Drive-in Saturday

This is what happens when I tell Julie about my day. I honestly feel she should illustrate my life always.

Gd Bargens

That's what they have in ikea.
Also look at these guys, they are ridiculously at peace.



Oh blog you are such a waste of space but I can't let you die. How else could I fill hours by typing and never posting? I'd have to like get a job or a hobby or a life. Or I could try to watch as many films as possible in order to break my eyes and never think and oh I'm done with this now. Can I pack up and start again? You won't miss me that much anyway because hey I may be amazing but I'm also pretty fucking mean.

There's nothing else to do

This week I did something I rarely do. I went out drinking two nights in a row. Oh wow look at me be the social butterfly. On the one hand I don't have hours to waste thinking. On the other I don't have hours to waste thinking. Anyway so tonight I was sober so I took pictures of things.


I call this one, things found in my jeans. Not pictured is the spare button to the skirt I am not wearing. It's a pretty great skirt though. It's a train ticket (not mine) on which I have scribbled either 3 paces out or space out, I step and smash into traffic. I'm sure it was relevant at the time I wrote it. The other is a paper airplane I demanded be made for some reason. I think I wanted to throw it at somebody. I never remember how to make them. And yes I'm reading Peter Pan. It's one of my all-time favourite books.



This was on a bathroom wall and I had enough wits about me to photograph it. One day I will photograph everything I read in public toilets and make some sort of art book. I call it my Second Year project. I mean what else would I do at uni? Learn? Pffft to that.

Bed now.

I waste time like nobody else can. If you want to see an example of unproductivity you have to come to my house and witness how I brutally murder the hours tween waking and midnight when I tend to lose sense. There's the opening of every curtain and the emptying of the dishwasher and the considering of potential breakfasts before deciding I cannot stomach anything at this time in the morning except an entire bowl of strawberries, or if it's a particularly awful day a cookie if one can be found in the back of my freezer (I am currently all out). Then I check blogs, forums and webcomics, all my notebooks in case I wrote anything interesting the night before and my emails. I search for jobs and literary magazines. I send off CVs that can be emailed and I don't send any pieces of writing but I think about it. I delete all my rejections. I dream about what I would do first should I ever find an acceptance. You know, who I would tell first and how I would do it. Automatically I dream of phoning the people who would care but then my brain kicks in and tells me it's rather early and what if people are too busy or they don't pick up or they do pick up and I forget how to speak. None of it matters because I have no acceptances yet.

Then I set myself a task. Yesterday I chose to write the tracklists onto all of my burned cds because I keep forgetting what songs are on what album. This led to thoughts about songs and how so many of them invoke men. Juneau is my ex-boyfriend's poloshirt I used to sleep in and his thick black hair. One-armed scissor was the boy a year younger than me in my music class that I was idly in love with, Wave upon wave upon wave is another one. I miss that class, I picked up a lot of music recommendations. Then there's I predict a riot and an old friend who spoke in hushed tones and got high and asked why I was with such an idiot. Debaser was a girl from Manchester who wrote me long winded letters and Black-eyed boy was a friend's cousin who decided I looked like Sharleen Spiteri. Some of the cds were burned from their own copies when we traded music with spit and chocolate and change for the bus and everyone had to share what we had. It was a constant conversion and my best friend never forgave me when I gave up my ticket to see Blue live and told her every band she adored was shit. Most of them were mere recommendations I followed up on and haven't listened to in years.

Today my concrete plans don't begin until later. Sunday night I found an ARG here about a site called Notes to Mary and I spent far too long this morning catching up. My task was to organise as much of mum's birthday while she's out but she'll probably be home soon. Yay for my ability to murder every hour and get nothing done.

Box of pearls

My dentist is adorable. When I last saw her she had a minifro and braces. Today she had neither and had fully swung from cute cute to hot cute. So naturally I wanted to impress her. What I've found is that there is no consistency between visits. I used to have this really lovely dentist who told me my teeth were perfect every six months. Then without being told she was replaced by an angry man, then an Irish woman who insisted I flossed and now this girl. Last time she warned of the evils of coca cola and above all the treacherous bru so I cut down a little. And I do mean a little. I drank more beer because spirits were mixed with fizzies and I didn't want my teeth to melt away. Today I walked in, forgot how old I was and made the receptionist glare at me with such indifferent malice, the dentist acknowledged my wisdom tooth and sent me back out. I didn't pay a thing and I gave my mum 50p for a big bottle of lemonade. Seriously it's great stuff and made with real lemons! so the bottle always proudly tells me.

