Category Archives: Talking About Myself

Jan 25 2013

30 Before 30: #10 Go Sledging

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If you’re daft enough to follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t, you should. I’m really very good at Twittering), you’ll know that on Friday and Saturday I was sulking because even though it was snowing in the UK, it hadn’t snowed enough for me to go sledging. To be more accurate – it had snowed enough to facilitate sledging almost everywhere else, but not where I live.

Sledging is one of my 30 before 30. It’s not that I haven’t been sledging before, I have – I did lots of sledging when I was a kid and when it used to snow lots. But that’s exactly the point. Maybe, when I was younger, I assumed that it would snow every year, and every year I could go sledging. Maybe I never quite realised that sometimes, it wouldn’t snow at all. And maybe I failed to realise that as I grew up, sledging would become much less of a priority and that there would even come a time where I might be considered “too old” to go sledging. Somehow, I’d never factored any of this in.

The last time I remember going sledging was with my brother in a nearby field. We built ramps out of the snow and even though I was so cold I felt like my fingers were going to drop off (despite the gigantic mittens my mum had sent me outside with), it was the most fun ever and it’s one of my fondest childhood memories.

After that, there was a bit of a snow lull for quite a few years. I mean it would get cold, it would get icy, it might even snow but it was only ever an icing-sugar dusting and would be gone again within a day or so.

Childhood disappeared, quickly followed by my teens and as I hit my twenties I realised I was growing up and there wouldn’t be another opportunity to go sledging, y’know because, I was becoming an “adult”. Worse still, I wouldn’t be able to go sledging with my brother in the field near our house because he was already an adult. A proper one. With a job and everything. Also, my parents had moved house so we didn’t live near that field anymore. And also the sledge went to a charity shop when my parents moved house. All things considered, it didn’t look I was going to go sledging ever again.

So I just got on with being a grown up. Soon, I had a job and paid taxes and went to the supermarket for my weekly shop and did things like report the faulty boiler to the landlord. Maturity brings a certain amount of responsibility. The older you get, the more responsibilities you get. The more responsibility you get, the less childish amazing fun stuff you can do. That’s just science.

Responsibility graph

Then, when I was in my mid-twenties, we had two really snowy winters. It was so snowy in both of those years, that I landed a WHOLE DAY off work in each year.

But I did not go sledging.

Perhaps, by this point, I’d admitted defeat. I must have waited twenty years for it to snow enough to go sledging with my brother and now we were adults and it wasn’t going to happen. So I just stayed home and watched DVDs.

Then we had a couple snow-free winters, and I kept catching myself looking out of the window and hoping it would snow enough to go sledging. So when I wrote my 30 before 30 list, I decided that ‘going sledging’ should definitely go on there. If it snowed again before I was 30, I would definitely go sledging and just get it out of my system.

So, fast-forward to Sunday. The light spattering of snow we’d had here was already disolving into a grey, icy mush. It looked very much like another sledge-free winter was going to pass me by.

Then my friend (also called Jo)and I arranged to take our dogs for a walk in a small town near the pennines… Where there was substantially more snow. “Shall I bring the sledge?” she asked.

This is all very mathmatical and complicated, so please consult the equation below:

Snow equation

Finally, I went sledging.

And I was chased my puppy Izzy (the one wearing a high-visibility dog coat) and my friend Jo’s dog, Dillon (the dog shaped one).

Sledging with dogs

Jan 14 2013

A New Year’s Revelation

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It’s the start of a new year. There are lots of people jogging (everywhere, all the time), because it’s that time of year where we punish ourselves for our vices and decide that by this time next year, we will most definitely be a much better person.

I tell myself to be a much better person at the beginning of every week, never mind the beginning of every year. And every time I decide to go forth and become an infinitely better person, the whole thing quickly falls apart and I soon end up feeling much worse than I did to begin with.

This year, I’ve decided not to set myself up for failure and I haven’t made any  New Year’s resolutions. There are two reasons I always totally flunk at New Year’s resolutions:

1. I expect to see changes in myself almost immediately after deciding that I’m going to change.

Life changes 1 

2. My resolutions tend to be a bit vague and immeasurable like “Be healthy” or “Be less shit at everything”.

New year's resolutions

A while ago I wrote this post about how much I wanted to be someone totally different – someone who wakes up at dawn to do yoga, someone who is creative, productive and successful, someone who has deep philosophical conversations, someone who… (the list goes on). I have to be honest with myself: I AM NEVER going to be someone who wakes up bright and early, and does Yoga while reading… I dunno, Plato or whatever. What’s more, I’m actually okay with the fact I will never be this person.

Change shouldn’t about shoe-horning myself into a personality that doesn’t fit. My ideal version of myself – the clever, healthy, active creative with a mind that’s totally Zen – is not me. It’s never going to be me. If I became this person – the “perfect Me” – and I met perfect Me at a party, I would most probably want to punch perfect Me in the face. When I really think about it, perfect Me isn’t someone I would want to spend a lot of time with. I wouldn’t know what to talk to perfect Me about. In fact, perfect Me is probably someone I would bitch about behind their back. I would roll my eyes whenever perfect Me was talking. Perfect me probably wears Lycra and goes jogging. Perfect Me is probably a fussy eater… And that’s pretty much a deal breaker.

