Sunday, April 30, 2006

there was absolutely no point to this

Bubbles in the can on my right. The sexy red sound of addiction.

I'm stuck on coke.

Beats and rhymes and things from speakers.

Typing and less typing, the keyboard in front of me.

Shampoo in my hair.

Cigarettes on my fingers, Mayfair, like my grandfather smoked before he died. I like to crumble the ends in my finger, flick the tobacco out and peel back the filter paper. The smell will stay on my hands for hours, it makes me want suck on my fingertips because I can't bury my face in his chair anymore.

The deodorant I borrowed off Kate three months ago and never gave back.

Clouds outside.

I've spent the day playing with pictures, trying to find a headshot for a website. I've blogged some of my favourites, but still haven't found one of me I like enough. I want to write for a website, but I need something pouty and black and white for their homepage. Pouty. Hm...

I get halfway through these blogs and lose track, utterly.

I taste chewing gum, fags again, it's really filthy, but Toby's just given up so I must be restoring some kind of cosmic balance. Billy tells me I smoke like a drama student and tries to correct me. Sam tells me my breath smells. They're all completely right, particularly Toby, who is sensible in this.

Between Sam, Cat and Est, I can now say several things in French, such as 'fuck the police', 'do it now', 'nothing is going well', 'hate breeds hate', 'hell is other people'... The total of French films I've watched now stands at two - La Vie Revee Des Anges, which was ok, but didn't have English subtitles, and La Haine, which was stunning, and not just because it had English subtitles.

Huber in La Haine (The Hatred) says that it's not how you fall, it's how you land. Learning is fun.

It's not that I have nothing to say, so much as I don't know how to start. I'm back to that place, searching for the ultimate adjective to describe what the hell I feel.

I get to see the psychiatrist one more time before I'm officially given the ok. What the 'ok' is, I'm not entirely sure, but I don't find it very reassuring.

Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land.

Jusqu'ici tout va bien; so far so good.

Friday, April 28, 2006

apology

Happy is the day I go 24 hours without letting someone down. Happy is the day I don't have this feeling like, huh, a punch in the stomach that I deliver to myself. Purely as poetry, so you don't have to, everything is justified because I hate myself enough for all four of us.

Me. And you three.

this is how i am

There's an awful lot to say, but pictures speak louder than words.







And there's a lot of people whose words are better than mine today.

“I guess I’m writing this here to help myself heal. I feel better writing about it, despite the risk of having people send me judgmental email telling me what a pathetic and selfish person I am. As needlessly dramatic as it sounds, my husband can only hold my head as I cry for so many hours before I have to get up and force myself to breathe again. I can’t look at the backyard or the place next to the bed where she slept without wanting to crawl into a hole in the ground. Is that dramatic? It probably is, but when you’re depressed, everything is dramatic. Breathing is dramatic. Perhaps I’m writing this to reach out to others who have suffered depression and have overcome it without the aid of medication. How do you get the drama to end?”


It was this kind of failure that overwhelmed residents of Al Rashad Psychiatric Hospital as Baghdad fell to US forces. Terrified, all 1,015 residents fled as looters stole medicine and equipment, then stripped the hospital of doors, windows and light fixtures. On April 25, aid worker Steve Weaver... visited Al Rashad. Amid the destruction, he saw decades worth of patient records scattered about. A lone member of staff was painstakingly sorting through the piles of papers, trying to re-file them... Weaver was told that some 700 patients were still missing from Al Rashad. Staff were concerned that they might have been wandering Baghdad's lethal streets.



So many of us have lost our sense of home over the years. Others never had a home to speak of. And that is why I say that we have journeyed long and far to be here together tonight. For those of us who are Christians, the bread and wine are symbols of something old and rich and meaningful. The bread nourishes more than our bodies, and the wine loosens more than our tongues. This meal is a celebration of the redemption we have always hoped for, always sought, and desperately needed to find. We consider ourselves to be a family in this faith.


If you wanted to know where I am - this is where I am. All this stuff, this is me today. Listening to Hindi Sad Diamonds from Moulin Rouge. I don't know much about truth. I feel rather a lot about beauty. Freedom and love...




...are interesting things.

