sometimes i just revert. i have to.

i spend all day in big important business meetings. i answer my phone every time it rings. and am nice to the person bothering me. i remember peoples names and am tactful to the loons and twits around me with the greatest of efforts. i have office banter and chair meetings. i offer to make the coffee. i even wear eyeliner. it's a big fucking deal.

so when i come home today, i put away the books and the paperwork. i refuse to login into my office network.

i make a quesedilla. i eat a bowl of ice cream. i swear at inanimate objects. i watch scrubs. twice. and i go to bed.

my life is one hell of a party.

babbling about bottles

so we all i am big pile of girly mush deep down. i've hidden it well. the masculine tentendcies and need for power certainly help. but sometimes i just want movie ending gushy kitten cuddles and pretty dresses.

which is why i perhaps didn't make a thing of valentines. 1, it is lame 2, i don't understand it as a holiday and 3, god forbid i did manage to convince myself it is both valuable and the epitome romantic, i'd never live up to my own expectations and that would be pathetic. like stab my own eyes out sad.

so i couldn't really be bothered or disappointed when I opened a hot water bottle.

the hot water bottle is indeed and archaic british thing, and new ones do smell a bit of institutions and clean rubber.

to be fair, as water bottles go, it's cute. if gap made a perky stripey one this is totally it. but they are so old ladyish I felt kind of blah to be honest. (dowdy is a good word.)

but now, a couple weeks later I am here to sing of my conversion.

I take it all back. The hot water bottle is the bestest most romantic valentines gift ever.

lordy, that swashy warm goodness wrapped up in cheerful knitwear on a pms day is the best thing. ever.

Its kind of like when a baby all cuddles into your side like a warm gooey happy thing except that if you roll over, you can't kill it. Plus, I feel gross and unmanagable and completly unfit to be near human life, but the bottle doesn't mind. It just let's me spoon it with it's cheerful pompom ties, radiating calming warmness and watch Persuasion again until the pain goes away.

It wasn't immediate, this love of mine. And it's not always necessary. But when things are bad, and I feel my absolutely worst, it's there to take care of me. soothe away my ickiness and i feel better. It's a rainyday, chips are down, end of the world sort of reminder. And I love it.

Liam is a fucking god.

relief.

I have never been so glad to bleed again.

poetry

I am 21 days into lent. I have read 16 poems.

Part of the problem is cataloguing them and having one handy especially as I have been away at the weekends or staying at liam's a lot more. But enough excuses. I am going to write down my list here to keep track.

Done:

1. The Relic, Donne (Isherwood)
2. Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Eliot (David)
3. Notes from a Deprivation Tank, Grady (James)
4. The Road Not Taken, Frost (Melly)
5. Prufrock again (Sonja) - does that even count?
6. R. Harper, Grady (Bill)
7. Tea, Duffy (Amanda)
8. Timor Mortis, Gluck (Liam)
9. All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands, Sufjan Stevens (Cecilia)
10. Oh God Where Are You Now? Sufjan Stevens (Cecilia)
11. Holy Sonnet 6, Donne (Kate)
12. Holy Sonnet 5, Donne (Kate)
13. The Sunlight on the Garden, MacNiece (Jules)
14. 426-0619, Bukowski (Jill)
15. Non-sequetur, Wilberg (Bill)
16. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (B. Reid)

Left:
Scotland, Reid (Lois)
Blue Song, Williams (Liz)
Happy Were He, Devereux (Liz)
Love Arm'd, Behn (Janet)
The First Step, Cavaty (Patrick)
One Art, Bishop (Hillary)
Night, Montgomery (Mandy)

oh and:
Unspecified Dylan Thomas (Dylan)
Unspecified Pythagoras (Tom)


Easter is still weeks away. I think I'll have to do some hunting of my own. Perhaps I'll read Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture beginning to end.


PS - since when did Sundays not count? How did I not know that in all the years deprived of pop and ice cream and swearing? I think I have earned a spare lent in all that overtime.

does this mean I am going to be alien scientologist housewife? or secretly black?

too busy to breathe

there is something wonderful about seeing your work in print. even if its unfinished, even if its imperfect, a tangible delicate rendering of so many hours is precious. i love my job. (though i am glad it's only the first proof.)

though, work is taking over my life. in on saturdays, working all night sometimes. it's a big thing.

and i am to the point i can't go on like this. i am unwilling to give up everything, though i am proud to do what i am capable of. glad to give what i have, but refuse to let it take more.

so i'm cultivating some time for just me. while i sort out a lot of things. about me. about us. about who i want to be and how.

wednesday i took the day off and went to alnwick, a tiny town just south of the border in england. the kind of little place with a mercat cross in the cobbled square and a norman city gate still in tact. a castle in the gardens and all that.

and the most beautiful bookshop ever. the victorian train station is now rows upon rows of old dusty volumes in which to lose yourself. giant iron grated windows and a tiny waiting room with red velvet buttoned couches.

i read some of Sir Walter Scott's epic Marmion, dithered in the youth religious section over edwardian primer books of saints and reveled in childish amusement at the hidden "spicy" section wraught with James Bond type soft porn. Mostly russian nypho spies and wanton women of the civil war. It was positively hilarious. who knew their was retro manly romance novels?

i was going to write how you know you're in a couple when you stay home from work sick and you go to put in a favourite dvd, you have to eject Civ III and it makes you smile.

but not only is that a grammatical disaster, sadly unfunny, it is also a vaguely Jeff Foxworthy type cliche.

but i still think it's sweet.