Oh and she implied my future degree in history was worth nothing. Least I won't be poking around in people's mouths and killing myself though! She's too pretty to be mad at but damn I did not need that this morning.

Also I had the craziest dream about Julie hiding from school and great big swirls of teeth that were sharklike and creepy and there was someone trying to kill us and I woke up so angry but a minute before my alarm went off so I guess my brain was only trying to help.

22/6

I left myself a blank page. The last page of my fourth consecutive diary. I left it blank for some small piece of enlightenment later. On the second to last page (because I greatly dislike the word penultimate) I scrawled down a dream. Tight neat black lines of ink, I dimly remember pulling the covers over my head and turning on my ipod just to grab some light. My second to last entry begins on the third last page and I've dated it 11/5 but that should be a 6 seeing as how it follows from 9/6 and addresses the issues in this previous entry. I picked it up maybe twenty minutes ago with a flash of inspiration about the inside of my head. I had to get it out, out as fast as I could before I lost it. That feeling that picks me up and understands. It's a feeling I can only express in my own terrible handwriting. But this scrawl informs me that on the twenty first of the sixth I filled every last space of that white page. Exhausted I had pulled images about choking on the previous night's perfume and tripping on discarded ribbon and lace and how I need to get out of this place. My flash of inspiration would have followed on. I would have written about how I want to pack a bag and go. How that's all I've ever wanted to do. I wanted to write about how that's all I had ever tried to do whether I was writing silly little escapisms or running away or attempting to do something really and truly idiotic, the point is there is nothing that compares to the knot in my gut as I leave my city behind.

I always thought I'd be gone by now. I had so many plans to take a year out and really see the world but such notions involved money and maturity and dreams of meeting somebody truly amazing who'd hold my hand until I could ditch them halfway across Europe. I never really found anybody. I attract those who want to protect me or those who need protecting and all I want is a little equality. Equality and a ticket out of here. Nobody could hold my attention for longer than a month and those who tried to stick around had every little fault picked out of them until they became a shapeless mass like everybody else. There was a boy with a stupid name, a girl with an odd nose and a whole society that made me feel so useless. Back then I was drifting and now the asphalt (because it's a pretty word) clings to the heels of my boots and either way I need out. I want to lose myself in something foreign. I like to shut out everything and lose myself in the centre of town, on a bus or a crowded street or a bar. Anywhere really you just got to get your head right and suddenly nothing makes any sense and I can't understand anything and it's terrifying but so very satisfying.

I wanted to write all of this and a helluva lot more I can't share here because you might read it and then where's the fun in telling you a secret in the future? Instead I've filled another notebook with nonsense and all I can do is mark the dates on the front page, the 1st of March through to the 21st of June which must be the shortest slice of my life I chose to record yet, tie it shut with an elastic band and place it in my box with the others. Until I sacrifice another I have to make do with half-thoughts and hope nobody reads too much into anything if they can even be bothered to read such a rambling mess.

There are

thirteen Smiths on the fiction shelves in Borders.

Thirteen.

I need me a new name.

We were talking about names the other day, my family and I. I think it was Julie who was considering the tradition of passing on names and asked why Dad wasn't named after his mum's dad. I can't really remember how she came to that slightly contorted conclusion. Anyway point is if he had been named for his maternal grandfather, my father would be John Smith.

I mean I have nothing against my surname, it's easy to spell and pronounce and balances out my long first name so I can usually just about fit it on a line but damn it isn't very exciting.

More exciting I got the cutest top, and I mean the cutest top, and a skirt from my local designer charity shop. Got them both for a tenner I did which is fantastic considering the top was more than that originally on its own. I do love secondhand shopping. There are so many ugly things that I want to own and make pretty but I'm not that talented and often they are too expensive. I still long for them though. Terrible dresses haunt my sewing machine. One of my biggest regrets clothing wise was this huge tshirt with the Doors on it. It was too expensive so I had to leave it on a hanger but dammit I had a plan. There was this perfect design in my tshirt book and oh sometimes it's painful to think about.