There are far too many things to say.

I'm here - here as in 'on my blog' - purely because the Boyfriend, his friend and I ended up back at our house watching Alien. I started telling a long story about watching Alien for the first time when I was 17, in my AS Film Studies class and being forced to watch it for the first time, and this came up. This, being: the horriblescaryface I drew whilst watching it and determinedly staring away from the screen so as not to see the chest bursting bit. Naive I was, but even I had heard about the chest bursting bit.

So I drew this picture, then, watching Alien, and tonight I showed it to the Boyfriend so he might better understand my neuroses. The outcome of the venture remains to be seen, but it reminded me of a time when blogging was not only a thing I needed but a thing I enjoyed - perhaps right now, right here, that's an important recollection to have.

(As I write, the chest bursting thing has happened and other Alien-related things are unfolding. Perhaps I should go and partake of them. Wish me luck.)

Merry Christmas. Anyone else know why they didn't just jettison the dude as soon as he got the face-hugger? Because I'm at a loss and it seems like that would've solved all their problems.

tragic

So, I spend a good portion of time updating all the links sections on my blog and - hey! - it looks good, so much more relevant and up-to-date. Excited am I, and carried away to the point where I click 'change template' and lose every single last damn one of them. Ta-da! Shiny, different coloured blog. No links.

I guess if any of you are desperate to know which right-on, left-wing, too-hip-for-words news sources I read every day, you'll just have to ask. I'd be happy to tell you all about it.

Oh, and labelling posts? Who knew?

petition for healthy living

Having a mosey around the Official Site of the Prime Minister's Office reveals some interesting petitions (We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to...):

...not support a state funeral for Baroness Thatcher. Apparently one was offered to Florence Nightingale and she was a thundering racist, so why the hell should Thatcher be denied just for hating poor people? /Snark.

...direct the government to provide Jaguar Land Rover with the targeted assistance it is requesting to weather the credit crisis and retain its central role at the heart of the UK's automotive and manufacturing industries. Yes, because the beauty of striving for deregulated capitalism during a boom is that when it all goes tits up the government that were expected to mind their own business are now expected to cough the fuck up. Mmm, taxes.

...increase the sentences of those found guilty of attacks on horses, ponies, and other equines. Increase the sentences of those* found guilty of attacks on members of the public?

...capital punishment for paedophile's and child murder's (sic). Mandatory smacks upside the head for those who attempt to petition the Prime Minister using improper punctuation and spelling?

...call on The Sun newspaper to back the social work profession. Makes more sense if you read the details. Nonetheless, actually asking the government to control the free press seems ill-considered.

...make urgent representation to the Broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, the broadcasting institutions operating in the UK and film regulators, asking them to stop the use of unnecessary swearing and bad language in their productions (including those available for downloading from websites) and to urge providers of user-generated content to take similar action. Couldn't agree more - about fucking time.

...establish an automatic buffer zone of at least 2 km between any new industrial size wind turbine and any home. Not in my back yard, etc.

...change the law to allow children born alive the right to life. Because everybody knows that currently, children born alive are tossed out the window by Act of Parliament.

Yes, yes. I'm being horribly facetious, particularly with that last one. It actually refers to children born before viability and makes a good point. I just really think one should check the wording of their plea to government to make sure it, you know, makes sense and junk.

(As an aside, the act of tossing something out the window is called defenestration. The simple fact that we have a word for this should be broadcast on the Beeb daily, in order that the petition-wrights of this world - myself included - might momentarily unclench.)

*****

In other news, I'm eating toast. Hurrah! I no longer feel like my body is trying to turn itself inside out and - as a thank you - shall now embark on that time honoured campaign of wishful thinking known as 'looking after myself'. I.e., no booze, fags, Dominoes, KFC Fully Loaded, or drinking coffee as a replacement for both food and water. I shall henceforth replace Coke Zero with fruit juice and a slice of lemon, endeavour to eat my five-a-day (and stop trying to convince myself that having lots of salad on my foot-long Sub makes it ok), cook simple yet delicious meals from scratch and curl up with an improving book and vegetable smoothie sprinkled with hemp seeds rather than getting wasted.

