To the workers in the Bell Street office

One: Milk cannot be recycled. Nice try, you are all disgusting.

Two: The cupboard is not a kissing booth. Please don't, just don't.

It was gay day today. George square just packed fulla pride. Lot of scary-looking lesbians. Every one I've ever met has had huge breasts, it's intimidating.

On a completely unrelated, I swear, note I saw the most beautiful girl. Asian with fantastic flicky hair and great jeans and I very nearly fell over I was staring so much which would have been bad as I was crossing the street. She just had a look about her that made me want to know her.

On another unrelated note I shopped too much. Must stop that. Soon.

My little sister's eyes so wide

A website glitched and refused to work for me. So I emailed them and they offered me an alternative and then I gave them something I wrote that was sent back to me because she'd given me the wrong email. So I grit my teeth and sent another email and got the right one and gave them something I wrote. Guys this is huge for me. Huge! Half the reason I don't do things is because I'm incapable of writing formalities about myself. I can psyche myself up enough to send things off, hand in cvs, fill out application forms, enter competitions but jesus a handful of words saying here it is, here I am, hope to hear from you. I just can't.

So yeah, go me. Now all I have to do is win.

I was watching the news just there. They were talking to some woman about McCain and dear god. Everything she said was a perfected speech. She was aggressive and defensive and it wasn't for the fact that it was a woman asking her the questions I would have despaired of my gender completely. She was this blonde, stretched, caked thing. Older than she wished she looked. Oh, it was bad.

In other news Julie stayed home sick today and played GTA in the way only she can. I have not seen such spectacular spins of flaming vehicles and the cries of oh crap! why did I get back in? The defining moment was when she tried to steal a Mafia car. She got punched, shot in the head and when she casually sauntered away three burning cars hemmed her in and crushed her polygon head before everything exploded and she was informed she had been wasted.

"Why did they do that?" My little girl wailed. "What did I do to them?" Then she shot a policeman and battered a whore, complaining that she didn't have much money for a prostitute.

My brain and tongue just met and they ain't friends just yet

Ok so I watched The Simpsons Movie (bad but I guess not terrible) and I watched The Wicker Man (which could have been called Nicholas Cage Punches Some Women) and I also watched Back to the Future (I forgot they swore quite so much, I was surprised and amused). But forget all them.

I recorded a film called Love Me if You Dare because it had Marion Cotillard in it and I now know who she is since I watched La Vie en Rose (and she's in Big Fish! I did not know this). It wasn't until the french title told me it was called Jeux d'enfants that I realised I had heard of this film before. Two kids start playing a game of dares that carries on as they grow up getting more and more dangerous is basically what Sky told me. Pah! It gave no indication about what the film was like. This was one of the most ridiculous, silly and ultimately pointless love stories I have watched in a while and I adored it. It was like if Amelie had a really mean streak and I do hate comparing every French film to Amelie but colour wise and silliness wise I'm going to do it anyway. Completely different message and the ending was almost ruined. It was so perfect and then there was another scene and I was like nooooooooooooooo but then it was ok. If I interpreted it right, then it was good.

So in conclusion I am very much in love with this movie. It may be that it's because he looks like a guy I fell in love with for awhile this year but I'd like to think it was more because the film was good.

Spill it out on the ragged floor

I sometimes feel that I project myself onto others too much. Like I'm slowly gathering a group of people to reflect my own personality. Collecting familiar traits. I can pick and choose and avoid the parts of me I hate. Mostly. I thought this a lot more eloquently than I'm writing it.

I'm watching another french thriller. This time about a page turner plotting revenge against a pianist who dashed her hopes of brilliant piano playing as a child. At least that's what the information button tells me. So far it's been a lot of weird looks from the girl who played the mother in L'Enfant (and who is rather good) and I think she's trying to injure the pianist's son subtley through difficult piano playing and she just kissed the pianist and made things awkward. The pianist is a woman. I think I just missed some sort of lesbian connection just now by typing. I'm really only watching because the pianist looks like an older version of an old friend of mine. Seriously I think the French can make a thriller from anything. I've watched lemmings, children and piano players. Interesting mix. I'm just not sure where the revenge is coming in. Unless it's I will destroy you by loving you! Maybe I should pay more attention.

Oh holy crap awesome bit!

This cello player put the moves on revenge girl. He handed her his cello and then just launched some sort of awkward boobattack from behind. Her face didn't change but her hand moved up the neck of the cello and I was like no that's terrible phallic imagery, terrible! But then she slammed the spike on the bottom of the cello onto his foot and he is in hospital. The music implies that more revenge is to come. I think she's now trying to drown the son. And I think I just saw her breasts. This is why you should close the curtains in changing rooms properly. She's like some sort of evil lesbian, I love it.

Je me souviendrais de mon petit ami

My dad just called from Paris. He's there filming for a day and called to make me jealous.

"I can save you some money. I'll take notes for your research instead. Not like there's any other reason to go." I shrugged off his taunts and he sighed. No fun if I don't get wound up.

Apparently it's sunny and the woman in the background sounded like she was shouting about her cat.

Bring me back a fat notebook of grey rain, writers hideouts, sweeping skylines and a kiss of Autumn boatrides. I miss my French lecture hall. I realised that last year. I miss the freezing room that smelt of gas as I sat there so very lost with all those grammar points I never learnt squeezed in snug with the curly-haired crazy and the silly-named Russian. Friends for a year and lost when I restarted. So many films and coffees and cheating on tests. Societies full of foreigners and bands with fractured English.

I watched The Black Dahlia again. It makes more sense when people stop asking whatcha watching, who's that guy, why's he doing that? Still not great though but now I have the book to compare it to.

Falling apart not at the seams. Seams can be repaired, tidied up, tucked away. Any seamstress will tell you it's the main fabric you want to avoid tearing. Even if you can save it, it will look ugly. It will look repaired.

I'll just sit here and bleed at you

I woke up early early this morning and shifted through texts I couldn't be bothered reading last night. I always like waking up to something to read. Although probably not great to start the day beating yourself up over the fact that someone is using an extended metaphor of addiction in an attempt to see you again. I'm better than heroin, guys! Fuck I guess I just can't help being so goshdarn amazing, now can I.

Anyway I woke up early early and decided to publish stories in my head. Plan out interviews and signings and reading and most importantly the dedications. Spend advances so far in advance you won't even have to think when you get the cheque. This destroyed an hour. Then I got up and sighed at my fringe for several minutes. I went back to bed with a pen but only doodled screaming attacks on my own personality.

Oh fuck what did they do to Sharleen Spiteri?

I'm poring over maps instead, calculating costs and packing bags full of books. I'm sitting in the red Mustang my uncle owned when he was my age, cheaper than an airplane because other people's memories don't cost me a thing. There's printouts and annotations and scraps of plans of ideas. Go here and here and here. Part of me was resigned to the fact that I wasn't going to get it out, thinks there's no point I'm never going to get there, never going to do anything. But fuck it, I have to try. So there's guidebooks and maps and printouts and my tights have a line trailing up the back of my legs because you have to wear a skirt to write this. Do my hair even though there's nobody to do it for. I'm doing it for my notebook, impressing my own characters, and I'm thinking ahead of advances and long trips and walks round buildings I love. I'm thinking dedications and piles of paper with a finished quality to them. My dad wrote two books, one he was commissioned to do so it doesn't count as much I guess. Still two books means my name is in two dedications. My mum told me the other day that some college course used his first as a textbook for a while which meant a bunch of students read my name.

This is what I did to pass the time before I made it down the stairs.