Frisky and Mannish and poems and hair

So! Yes! Hello! What wonderful and exciting things can I tell you about?

I saw Frisky and Mannish perform last week. They are truly legends in the making: Frisky can do justice to any female vocalist you care to name, and Mannish has such incredible range, in every musical sense. They're both skilled performers, and have an incredible dynamic. It's a thoroughly enjoyable thing, to see that kind of natural partnership: people whose thoughts and signals bounce off each other so flawlessly. Here is a video they made: Kate Bush sung in the style of Kate Nash. It's called Kate Bash, because of course it is. I feel like I might have shared this video before? I can't recall. In any case.

   

Here is a picture of my face in proximity to their faces:

It was as profoundly awkward as it looks

I don't know what else to tell you, other than that life continues and my poetry has all but ground to a halt. I really thought that having a creatively undemanding job would spur me to write in my free time, but honestly, I have just about enough mental energy to jot down draft after draft without ever finding the time or drive to work them into something.
I mean, take this for example:

So I said goodbye. What else could I do?
And me and the sea oh we both waved to you,
well no wonder it's blue.

That could be an actual song (not a good one, mind you, just a me one), if I just got my dang act together and finished it. I need to spend some quality time with my ukulele when I get my day off. I'm getting all of three minutes a day in which to practise, so I'm slipping backwards from "incompetent" to "an affront to ears."

My hair is getting beyond silly. My roots have grown out beyond the point where a hat can successfully cover it, which is due to being very impoverished for a long time, and then very busy recently. I still want to get along to Guy Christian - probably their new salon in the bay! - to get something done with it. Just as soon as I decide what that is.

Hair is a mystery, man. I mean, they say it grows back, but who wants to take that risk, you know?

Birthdings

I was not going to celebrate my birthday. I was playing it cool. I always do, at first. It's a lowering of my own expectations, really, because I'm never convinced that anyone else is going to remember.

I promise this post gets less wallowy. Bear with me.

har! har!

Having a birthday in October, for a kid who grew up as bookish and introverted as I did, meant that people at school often hadn't had time to get to know me when my birthday rolled around. September kids probably have it even worse.

In my first year at uni, my first birthday away from home, I quietly mentioned my birthday to the three people I knew by name; and I got a surprised "Ah! Really? Happy birthday! ... So are you doing anything for it?" to which I answered No, no. Not really.

So, nothing happened.

It's my own fault; I'm bad at making things happen. For my 18th birthday, my friends demanded that we go to Pizza Hut at least, because I wasn't planning to do anything at all.

Since coming to Cardiff, though, things have picked up speed. I'm not the wallflower I once was, and I'm lucky enough to have friends who'll grab hold of the most tenuous excuses imaginable for a fancy-dress shindig. I love them, I love them (fancy-dress shindigs AND my friends; but I mostly meant my friends. I would not trade the wonderful, talented, gorgeous people in my life for anything, not even a kawasaki ninja, and LOOK how frakkin' pretty they are:

Are we still parentheses? We are. Sorry).

Yesterday, despite being in work all day, I was remembered by a great many people. As soon as midnight hit, Sean Solle got the first HBD greeting in, and the following 24 hours saw a whole bunch of people on twitter and facebook and even tumblr wishing me a merry one. Some of them barely know me, or were reminded by facebook, but every single one made me smile and feel valued. That kind of positivity really adds up over the course of a day!

And, to top it all, the very kind family I live with (whose generosity I can't begin to deserve) bought me a book on Graffiti - one I don't already own! It looks great, the pictures are grouped by area rather than by artist which is so cool bec- er, anyway - and a birthday cake.

And AND, the people I'm training with at work bought me cards and chocolates because they are insanely lovely. INSANELY. Get this: the lady who trained me for the first two weeks remembered that my short story has been published by the UK Zombie Defence League, looked the UKZDL up, found my blog along the way, discovered that Lindt Lindor are my favourite chocolates, got me some, and made me promise not to share them.

SERIOUSLY.

like -

I can't even -

That's lovely on a scale I never expected to encounter in a work environment. Dilbert did not prepare me for this. How are you supposed to respond? Anywhere else I'd have given her the biggest bearhug on record, because seriously, that's above and beyond the contractually-obliged Happy Birthday, but instead I just rambled and thanked for a bit and grinned my way throughout training for the rest of the day.

