I really don't like this

1. There is an undercurrent of anger and despair flowing right underneath the surface. I think it’s always been there, but it’s risen in recent months.

2. I am afraid I am going to snap. Lose my shit if someone is mean to me; start bawling if someone is nice.

3. As a result, I withdraw. It’s not fair to snap.

4. I’ve postponed a date that was planned for tonight. She’s cute, bright, stylish. But I feel too caught up in my internal vicious circle monologue to be available even for a date. I don’t feel I have anything to offer.

5. To break out of this internal vicious circle monologue thing, I should really go out on dates. Back to square one.

6. Why did I resist the urge to throw the loaf of bread against the wall? The worst that could have happened would be funny shaped toast. And maybe it would have made me feel better.

7. I am losing some friends. One part of me thinks they’re right; why should they stick around someone so caught up in her own misery? I brought it upon myself. A smaller part of me thinks friends stick around no matter what. Ah, the great myth of female friendships.

8. I hate self-pity. So what d I do now? Watch tv, I suppose.

I’m not staying long.
1. Last night I dreamed that I was on my way to perfecting the recipe for chicken feet jam.I wonder what that one means, then.

2. The leering marathon is going well, thank you. 9 episodes of The L word down, 4 to go. I have just watched Shane have sex on the floor with Rosanna Arquette’s character. It really, really cheered me up. Who whispered vicarious?

3. Finally, if you understand French, go here. It is my very lazy but very funny friend Zabélie’s blog.

Chicken feet jam.
*shakes head* I don't know.

Here comes the recommended hiatus
Please excuse me for a few days; I am currently busy obsessing. I am having an L word marathon. The complete first season, brought to me by J; he is catering endlessly and mercifully to my vicarious-living-as-a-way-to-recovery method. I don’t know if the method really leads to recovery as such, but in the meantime the tears I shed are over the fictional lives of fictional people. Who happen to be sexy, although somehow airbrushed, and make a nice change to the bridge trolls I saw on Saturday night when I was out with Jacqui causing a ruckus in ladies’ bars. Pah, not really; we were incredibly well behaved. But I digress: bridge trolls were my point. That’s what I saw. It made me sad. Beer-swilling graceless creatures with bad haircuts and white trainers. Or hipsters in cliques. I’m off to watch episode 7 now. I don’t think I’ll write a review, I just like to leer. Thank you for listening.

Put succinctly

1 I saw Margaret Cho on Saturday night.
2 small venue, about a hundred people.
3 She kicked ass.
4 Jacqui and I didn't linger at the stage door. Too dignified to be groupies, you see.

I’m a bit bored with this. I’m also despondent, lonely and cold. Possibly bored with being me, too.
I’ll come back soon.
Feel free to talk amongst yourself.

Good night.

Clearly, Attention Deficit Disorder

Two occurrences that almost made me cry:

1. At lunch time today I lovingly and reverently cooked some Trofie (for the gastronomically challenged, that’s a traditional pasta from Liguria). Posh pasta usually takes 300 times as long to cook as normal pasta, so I stood over the pan stirring, took the pan off the hobb as soon as the trofie was perfectly al dente, and added carefully chosen ingredients.
It’s only after I had sprinkled the exact amount of parmesan out of the little plastic shaker thing that I noticed the little green dots. Mould. Mouldy parmesan.
So after throwing my fork across the room in a fit of despair and rage, I did what any self respecting cook would never do, I washed my pasta under a stream of lukewarm water.
It really wasn’t so good after that.
But I didn’t cry.

2. Yesterday in between work and a work function I had exactly half an hour to squeeze in some Christmas shopping. The product of my (frantic) Christmas shopping was in turn stuffed into a plastic bag. A plastic bag which I have left. Somewhere. Bus. Street. Bus stop. I have no idea. I think I am going to cry after all.

At this point I would like to blame mulled wine for this sudden drop in attention. I would also like to blame the box office that still haven’t sent me my pair of tickets for tonight’s show, as well as Christmas shoppers all over London, parmesan makers that don’t print sell by date on plastic shakers, and exes you can’t get over and spend time crying about on the bus. It’s all their fault.

