New peril

(9:12:22 pm)gavin777:HI sexy godess.iam looking for a woman to be an online slave to by text or email, i have a thing for women in control plus i secretly wear womens underwear, if this is your thing and you want to email me or text me orders what colour womens underwear i must wear under my clothes everyday, let me know and i will give you my email and mobile, i hope your intersted in having me as your online slave sexy godess , and iam willing to give two of my females co workers emails so i will have no choice but to do as you say mistress, BUT WOULD BE UNDERSTOOD YOU WOULD NEVER USE THEM , JUST TO KEEP ME IN LINE, AND WOULD BE A TURN ON KNOWING A WOMAN HAS THAT POWER OVER ME, IAM WILLING TO WRITE LINES DO ANY TASK EVEN EDIT MY PROFILE TO SAY ANYTHING YOU THINK I SHOULD PUT ON IT LIKE THE PANTIE WEARING INFERIOR WIMP IAM

(9:20:36 pm)mobda:God above in heaven. You are an instant BLOCK mister

SUCCESS

I bought a ring which I LOVE but it is off being resized to fit my weirdly thin fingers so I can't wear it until it returns, which gives me a chance to get a manicure (I was ashamed to get my hands out in front of the nice jewellery lady). I am eagerly awaiting its return. Thanks, Eric! It it is old fashioned and ladylike and it glitters in the sunlight :)

Also I bought an SD card for my stupid fancy phone but apparently my phone OS doesn't support the massive GB size I bought? Does anyone need a card? Also I can't sync my phone with my computer so I can't put any music on it, because I need some software and I haven't got it. I hate software.

Also it is literally impossible to believe, but there is not one single shop in Hyson Green which would allow me to bake my skin until it peels off my flesh. Not one! It must be the only suburb in the world without one. I guess that is what comes of living in an ethnic neighbourhood.

This sort of thing

is why I can never be without a cameraphone.

Sometime between me parking my car at work and me driving that car home tonight, someone wrote SEXY DRIVER! in the dirt on the back of my car.

For those who have just tuned in, a couple of months ago someone also wrote 'cunt' backwards in my rear windscreen. Is this the same person? Two separate, unrelated incidents? No one has EVER written on my car before, and now two in two months.

And in what way am I a 'sexy driver'? Is it my driving method which is sexual? Or am I a sexy person who drives? Does the person who wrote it know me (in which case why not just write 'sexy lady'); or are they a stranger who picked a car at random? Or is it someone who followed me into the carpark and decided to write a sarcastic missive on my driving style?

I fear I may never know.

But I haven't got a pic to put in here because I cannot sync my motherlicking BlackBeret with my chuffing computer. I need to hire an assistant.

2009; better and also worse than 2008 YTD

I know I talk about boys aaaall the time, and if I was a nice girl I wouldn't (if I was a nice girl I would be married by now I guess).

HASTY EDIT lord above will I never learn

In other news, I had an all-day meeting with some guy so enormously, morbidly fat that I thought he might have a heart attack and die right in the middle of struggling to make himself a cup of tea. I had 999 tapped into my phone, ready. I've never had to dial it before!

I'm not blaming anyone else

but all these things happen to me and none of them are my fault.

SIMULTANEOUSLY BEST AND WORST DAY EVER

WORST THINGS FIRST:

Yesterday I made a decision about how to do a manual workaround for an aspect of my job which doesn't work. As far as I knew there was no set process; but what I did made sense and has in fact been done before.

Somone with FUCK ALL involvement in my project caught wind of it via an innocent third party and came storming down the office all guns blazing and proceeded to chew me out in front of my team, my assistant, my category contacts and the third party, who I barely know. He shouted at me for a good twenty-five minutes. The upshot of it all was; a) there is a process, an incredibly complicated and secret one I've never heard of; b) I am an incompetant retard; c) I've been deliberately and maliciously misinforming colleagues with, I can only assume, the desire to cause the downfall of the company that provides the means by which I live.

Two meetings later, this nightmare emailed me and TWENTY other people - half of whom I don't even work now, but will be doing on future projects - telling them all what a huge fuckup I'd made, how he'd fixed it for me, and how what I had achieved was a sackable offence. Sackable offence. Them's fighting words! It's lucky I'm a battle-scarred, emotionally distant tough type because someone of lesser moral fibre might have dissolved into a nervous wreck after an onslaught which basically lasted all afternoon.