The more I thought about it, the more the perfect Me became less perfect and more smug and annoying. I realised that I don’t really like perfect Me at all. And if I don’t like the perfect version of myself, then why tell myself to become that person in the first place?

I started to wonder what was really so terrible about my imperfect life to make me feel like I had to become this Lycra-wearing object of perfection.

I decided to review what I’d achieved in 2012. While I realise that I didn’t make any particularly massive leaps forward with my life, in review, I think I achieved a fair amount. I completed the taught seminars on my MA, where I also made loads of new friends, I re-connected with old friends, I started writing for a couple of websites, I started writing a new novel and I (admittedly, in a totally random and seemingly impulsive manner) bought a dog.

And while none of my 2012 accomplishments have earned me an impressive salary, or landed me a publishing deal, or got me into some Lycra trousers, I’m safe in the knowledge that, in the very least, I’m heading in the right direction.

In the end, I decided to stop tormenting myself with thoughts of having a massive life overhaul and of becoming a person I don’t really want to be. And while there’s still a lot of room for change in my life, ultimately, I’m doing okay. Most people are doing okay. And that’s okay.

So while I’m still fully committed to trying new things and continuing with my 30 Before 30 list, I’m also not pretending that by the end of 2013, I will be a fit and healthy, intellectual, best-selling novelist with zero financial worries and a buzzing social life. All I want to get out of this year is to learn to be more appreciative of the things I have got and to just keep chipping away, slowly but surely, at the things I really want.

So here’s to 2013 – what I hope will be a slightly better year than 2012.

Nov 27 2012

30 Things to do before I’m 30

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This blog post has been in the works for quite a while (about 4 months). I’ve come close to posting it so many times and at the last moment, talked myself out of it again. Last week some friends on Twitter were talking about the 101 in 1001 lists thingy and I decided that it was time to post this. It’s still taken me another week to overcome inertia, so I’m posting it now before I give myself the opportunity to back out again. Apologies for any typos, I’m just sick of reading this over and over and then deciding not to post it. This is a long one btw, so grab a cup of tea and pull up a chair… Jo.

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been a little internet-absent recently. Normally when this happens I come back with some blog post or other plagued with apologies and excuses. This time it’s different (and no, it’s not because I had to go to rehab following my Snickers addiction).

A few months ago I realised that I am now, officially, in my late twenties. I am 28 and a half (ish) years old. That means that in a year and half (ish) I’m going to be 30. I know that’s not an overly distressing thing in itself, but it prompted me to think about my twenties and wonder what, if anything, I have been doing with my life so far.

I started to think about the things I have done, but mostly, I thought about all the things I haven’t and I wondered why that might be.

Let’s go back to when I was about 6 or 7 years old. At this point in my life all of my friends had birthday parties at a place called The Big Buddy Bear Club which was a massive play area (ball pools, slides, tunnels, rope ladders etc.). The Big Buddy Bear Club was the place to have birthday parties. It was excessively good fun, for most kids.

I’m sure that given the amount of times I actually went to The Big Buddy Bear Club I probably had fun at least once, but all I remember is that I once got stuck in a tunnel and I found it very scary and upsetting.

I was crawling through a tunnel which had a gap in it. To cross the gap, I had to crawl across a rope bridge. As I approached the rope bridge I stopped. I wasn’t keen on crossing the rope bridge – it just didn’t feel safe. My gut instinct told me to go back the way I came, but there were kids behind me and I was too shy/scared/socially awkward to ask if I could crawl past them so I closed my eyes and hurriedly crawled across the bridge before pulling into a side tunnel and bursting into tears.

Even though I didn’t fall, and the rope bridge didn’t disappear beneath me, and nothing bad happened at all, I couldn’t bring myself to continue further down the tunnel. And I couldn’t bring myself to go back across the rope bridge, either. Supposedly, facing your fears means you overcome them. For me, it merely confirmed that I definitely found crawling across a rope bridge incredibly scary and that I didn’t want to do it again.

And so I sat there in the tunnel and cried. I cried about being too scared to go forwards and too scared to go backwards. All because of a totally non-threatening rope bridge especially designed for children of my age, height and weight to crawl across.

As I sat there sobbing loads of other kids crawled by. Some would give me a quizzical look before going on their way, others didn’t notice me.  Once again, being incredibly shy, I was too scared to ask one of them to help me get out of the tunnel. So I just sat there and all I could think about was how everyone in The Big Buddy Bear Club was having masses of fun except me. And maybe some other kid who was throwing up in the ball pool or something.

Eventually, after I can’t even remember how long, some girl I didn’t know saw me crying and helped me back across the rope bridge and back to where lot’s of extremely bored-looking parents were sitting on a bench drinking coffee and waiting for the party to be over. I sat with the bored parents until the end of the party, watching all the other kids playing and having ridiculous amounts of fun. I wanted to go back, but I told myself not to. It just wasn’t worth it, what if I got stuck somewhere else? What if next time, no one found me and I’d just get left there?