The more days that pass, the more certain I am that I've made the right decision. The quieter it gets round here, the more suspicious I am of what's previously been said. The less I believe in God, the more beautiful the world appears to me, the more free I feel, the less I understand what I believed before. The further I get from faith, the closer I get to figuring out who I am and what I'm doing.

That should be sad, but it's not. Truth, beauty, freedom and love. Life in abundance. These things don't work out the way you expect them to; you don't find those things where you once thought you would.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

break your heart and raise a glass of gin

Cat and I are perfect mirror images, each leaning out one side of the window, a Spanish cigarette in one hand, a pink plastic glass of cheap Cava in the other.

We're watching a French film, talking about God, various failed attempts to fight the slut within. Faith should be something constant, deeply understood. I tell her I'm taking a step back, trying to start again with the whole thing. It's odd, trying to explain it out loud for once, not to just anyone, but to Cat, my big sister and partner in crime.

She says, as your cell leader, I'd have to advise against taking hard drugs. She leans out the window, stubs her cigarette on the sill. "I wouldn't want to get into something that might be addictive."

She doesn't know it, but our plans to head up to Windsor Great Park and get even worse are the most encouraging thing that's happened to me in quite a while.

*****

Up to the point where she rescued me and took me to Budgens for junk food, yesterday was a bad day.

I sat down at my PC, face to face with all the work I've been ignoring for three weeks and suddenly realised how lazy I'd been. Which made me feel bad.

And there's a turning point, I've realised. It comes somewhere between the initial 'huh, I've cocked up' and the resultant trauma of 'I'm such a horrible person'. In that point, maybe that half hour, I should have cracked on with an essay, or gone for a walk to get some air, or done something.

Should should should.

I haven't thought about the turning point for ages, because I haven't thought about the Bad Place for so long. The Bad Place bit me in the ass yesterday.

They reckon pride comes before a fall. They can fuck right off. Whoever needed a proverb to tell them that?

*****

And after yesterday's antics, my own ones, rather than the ones undertaken with Cat (which I happen to believe were both necessary and productive), I don't know qualified I am to talk about pride. About self-respect, really.

Pride's a sin, yeah? One of those awful things that we fallen humans do for kicks. Not Good. I like to think I'm pretty self-deprecating (even if I'm not very good at it), but we lions are proud things.

I don't like to be patronised, or patronise. I like to look people in the eye when they're talking, to shake their hand when I meet them, to respect their opinion, their personal space and I expect people to do the same for me.

The only man I get down on my knees for is God. As far as I'm concerned, his is the only ass I've found in the world worth kissing.

What if you stop believing? Whose ass are you kissing then? Whose rules are you following then?

As a Christian, my self-respect comes from being right with God, from trying to be good with him. Looking at myself in the mirror without flinching is from that and only that.

I might be a mess sometimes, spectacularly so, but a girl has to look in the mirror to see to do her eyeliner, and if I'm pretending to be something I'm not then I just can't do that.

As someone who isn't a Christian, my self-respect comes from kissing ass for no one, and getting my eyes done properly. And you can take that however you like.

Monday, April 24, 2006

pull it together, love

You can't remember if you've showered yet today.

You know you've eaten, you know you've slept, you know you've drunk three and a half glasses of water, called Kate, txted next year's prospective housemates, updated some profiles, done some work but not nearly enough.

You tidied your room a bit, but haven't hoovered, spent far too long pissing about with music today.

You go to Pandora, type in a band you like, listen to some songs.

You go to Napster, download the ones you really liked, and listen to them again.

Your favourites, you put in a playlist and spend some quality time with them whilst eating, writing, painting your toenails.

The ones you really like you pick out of your Napster library and pay 79p for, unless your computer has lost them, in which case you have to go to options, change the target folder for your new downloads, redownload them and then pay 79p for them.

Then, you try to transfer them onto your phone using Disc2Phone, only to discover that WMA format is not supported by your phone. Huh.

You browse the internet for software that can reformat songs. You get some.

It doesn't work, you get some more.

You use it to convert some songs that you got off CD from WMA into mp3. It works. Hurrah!

You try it with songs you got off Napster. It doesn't work. Balls.

You email Napster and complain.

You eat lunch.

You receive a reply from Napster saying, why don't you use the Napster software for transferring music to a portable device?

You reply saying, because my portable device hates you, and so do I.