Needless to say, I shall be discussing this further with my line manager on her return (at which point I will clear my desk).

BEST THINGS IN THE WORLD:

A guy I sort-of know at work has sold me his bitchin' BLACKBERRY at supercheap knockdown price and option for favours (non-sexual)! I did want an iPhone, but I did a survey of the number of picture messages I take in a week and their humour-factor relative to that of my text messages; and I concluded I cannot live without the option to send pictures of the cat in funny poses to my housemates whenever I damn well please. Whoop de whoop!

ABSOLUTE TOTAL BEST THING THAT I THINK HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME:

My brother wins THE GAME for inexplicably giving me this amazing wonderful gift of life. For those without eyes, it is a voucher for ONE METRIC TON of money to spend in a jewellery shop and above all things, I love jewellery! Lord above I nearly had a stroke when I clapped my beady eyes on this and there was such a shriek the cat shed all his fur in horror.

Thank you, god, for providing me with a brother who has more money than sense. Although god knows I deserve it after all I've put up with.

HA HA HA HA

A list of all the things I have asked my brother to buy me for my birthday - UPDATED

1. DVD from Studio Ghibli (not Spirited Away or My Neighbour Totoro)
2. Subscription to any leading Lit or Lang journal
3. Something called Labyrinth the book (I actually meant House of Leaves)
4. An iPhone
5. Anything by Denis Johnson
6. A tattoo
7. A print from ISO50
8. Something which might be useful for someone thinking of going to Nepal
9. Books about the political history of the Cambodian genocide
10. A book about bee-keeping (in the guise of a book about meerkats)
11. And a huge gingerbread latte from Starbucks

This is going to be the best birthday ever.

Scratch all that

All I want for my birthday is books about Cambodian political history and subscriptions to any number of daily papers.

Shit I've left everything too late again.

Does anyone want to be my academic reference, I can't ask Uni because of that scandal with that lecturer, I'm remembered for all the wrong reasons.

LONDON GATWICK < EGYPT > LONDON LUTON

So I went on holiday a couple of weeks ago. I went to Egypt. Egypt is awesome! I would like to go back and see the pyramids and learn to dive and be sold into marriage to a boyfriend who brings me icecream when I've already eaten seven desserts. My dowry will be seven camels. My bemused family will have to visit the camels when they are missing me too much.

The whole expedition was doomed from the start. Mistake number one was going with Emma, who doesn't feel it's worth going on holiday unless one gets bitten by at least one exotic but unidentifiable beast while you're there. Mistake number two was only booking the holiday two days before it started, because this means all local flights (local being within three hundred miles) are booked up and one is forced to drive to Gatwick at 3am in the morning.

Mistake number three was owning a car of such haughty, fickle Italian heritage that it refuses to work sensibly when it is raining as though the apocalypse itself had begun. Mistake number four was using Googlemaps which thinks it is perfectly possible to travel three hundred miles in an hour and a half, forcing one to drive at ninety billion miles an hour in order to keep to schedule.

Mistake number five was getting to check-in right as it opened only to find that the flight is delayed for 3 hours. Mistake number six is not always travelling with two days' worth of movies, games and music to fill hours waiting around the terminal.

Mistake number six was leaving Egypt to come home again.

Mistake number seven was not taking the warnings of snow, overheard when still in Egypt, seriously. Mistake number eight was feeling relieved to land at Luton airport after the pilot, who had been circling Gatwick airport for two hours in the worst blizzard for twenty years, promised there would only be an hour's delay getting to Gatwick.

Mistake number nine was imagining that landing at Luton at 10pm on a Sunday night would enable us to get back to Nottingham in time for work at 8am on Monday morning. Mistake number ten was not bringing sufficiently warm clothing, sleeping bags and portable showers to allow spending the night in Luton airport, on the floor sans blankets or advice on whether we would ever be provided with alternative transport in order to be reunited with our car and lives..

Mistake number eleven was driving three hundred miles back on Monday night in another blizzard despite not having had any sleep for at least thirty six hours. This mistake worked out ok, though, no one died.

Mistake number twelve was going back to work for my ungrateful company, who tell me I don't get paid for missing work on Monday! Scandalous.