I have no idea what to wear for tonight’s show. Cos, tickets or no tickets, I will get us in, I swear. Oh, it’s Margaret Cho. Yay!

Tis the season to be jolly

-I’ve tidied up your closet, and the drawer under your bed, says my mom.
-You have? [mind races as to what she may have found in there.] You have. Ok.I can deal with my mom stumbling on my things. I am an adult now, aren’t I?
-There’s so much strange stuff in there, and I needed space to put away my summer things, so I got rid of some of your old stuff.
- Can’t you wait til I get home and do that myself? And how do you know what to throw out anyway?
- -Oh, but I’m not throwing anything out. Guess how much I got for your old pairs of goth boots?
- My boots. You didn’t. They were relics!
- Well it’s not like you were going to wear them anymore.
- Maybe I was!
- Oh well, they’ve made someone happy now. Maybe they were putting a show and needed costumes. And! I managed to sell your stereo! First I used the speakers to put flowerpots on, but I thought they were still good, so I took them down to the flea market too.
- What am I going to do for music now, then?
- There’s always my cd player
- The old piece of shit in the kitchen. Right.
- So when you come home, you might want to think about what to do with the huge stack of magazines. Oh, and, there’s that bundle of exercise books all tied up together, I didn’t have a look at those, but we can have a bonfire when you’re here.

At least I was spared the ultimate humiliation. That carefully tied up bundle of books are my early teenage diaries, complete with details of sorrows and tears and crushes and ponderings and tampax experimentations. Not pretty.

I wonder why the sudden urge for clearing, and why my room.
Everything else in the house remains untouched. My brother’s room in particular is a mausoleum of his 19 years of life. Books on the foreign policy of Guatemala or the changing geographies of the Finnish-Russian borders or a political and historical assessment of the middle East; his posters of tennis players; and his collections: coins, notes, vials of sand from all the deserts of the globe, cigars, 19 Century lead soldiers.
I never collected anything, and I’m still alive. Maybe that doesn’t grant my old room any sort of special status. I’m not really bitter about it; but I am considering the bonfire. Except that I’ll be the one to do away with my stuff. Get your matches ready, mom.

And this is why I turned down that $70 Million contract

‘How are things at Megalopolitan pictures ?’ asked Sir Ambrose.
‘Greatly disturbed. We are having trouble with Juanita Del Pablo.’
‘Luscious, languid, and lustful?'
‘Those are not the correct epithets. She is – or rather was – ‘surly, lustrous and sadistic.’ I should know because I composed the phrase myself. Miss Del Pablo has been a particular protégée of mine from the first. I remember the day she arrived. Poor Leo bought her for her eyes. She was called Baby Aaronson then –splendid eyes and a fine head of black hair. So Leo made her Spanish. He had most of her nose cut off and sent her to Mexico for six weeks to learn flamenco singing. Then he handed her to me. I named her. I made her a anti-fascist refugee. I said she hated men because of her treatment by Franco’s moors. That was a new angle then. It caught on. And she was really good in her way, you know- with a truly horrifying natural scowl. Her legs were never photogénique but we kept her in long skirts and used an understudy for the lower half in scenes of violence. I was proud of her and she was good for another ten years’ work at least.
And now there’s been a change of policy at the top. We are only making films this year to please the league of decency. So poor Juanita has to start at the beginning as an Irish colleen. They’ve bleached her hair and dyed it vermilion. I told them that colleens were dark but the Technicolor men insisted. She’s working ten hours a day learning the brogue and to make it harder for the poor girl they’ve pulled all her teeth out. She never had to smile before and her own set was good enough for a snarl. Now she’ll have to laugh roguishly all the time. That means dentures. I’ve spent three days trying to find a name for her. She’s turned everything down. Maureen there are two already. Deirdre – no one could pronounce it. Oonagh- sounds Chinese. Bridget – too common. The truth is, she’s in a nasty temper.’

From The loved ones, Evelyn Waugh. Read it. If only because you’ve watched all four series of Six Feet under and miss the atmosphere of funeral homes.

Real intellectuals play board games part II
Some time ago, some clever American bastard came up with Ghettopoly.