Napster says, try burning them onto a CD first.

So you dig out the CDs you bought over the holiday and burn three CDs worth of Napster tracks that you bought for 79p each having already downloaded them twice on account of your computer losing them the first time round, thus converting them into mp3 files.

You then rip them back from the CD onto your computer, and pluck them from the evil clutches of Windows Media Player, transferring them onto your phone before the bastard can do whatever it did to make them unusable in the first place.

Realise that every single track on your phone has no name or artist.

Spend considerable amount of time renaming and sorting every last one of them.

Call your parents to find out how to wind your watch up.

Decide to go for a walk and listen to your new music.

Spray on some deodorant, look at your hair in the mirror and think, have I showered today?

Smell your armpits and think, you know, I really can't remember if I have.

Say, cock it, and go out anyway. There's music to listen to and work to avoid doing.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

baby, did you forget to take your meds?

I should word this carefully. Coherent thoughts are few and far right now - I guess it's a hazard of the trade.

...If I could string something better than this together than I would.

The last couple of days have been wicked, if hectic. Far too much work, for a start, four essays due in for the beginning of May. Fab.

On the plus, we had Philanthropy at the Forum in Kentish Town, which rocked fucking hard, and meant seeing Tim for the first time since August. Everyone say Hey, Tim!

The other two acts we saw on Friday, Caroline Alexander and Bungalow Zenn, were good, but Not My Thing. Philanthropy put on the most energetic show I think I've ever seen. Plus, there was balloons, and a cover of Boom Boom Boom Boom by the Vengaboys. What a happy girl I was.

The Forum was very pretty, for various reasons.




Saturday was meeting up for a coffee with some lovely people who I don't get to see half as much as I'd like.



My favourite relationships are the ones that consist not of a series of meetings but of one continuous conversation. You'll never reach the end of the conversation, because that takes too much time. Only your spouse, your oldest friend, ever gets to the end of the conversation. Those are the ones where it's enough just to sit, to be near each other, but I'm far too young to have many of them yet. I want conversation, I want people I could talk to forever.

The people I talk the best with seem to be the people I see the least. Cruel fate. I've seen a few of them in the last few days, which makes me a happy bastard indeed.

I've also watched some ace films - Shooting Fish, Ocean's Twelve, Spanglish, High Fidelity, Sliding Doors, Blazing Saddles and The Corporation.

If I needed any more convincing on the topic of 'what to do with my life', then The Corporation was it. That simple. If you haven't watched it, watch it, or if you haven't read it, read it. Or anything my Michael Moore, if you want some humour with it, or anything by Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky or the good boys down at MediaLens. Get some of that down you and you'll start to see where I'm coming from.

Meanwhile, I'm getting horribly tired again and keep wanting to retreat into my room for hours at a time with no human contact. Luckily there hasn't been much opportunity for feeling sorry for myself, but it begs the question - how much of my mind belongs to me right now?

If I forget my Meds, baby, then I feel it. I really do. Just... shattered. I've managed to get into the habit of taking rather than forgetting them, but this hasn't stopped me feeling decidedly odd recently. I'm better now than I have been for ages - this sadness keeps coming back to me.

So, that's my issue. What's a bad mood and what's depression? What's me and what's my pills? Do I call the doctor and ask to up my dosage everytime I feel shit?

...Or do I pretend that I feel fine, and restart the cycle that caused all this in the first place...

Friday, April 21, 2006

i am spitting out all my bitterness along with half of my last drink

It's gotta be said that I love my room.

I love that it's mine, that there's a lock on the door, that the bathroom is mine, the toilet is mine, the shower is mine, the sink and the toothpaste and the bin and the diary on the floor.

The walls are covered in my photos and newspaper clippings, it's my dirty cutlery, my empty tin of peaches, my books on the floor.

I don't even have to say 'fuck off and leave me alone' because if the door's locked then people just have to.

Switch your phone off, sign out of msn, lock the door, turn up the music, curl up under the desk and don't wish to be somewhere else for once.

Today I hate Madonna. Specifically, I hate 'What it feels like for a girl' by Madonna. The bit at the beginning I really love, "you think that being a girl is degrading", so much so that I didn't really listen to the rest of the song's lyrics for a few weeks after I downloaded the song.