I give it a week.

But really, I'd like to be a little different. I wonder what my friends are like when I'm sober?

* read: police officers.

Edit: This I would sign a petition against.

I thought it was a hangover - which, technically, it was - but it was also so much more than that.

It says something, though, about my alcohol consumption on the average Friday night that when I'm praying to the porcelain-altar at 4pm the next day I don't really think there's any cause for concern. Anyway, whatever it was, it blew.

So the boyfriend and I have spent a pleasant Easter curled up in bed watching golf (him) and surfing the blogs of former America's Next Top Model contestants (me), drinking Lucozade (both of us) and occasionally dashing to the bathroom to make deals with God (thankfully, just me).

Good grief! I have one week left of my impossibly, beautifully long Easter break and then it's back to Brighton, early mornings, Metro, Nero espresso at Gatwick, the shit-stained smell of trains and endless reading and dissertation doing.

Now? I'm happy with an evening of South Park, rice cakes and the contemplating the inner complexities of the toilet bowl because - believe me, the way I feel is no laughing matter but still - I'm really enjoying hanging out just the two of us. If roles were reversed, I'd feed you Rennies and stroke your hair too.

*****

In other news, my parents, brother and half of the Scottish extended family are currently out for dinner in Aberdeen and I am jealous. Oh, for a plate of stovies. And the ability to digest food.

thinking

That deciding to do a dissertation about free-market economic theory was probably slightly ambitious. That is to say, I am indeed fucked.

This is amazing.

This is horrible.

This is terrifying.

This is so bizarre it's almost funny. Until you think about it.

Of course, I should be grappling with the finer points of Milton Friedman at the moment, so reading news blogs is obviously the sane choice.

tubs of fun

Tonight I am blogging as the latest weapon in my defense against the powerful urge to cut my own hair. I KNOW it's a bad idea, I KNOW. But I WANT to.

*****

My appearance is on my mind (or, my mind is on my appearance? Boyfriend has a thing for switching the nouns in a sentence - switching the sentences in a noun - and it's catching) today. If I don't have time to get a paper on my way to uni, I'll just read whatever I find - Metro is always good, on the way home there's sometimes even a Times - and on Tuesday I found the Daily Mail.

Horrors. In the Mail, they had a surprisingly enlightened article about women and body image (and if you're thinking they thought body image was political correctness gone mad or immigrant invasion gone mad, you'd be wrong, as was I). This woman did a creative writing competition where women wrote in how they felt about their bodies, and the Mail published some of the entries. Other than the earth-shattering counter-productivity of having women compete to see who can hate their body most eloquently, it was interesting.

One entry completely ripped off an entire page of Wasted, which fucked me off because it's a stunning book and so personal. This girl had absolutely no right.

One was by a girl with cerebral palsy, talking about the perceived asexuality of the disabled. It was fantastic, nothing self-indulgent, none of this 'we are all unique and beautiful snowflakes' bullshit, just 'Alright, this is me, I'm fantastic and sexy and clever and why the hell wouldn't you want me?'. Good lady.

It gets me thinking about things that I hate to think about.

Today I went shopping with my gran, aunty and mum. Good times. Granny and I are looking at big jumpers, and I say that I want to get a really oversize one and wear it as a dress. So I pick one up that's about 4 sizes too big and hold it up and my granny says - "Yes, that should fit, you're like me, bigger than you look."

Out of the mouths of grans...

*****

God, I hate putting on weight and I hate even more that I hate it. I want so much to be right-on and feminist and 'lalala' I love my curves because - honestly - most of the time I do. It's just that I've crossed that line between Tyra Banks bootilicious and looking slightly pregnant. I'm not being mawkish, it's true. But girls are so impossible to talk to sometimes.