Also, a girl I met on a bus and befriended the heck out of lent me the first Harry Dresden book, so I've got that going for me too.

Just - keep up the good work, universe. This is all very very adequate.

Time

I'm not good enough. The list of things I would change about myself are as long as the phone book, and decidedly less interesting to read (and to write. As a favour to both of us, I will not enumerate them here). Ultimately, it's the length of the list that proved the biggest obstacle to my self-improvment; I get paralysed by the indecision. What's the biggest problem? What's the most urgent one? What needs long-term improvement? I have no idea. I hate lists.

I've always thought the "kid in a candy store" analogy didn't really encompass that moment: the moment when the kid clutches onto mum's skirt and hides their face because this is too many everythings.

I have, however, made a huge leap forward: I've targeted the one area that I really need to work on, and it's time management.

I've always been terrible at it. For the past 15 years, it's been the reason that I got incredibly creative with my excuses for having not done my homework. Remember this blog post? Of course you don't; it was seven freaking years ago (almost to the day), but it was by no means an isolated incident. Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow?

Maybe it's hereditary. My own family was habitually late everywhere. Memories of school mornings are a blur of stress and hurrying, trying to remember where in the chaos my shoes were.

One of the side effects of this perpetual lateness was that I am extremely paranoid about travel time. I am currently getting to work about an hour early in the mornings, just because the journey home sometimes takes a couple of hours. It's hard to calm myself down enough to actually leave home later in the morning. I prefer being early anyway, I tell myself. I don't get told off for being too early. I go for walks instead; mentally calculating and recalculating that, since it took ten minutes to get this far, I should allow twenty to go back. It doesn't make a lot of sense, I know.

Oh yes, that's a new development: work. I work full time in a call centre now; 36 hours a week, or thereabouts. So far I've had two weeks of training in customer service. I won't get paid until a month from now, due to fluctuations in the mysterious forces that govern administration. That's sad. I wanted money for my birthday this coming Tuesday. I'm deferring my celebrations until I am ludicrously wealthy a month from now. (This is my first full-time job; it will feel like affluence beyond reason to me!)

So my job isn't paying me yet, but what it is doing is forcing me to think harder about how I'm spending my time. If I want to catch up with friends, I can meet up with them in town for a couple of hours in the evening, or we can plan something on the weekend. That's it. No more spending a couple of days at a mate's house just because we've gotten addicted to a new cartoon. No more spending all day on tumblr, unless I've actively decided that that is what I need to do that day. (Sometimes that is what I need. Sometimes I crave the mental space to bumblebee around the internet, alighting on a topic for only so long as it takes my fancy.)

In other exciting (to me) news, a short story I wrote has been accepted for publication by the UK Zombie Defense League! I'll let you all know when it's out. I'm planning to buy the paperback and show it to everyone I pass for a month or two.

Here follows a miniature list of things I have been doing lately, in what I'll generously call my "hiatus":

• visited my family on the beautiful Isle of Wight
• saw Frankie Boyle perform, thanks to my lovely twitter-friend Meryl
• went to see Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm again
• discovered Gravity Falls and decided that Mabel is my soul twin
• the other stuff that I've already told you.

A few photos I've taken recently:

Judi, my big sister, who is crazy pretty and doesn't even know it

I finally managed to reattempt this after losing an SD card a few years back!

A helium princess. Blurry, but just about perfect.

To round things off and reward you for reading my witterings, here is a story told by Neil Gaiman, in which his family are more terribly late than mine ever were:

Back to school

Well, what a week... on Tuesday, I had my first 'proper' job interview. I'd been saying for a few days that I felt really confident about it it, but as I took the 15-minute train journey to Penarth, I got increasingly jittery. The truth is, I had no idea what to expect. My good friend Tony had given me a few tips, told me what questions to ask etc -and I was racking my brain trying to remember them.
I arrived about an hour early, taking punctuality to new and unnecessary levels. Just as well I did, really, as I got lost. I managed to arrive a reasonable ten minutes early, filled out a form, talked to some people, and then was led into a side-room where I would either be murdered or interviewed. As soon as it became apparent that it was the latter, I relaxed, and answered every question confidently and with a smile on my face. They'll let me know in two weeks, and I'm quietly confident. Can you still be 'quietly confident' if you're telling everyone that you think you got it? Let's say yes.
The next day, I went back to university for the first time in almost a year. The second I got talking to a couple of lads outside my class, I knew that this year would be interesting. The one with a ponytail had perfected the sleazy wink that has been used (tragically, quite successfully) on me in the past, and one with ginger dreadlocks and a massive coat seemed like a generally lovely chap. The class itself was more or less what I expected, but I'll be honest, I was more interested in Mat and Ben, for those are their names. They made me laugh, they were friendly, and I ended up spending the day with them.
Mat was handing out CVs in town, and ended up getting an interview while Ben and I talked on the steps outside. It was fascinating to speak to someone with such a different philosophy to myself, who nevertheless seemed very much on my wavelength. I went back to Ben's and watched half of Dark City before I had to go.
Today was a much quieter one, but I'm delighted to say that I have made a personal breakthrough! Ohyes! It's a matter of record that I have never, ever managed to draw a man that doesn't look horribly deformed or like a serial rapist. Often both. But today, I drew this chap:


... and I'm really quite pleased with him.

I love you, Randall Monroe

Entropy and rain

Today, it rained. I walked. Computer. Laminater. Velcro. Posters. Guillotine. Database, database, database...

Still it rained. I walked, waited, watched My Fair Lady. I read.

I read this. Read it. You'll like it. Ben probably already knows it backwards.

I don't know enough to stop my boyfriend having panic attacks. Hell, I can't stop MYSELF having panic attacks: the string, fluff, and optimism that I'm made of seems to fall further apart every day. Entropy. Hah.

He can reverse it of course. In theory, He does. By His wounds we are healed. But still, my life is a bit of a shambles.

I need to retake a module to get into UWIC like I hoped. I need to submit an essay. A really long, big, difficult essay - you know I have trouble with them at the best of times. While holding down a 9 to 5 job.

I'm halfway through my overdraft... getting paid tomorrow though, hooray! And I'm seeing a very special friend soon! And I'm going home soon after that.

And it rains.

Working 9 to 5

... as the legendary Dolly Parton sang. Yes, the rumours are true, I finally have a job! Today was my first day, and it was pretty good! Stuffing envelopes, wrestling paper jams out of printers, standard temp stuff.

For some reason I was in a truly weird mood afterwards. All sad and quiet and wanting something-but-I-don't-know-what. If anybody has a theory I'd be delighted to hear it; all I knew was that I felt down and even cuddles couldn't fix it. Probably just hormones, giving me the old leaky-eye.

Ah well, same again tomorrow no doubt.

Work, play, toys, tales, pity and pictures

Well well well. Where to start.

I've got a job. Just for a month, some simple office work, but it will be my First Proper Job. I'm not too nervous, actually; I've got a kind of "just do it" attitude that probably means I owe Nike royalties. In honour of doing this remarkably grownup thing, I've been making the necessary phone calls and running errands and finding paperwork and all sorts of impressively organised things. Mostly without hardly being threatened at all.

A friend of mine has bought a wii. This is, naturally, the perfect excuse to all go round his house and play that strangely addictive sports that involves odd limbless people that look almost, but not quite, entirely unlike you. I'd like it to be known that I absolutely kicked ass until we started playing a proper game.

I miss the days when I used to rule the world at DOA3. Out of sheer sudden cravings for that game, I started playing on Gav's Soul Calibre 2. Methadone.

I had a very detailed dream last night. The best way to remember dreams is to repeat them to yourself out loud in the morning. I thought it all through in detail, figuring that's more or less the same, and it hasn't worked. Booooo.

Gav had his hair straightened, and it made him very happy. He looks really good too, so we've bought some straighteners to share. Hooray!

Gah - remember my crushingly embarrassing bikini story? I had the opportunity to tell a rather lovely person the whole thing, and our mutual friend told me that she'd read my blog post on the matter at work on a rubbish day and that it cheered her up. I mostly write this blog for me, but that kind of comment truly brightens up my day.

Also, my toe hurts. I tripped over the carpet last night. I hopped about for a bit looking pathetic before remembering that there was nobody here to feel sorry for me. That's why I'm telling you; I figure I'm karmically owed sympathy!

Some of you know about the cartoons that I made. Well my creative splurges now extend to graphics tablet doodles. Let me know what you think!

So, in summary, life is good and moving forward, and my addiction to Boots meal deals continues unabated.