Silky smooth / lips as sweet as candy, baby / tight blue jeans / skin that shows in patches / strong inside but you don't know it / good little girls they never show it.

Do you know what it feels like for a girl?


Does she know?

Piss off. I don't think being a girl has ever felt like tight blue jeans, silky smoothness and lips that are sweet like candy. That is what it feels like to be an image in a magazine.

I would never presume to be able to define what being a girl is like in one 3 minute pop song, or even a book several thousand pages long, but I know that it's never felt anything like that for me. Feeling like a girl is something utterly different. You'd think Madonna had never had a period in her life.

Sweet as candy indeed. How fucking patronising.

I can just sit here in my room in whatever state of undress I choose, listening to Suzanne Vega and New Young Pony Club and Madonna can piss off.

I love my room.

Next year's house, very nice indeed, I think, I've only seen it once. Four bedrooms, only two of them filled. At least now that both the boys have dropped out, Kate and I are definitely getting the big rooms.

Would I trade in my en-suite for a double bed?

Maybe. These are good problems to have. Silly little problems, not life and death problems. I could die happy with stupid problems like Madonna's misrepresentation of the female psyche and having to share a toilet.

With PMT this bad, a girl can be forgiven for thinking about comfort.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

i'm going missing

Now is one of those amazing times when song lyrics don't so much speak to you as jump down your throat and fill your lungs.

I'll do graffiti if you speak to me in French.

Now, happily, is also the time for using New Phone to take deeply pretentious pictures of myself and my aptly named diary.


What did you used to be?

I used to feel like shit. Let's raise some flags and talk about space, and time, and listening to new music and feeling so so so much better.

Let's talk about not knowing what to say. Or what to write.

"It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet." - Marcus Aurelius.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to say today. I guess I just wanted to say that I feel absolutely wonderful. Really wonderful. I haven't felt this faithless or this free, I haven't felt this happy in years.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

divorce

And I'm sitting outside High Cross Church in Camberley, leaning against a brick pillar to keep out of the wind, writing on the A4 pad that's now my diary, clutching carrier bags of stationery, waiting for my phone to ring, my lift to arrive.

The doors to the caretaker's cupboard are swinging open, bang, bang, smacking against the wall, making me jump. When's somone gonna come on out and close it? I won't.

I'm writing, funny how I still feel safer near a church. Now the mystery isn't enough to draw me in, just to keep me sitting in the doorway.

And the vicar's leaving through the sliding doors, leather jacket, book in hand, and as he walks past I'm rolling out from behind the pillar like an agnostic ninja and - is it the drama of the thing or just that desperation? - asking him for a minute of his time.

He's on his way to a funeral, in a hurry.

All I want is thirty seconds. Give me one good reason why I should still believe in God.

He shrugs, opens and closes his mouth, looks at his watch, we pause and listen to the wind beating through the carrier bags at my feet, the struggling pages of my diary.

"Love." he says, eventually, definitely.

I smile. Good answer.

"What other answer is there? In the end, when you take away all this stuff about control, all this crap about dos and don'ts and people thinking they know God's will, all that's left is love, and honesty. Either you see love as an emotion between humans or you see it as something divine, something underpinning everything. You make a call and that's it. I made the call and -" he tweaks the dog collar "-that's just what happens."

That's the best thirty second answer I could have hoped for. Thank you.

I roll back behind my pillar, find my page again and starting write down what he said before I forget it.

*****

And I'm reading Romans 7:7-13, about the law and sin, and how sin corrupted the law which was good and pure and turned it to something that brings death. And she's telling me how all you can really be sure of is Christ, and if you have Christ, the rest will somehow fall into place but without Christ, it's just a law. And laws don't make you right with God. Or yourself.

*****

And I'm telling him a secret, the new secret, which isn't that I'm depressed but that, ever since I've been getting treatment for the depression, I don't believe in God anymore.

And I've said it, and he's sorry, we both are.

And I think about marriage. How there's lust, and infatuation, and if you get married on nothing but that your marriage will fail because you'll only be following the laws of marriage, and not the love behind it.

And how if you get saved for what you can get, if what you want is someone to love you because you can't love yourself, if you're not in love with God but merely infatuated with the mystery and comfort of it all.