CONCLUSION: airports suck! I'm scared of flying! Cruises down the Nile ftw.

I know I haven't written about London yet

but this video nearly made me lose it completely.

In other news: things I want for my birthday include House of Leaves, a tattoo and an iPhone.

And a lion, obvs.

So I might go to Nepal?

I write
and write, and transcend
nothing, escape
nothing, nothing
is truly born from me,
yet magically it's better
than nothing

Twilight

So I took this book on holiday with me, and I read it twice.

I took it with me because it sounded like a cross between Harry Potter and Ten Things I Hate About You. I love Harry, and Ten Things is my favourite film.

I read it twice because it only took about four hours of beach-lounging and I had nothing else; also, I couldn't believe how incredibly bad it was.

Seriously! I know, I'm a lit student, lit students hate anything that isn't Bukowski or cut-up bits of newspaper stuck together and called anti-art (yeah, I'm looking at you, Burroughs). But I'm a lit student whose favourite books feature a series of post-apocalyptic mutants, one of whom has a secret destiny to save the world. What I'm saying is, my reading habits were set early and I am really easy to please. Vampires? Amazing. Unrequited love? Can't go wrong.

Sadly, though, this is pretty much the whole plot. The first two thirds of the book are; boy does inexplicable things; girl rationalises it and gets it wrong, then gets it right; he spends the rest of the book alternating between being 'macho dick boyfriend' and 'Bunty reader's ideal boyfriend'. You get the impression the author had a tough time in high school. In hindsight, she should have spent that time practicing her writing. I had to re-read the first chapter to make sure that it wasn't something I'd written when I was ten. It is basically pretty bad.

The last third of the book, however, is like a lorry jack-knifing. Everything is going nicely, it's sort of like a Mills and Boon without the sex (I'm coming back to that), she's met the parents etc etc and then - BAM! VOLTE FACE! You can hear the creaks in the plot where the author shoehorns in her written-for-a-movie set piece. Seriously, you could rip this book in half and have two perfectly independant stories. This is annoying.

And yeah, there is no sex. I didn't get into the book thinking it was a piece of erotica, mind - but the lack is glaring. Yeah, there's some kissing - but somehow the vampire who's been a seventeen year old virgin for a hundred years and the girl who has just fallen in love for the first time in her loveless life don't find it a big deal that there is no sexytime?! It is sort of rationalised in the plot (he is sooooo powerful he might accidentally kill her - haha yeah like I haven't heard that before) but honestly, I don't think that would have stopped me, or him. Maybe it is a bit silly to complain about lack of realism in a novel about high school vampires - but I'd find it easier to believe in vampires than celibate teenagers.

My main mistake in all this, of course, is that I bought the first three books as a set, so convinced was I that I would chuffing love Twilight. Now I've read the second one (doesn't even warrant a whiny review) and will, I'm sure, read the third before the week is out. And that will be twelve hours of my life I could have spent writing my own masterpiece, about this unicorn who starts a job with a pharma company and has to keep his identity secret in case someone grinds him up for use in a new cancer drug. He falls in love with the microbiologist who is in charge of the research and is conflicted because his death would help others to live. In the end, he'll accidentally gore the microbiologist and feel so guilty he has to go and live in Alaska for a week or so.

The end.

FOUND

ONE MEMORY FROM MY CHILDHOOD

So about a week ago something happened to trigger a memory in my clouded brain of watching a movie about wolves and a stream and a fight with an old wolf on a rock. In the way of these things, once I'd remembered it, that was it, I had to know. Because I am tenacious and clever, I DUG IT UP.

I was convinced that what I was remembering was not the Jungle Book, based on my knowledge of the Disney version. I was wrong! So wrong. It was this Japanese anime version of Rudyard Kipling's book which somehow filtered into my tiny most-central-and-most-ethnically-white village-in-England childhood. How?! Does my brother remember it? Would my parents? Was it just me?

Sadly, now I have an absolute need to own it on DVD. The sad part is because the only places I can find to buy it are in Asia and they are seriously expensive, even for my profligate nature.

Oh well, at least there is still Youtube.

I am back

God am I ever back.

I can't begin to explain how difficult it was to become 'back'.

But I will, later, once I've slept and washed and gathered my shattered wits about me.