Eg., hearing two of my skinnier than me friends talk about how fat they are, I try to interject - don't be stupid, I'm bigger than both of you and I love the way I look - but I don't get as far as 'I'm bigger' before it's oh no, oh no, you're way skinny, we're fat.

How patently fucking ridiculous is that? These girls weigh less than me, take a smaller dress size, eat better than me, drink and smoke less, work out more - of course I'm bigger than them, to me it doesn't seem like a big deal. Until they start trying to tell me otherwise, because then I think - you protest too much.

I hate the whole thing so much. And now that I do feel fat, I want to hear 'oh no you're not' even less.

*****

Why is this such a mountain we feel like we have to climb? If I get a bad essay mark, I'll find out why and work harder on the next one. If I don't like my hair, I'll cut it or dye it. If my house is messy I'll tidy it but GOD FORBID that I should be so flippant about this. God forbid that I should casually remark that I'm packing more junk in the trunk these days - this is the one problem girls actually can't talk about.

Perfect world?

Girl 1 - I've gained weight.
Girl 2 - OK. Do you care?
Girl 1 - Yes.
Girl 2 - Then go to the fucking gym.

Simples. I so wish it wasn't a big deal, for me, for any of us.

books, turn up for the

So, I just got round to watching the Terry Pratchett programme, Living with Alzheimer's that's been saved on Sky Plus for a few weeks. Other than crying, a lot, I also found the time to panic about losing and forgetting things. Recurring nightmare No. 347 - this blog suddenly, mysteriously gets deleted from the mighty interweb and I lose my only copy of about 4 years of writing.

I'm sure there's a better way of backing up your blog, but I don't know it, so I've spent the last hour going into the posts from every single month and copying the whole text into a Word document. Are you curious?

303 pages; 150,131 words. My God. That's long, that's book-long. That's a crying shame.

Since my angst-spectacular resignation from the blogging world, I've only really come back for the occasional rant/hangover story/misery-fest. It seems like I only actually want to do this when I'm feeling something bad so - just to reassure you - I'm fine.

Really, absolutely. Amazing, hey? In case you're wondering I wouldn't ever trade. I miss being a creative person (I don't think I quite deserve the label anymore), miss feeling like a writer. But being happy and comparatively well-adjusted is far better than I ever could imagine it was. It's so alien in fact that sometimes I get paranoid, start looking for problems because I really can't believe that days and weeks can go by where I'm just ok. Just, fine.

Anyway, I think I'm on here because I feel like I have something to say again. No idea what, as yet, but I seem to be spending a lot of time on the net at the moment, on message and debate boards/whatnot. It seems strange to be spewing all this opinion out anonymously while this blog - which I am so proud of, so attached to - just moulders away. Not literally, y'understand, that would be impossible. But metaphysically, yes, it is covered in mould. *chases mice out of long-abandoned photo section*

Theoretically, I could do this again. It's not like I'm incapable of writing now, in fact I'm enjoying studying so much at the moment that most days on the train home I'm frantically scribbling down my two-cents about pretty much everything. What's stopping me is that I am so not the same person that started this blog, or even the same person that was writing it until maybe 2 years ago. I'm not that borderline-bipolar, born-again Christian, hyperactive drama student, head up my own ass, pious little motherfucker. And that's not a bad thing. I never really loved that girl, she was pleasant enough to be around but pretty shit to be. So as far as I'm concerned, I've lucked out.

Now? Ha. Relatively sane, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, cheerful, atheist humanities student? Slightly heavier? Better dressed? In the same, constant, dire need of a haircut and a good bath? Hm. I guess I've spent the last couple of years learning to just get shit done. I pulled my head out of my ass long enough to sort my life out, then messed it up again, and now - balance! Fun! Domesticity! Cynicism!

I could write a whole blog about the cynicism alone. Maybe that's where I start.

(Tenner says I never post again.)