Someday you'll learn to love yourself, and wonder why you're following this law that only brings death to those who have no love for Christ at the heart of it.

*****

And I'm sitting in the church and I'm supposed to be praying. I'm looking at the instructions I wrote out for people to pray with, the theology I typed out and how I don't believe any of it and there's people with heads bowed at each prayer station and I have never felt so insincere.

I put the stone I've been carrying at the foot of the cross. It's a mute gesture, because I don't know what it means. It's the way you hug an old friend to silence the awkwardness, the way you kiss your wife on the cheek before you leave to cheat on her, the way you stroke someone's face when you've argued and neither of you know what will happen but what's important now is not words but a gesture.

It says, I think I love you, but I don't know if I can be with you, so right now this stupid sentimental token is all I can give you. It says sorry, but I have to be myself and... I'll call you.

*****

I walk out an hour and a half before I'm supposed to finish praying, walk for 40 minutes in the dark to a field where I light up a cigarette, listen to Evanescence and drink an alcopop. Not because I want to, you understand, just because I can.

If that was a break-up then this is the pull. Changing my degree and writing and drinking and smoking and partying and volunteering and kissing and thinking and listening and changing and growing and talking and learning to love myself is me eating chocolate with my girl mates and watching chick flicks.

This is me being single.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

all things in misery considered

Tomorrow, all will be made well. Tomorrow, I'll be heading back to my halls for a few days to, theoretically, get some work done. Tomorrow, my overdraft will kick in, Napster will get their £9.99 which means that I can a) listen to music again and b) put mp3s on to my spangly new phone. I'll also be able to post pictures from my spangly new phone which means, oh yeah, I'll be blogging again.

If I haven't mentioned it before, I hate not being able to blog. It really is like a kind of amputation. When all else fails and you have too much to say - resort to lists.

Things that have been good
1) Real food, courtesy of my parents.
2) Doing absolutely no work whatsoever, courtesy of my God-given gift of procrastination.
3) Yateley, and all the strange and wonderful people who live in it.
4) Going to the Ag again.
5) Counting the seconds between saying hello to Mike(22:38:59) and Mike's first mention of his penis (22:39:03). The boy is fast.
6) Playing with aforementioned spangly phone.
7) Reminiscing about good times with old friends (when we used to play together, when we built treehouses together) and even better times with even older friends (how we used to lie to each other, steal from each other, plot against each other).
8) Going to LDN with the marras - not only was the club a part-time strip, but the drinks were 80p a time, and that made me happy.
9) Waking up in Belsize Park.
10) Watching Deal Or No Deal, always an emotional roller coaster.

Things that have not been good
1) The ongoing 'do I don't I' saga of myself, Christianity and the man upstairs. Don't ask me, because I simply don't know.
2) The way some people react when you say you're not having the best time with religion at the moment. I can't decide which is worse: people being so smug you wonder if they realise how much losing your faith hurts, or people being so dramatic about it that you want to smack them upside the head with a palm cross just to shut them up.
3) Realising that my orthodontist wasn't joking when he said that if I didn't wear my retainer after my traintracks were removed then my teeth would go crooked again.
4) Burning my retainer in a pagan ritual of thanksgiving and then realising that, huh, my teeth are going crooked again.
5) Not being able to blog. Also, not having Napster, broadband, money, sanity, et al.
6) Returning to the Ag to find that it too has fallen victim to the emo virus. I would like to reiterate that my horrible prejudice towards emo kids will only end when I can go to a club without one of them burning me with a cigarette. Are their subliminal messages in their music that tell them to burn me??
7) Having to go through my new phone and spell out each of my favourite swearwords into the predictive text dictionary. This is taking longer than one might imagine.
8) My nan going back to Scotland.
9) Having secrets.
10) Feeling small.

Other than that, there's been a lot of books. And a lot of chicken. That's me in a nutshell. How are you guys?

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

blip

The problem is that we've had our family's computer for about 8 years, and its age is really starting to show. Poor thing.

In a similar vein, current lack of broadband means that the OAPC is the only one I can use for blogging or, well, anything.

So that's the state of things. Millions to say and not quite enough internet access to say it. Accessing the internet from grandpa Compaq tends to make him crash. Nuff said.

For a couple of weeks at least, expect nothing from me and you'll only be pleasantly surprised. Love you all.