to the till and i'm scribbling away? i shove the bit of paper underneath the screen and give them a giant "i'm not a slacker grin". hiya!

if i was going through the till and the person working was writing on some till roll, i'd be so curious. i'm nosy like that. i'd be thinking it was a note to another checkout worker, to be delivered via the greencoats. or a poem or something. maybe they're running away and writing and leaving a letter.

******

The end of the thought that I tried to write down was that I have changed. If I can look back at stuff I used to do and know that I don't do that anymore, then I've changed. It sounds so blindingly obvious, it's stupid that I'm making such a big deal of that one fact. The one prayer that always comes up, no matter where I am in life, is "Lord, change me". And everytime I pray it I'm expecting some kind of revolution. That's not the way it works, I guess. It's not about magically transforming overnight, it's about knowing that every day, I get a little bit closer to being where, and who, God wants me to be.