'Pimp up your stable of hos, build crack houses and projects, do a drive-by, get the whole 'hood addicted to crack- collect $50! Only the hustlers with the tightest game will win!'

To ensure that players stay true to the game, player game pieces include: Pimp, Ho, Uzi, Marijuana leaf, a Basket ball and a piece of crack, and of course counterfeit money and two dice.
Apparently the overrated overpriced shop Urban Outfitters carried the game was instantly boycotted by the NAACP. Fair enough. Now in the pipeline are Hiphopoly and Redneckopoly. 'It draws on stereotypes not as means to degrade, but as a medium to bring us together in laughter; if we can't laugh at ourselves, we'll continue to live in blame and bitterness', said the infinitely philanthropic creator of the game.

Personally I would never shell out anything for any board game; Scrabble makes my face go numb and I can't sit in front of Monopoly without going into severe convulsion. Last time was New Year's Eve, 1993; I lasted ten minutes, and was later found racing around in the snow in a tshirt, and that had nothing to do either with the sangria or the funny cigarettes. Really. But where is my point? Oh yes. Here it is, sort of: still I confess that the thought of that game made me chuckle. It's just a funky board game, right? There isn’t much difference between that board game and what is glorified in hip-hop lyrics and music videos, right? Wel, I don't know. Not so sure. What do you think? Would you be upset by Jewnopoly? Asianopoly? Scottishopoly? Gaynopoly? Would I be upset if it were Frenchonopoly instead? Maybe, in true French fashion, I would rant for half a minute, consider educating the ignorant masses for another ten seconds, then just shrug it off.
The truth is, I probably would get upset. I do have a history of getting disproportionally upset by the jolly shovelling of stereotypes about the French. Or about any nationality, in fact. But that's another story altogether. Maybe some other time.

I told you, I never liked board games anyway. I think I'll go back to my original Christmas presents ideas:

A rude cross-stitching kit
The guide to how to shoot rubber bands
My face on a grilled cheese sandwich

There is no emoticon for the way I’m feeling today.

On the way back home from the cinema, I pass:

· a couple dragging a heavy bag and dumping it into the river. Late at night. It probably isn’t really a body, because these things only happen in films. Still, I walk faster, just in case they have a heavy spanner/knife/hammer and a spare bag.

· a dog kennel with a ‘for rent- £180 a week’ sign on it in someone’s front yard. When I go back later to take a photo, the sign’s gone. I guess it was too good a bargain in this area of London, someone’s already grabbed it.

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. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched the Office Christmas specials. (In hell, it’s Slough every day.) I think the perspective of another Christmas spent with my mom pretending to ignore Christmas is crushing me already. We’ll pretend to ignore it together and make chit chat about this and that and the subtext will be about everyone we/she has lost and how she’s only got me left and how far I am.
Yuck.
Maybe I just have an iron deficiency. Maybe I’m just hungry. Or dehydrated. Or bored. Can’t always tell.

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Another recurring dream, people of blogland: I dream that I do the splits. Clever explanations in the comments section, thank you.

Misdirected romanticism, anyone?

'Romeo, Oh yeah, I used to have a scene with him. (Juliet)

1. Maybe 8 months ago, I opened the case where my glasses live when I don't wish to see the world around in too much focus, and saw, stuck to the lid with cellotape, a pink fortune cookie slip that read:

You or a close friend will be married within a year.

I believe it was A's fortune cookie; in any case, she put it there.
Out of some sort of superstition, I kept it when we were together. And kept it when we weren't.
It's still there; and I won't peel it off.

2. Was it also superstition when I put A's name down on my life insurance form? [see footnote #2] Perhaps it was. In any case, should I get flattened by a double-decker, she will still get a year of my salary, which could get her a (second hand) bike to replace the one that was stolen and probably sold on Craig's list to someone else who had their bike stolen, etc.

It feels almost vengeful and spiteful and mean to go and take the step to cross her out, just like re-writing your will to spite your estranged wife, or something; Yet, and how I know this! it's incredibly dumb of me not to. I will get round to it. Eventually.

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[Footnote #2 :Last time I promised footnote #1 but never delivered, it's still in gestation. But here is F#2: yes, I have life insurance; don't ask, it's a work thing. I'm not that organised]