This is pretty much the story of my life. I’m scared of everything. When I face something I find scary I don’t conquer my fear, I simply reinforce the fact that, yes, I really do find that thing scary.

This is, apparently, how I roll. I seem to fear things I’m perfectly capable of doing, just in case something terrible happens. And so I sit on the side, crying, too scared to go forwards and hoping that, eventually, someone much more confident than I am will find me and I can go home.

Whenever I have taken ‘risks’ (and I mean that in the broadest possible sense of the term) I feel like things work out badly, and I regret taking that risk… And then that puts me off ever taking any other sort of risk or impulsive action ever again… Ever.

So now I ring-fence myself into ‘playing it safe’ that is: avoiding all the things that scare me, not making any decisions, and hoping that maybe one day everything will just work out for the best and I’ll be happy. I stop myself from making any decisions just in case I make a bad one that might make me unhappy.

So here I am. Nearly 30 and well and truly fenced into my comfort zone. This doesn’t result in a particularly satisfying life.

When I started thinking about what I have done this past decade, I realised that I’ve moved house more times than I care to remember, eaten a lot of pizza and watched a lot of films. I also passed my driving test, but I’m too scared to actually drive a car. And I wrote a novel… with no story.

I’ve realised that a combination of life anxiety and an unrelenting fear of failure has left me in this situation. I can either shrug my shoulders to it all and say that this is just the way I am, or I could do something (even if it’s a fairly small thing) to change.

In the interests of turning 30 and knowing that I’m heading in the right direction (or at the very least, be safe in the knowledge that I did more than move house and eat pizza) I’ve decided to make a change.

I started making a list of things I wanted to do before I’m 30. It’s kind of like a bucket list – minus  the  swimming-with-dolphins cliché and having death as the deadline. There are only 30 things on my list, but some of them might take me a while to complete. Others are small things that I’ve wanted to do for while but never got around to doing them – or simply because it’s easier not to bother.

I’m sharing this with you, Internet, to force myself to actually do the things on this list instead of flaking out like I normally do.

And I figured that since I’m sharing my list with the internet, I may as well write about each of them here. I foresee most of these things going spectacularly wrong (all part of the fun/learning curve, right?), and I’m more than happy to share those experiences for your amusement (you’re welcome).

Still reading? Excellent. Without further ado, here’s the list:

30 before 30 – The List

1. Join the Anthony Nolan register.

2. Have something (anything) published and be paid for it.

3. Begin to pay off my student debt.

4. Do volunteer work.

5. Be a confident driver (i.e. not have a panic attack when facing the prospect of getting in the car).

6. Write a new novel and complete my MA.

7. Learn how to play chess.

8. Take a yoga or meditation class.

9. Eat lobster.

10. Go ice-skating/sledging.

11. Learn a bit of Spanish.

12. Host a dinner party.

13. Walk the Three Peaks.

14. Try out for a roller derby

15. Have a party with a bouncy castle.

16. Master using WordPress

17. Go to a music festival.

18. Watch the films I haven’t watched (list to follow).

19. Go out for brunch.

20. Go to a drive-in movie.

21. Visit Edinburgh.

22. Do all the touristy bits of London you’re supposed to do when you’re a tourist.

23. Do a pub crawl.

24. Knit a scarf.

25. Do all the things I was too scared to do as a child (list to follow).

26. Own a round wicker chair.

27. Be a vegetarian for a week (or maybe a month).

28. Go on a random trip without planning any of it.

29. Stay up for 24 hours.

30. Work in the field for which I received my degree.

There’s a reason for why each of these things went onto the list, but I’ll explain each when I blog about them (because otherwise, this is going to be the longest blog post ever).

Jun 18 2012

It Must Have Been [Feelings of Crapulance] But It’s Over Now…

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A couple of weeks ago I had a free Saturday. For the first time in a really long time, I had a totally blank Saturday where I had almost nothing to do. Unfortunately, my totally blank Saturday started very early (6:30am) after a very bad night’s sleep – during which I had dedicated many hours to worrying about every unresolved issue in my life so far. I gave up trying to get any sleep during the bright Saturday morning, and instead decided I to get up and be ridiculously productive.

But in deciding I was going to productive, the exact opposite occurred. Nothing seemed to be going right. I’d spend a couple of hours on a task, and realise I wasn’t getting anywhere. Then I’d do something else and the same would happen. By lunchtime I realised that I had lost hours trying to do lots of things and had been totally unsuccessful with all of them.

Having achieved nothing, and lost my entire morning, I was met with inevitable feelings of ‘meh’ and crapness. And I started to mope.

I hate moping. Moping leads to more moping and thus, more feelings of crapness. It’s like this:

feelings of crapness

And once I had descended into this cycle of moping and crapulance, I felt like there was no way out. I wondered if maybe I was feeling crappy because I hadn’t slept. Maybe if I tried to sleep, I’d wake up and feel eleventy-million times better. And maybe then I could actually get on with the day and do something vaguely productive. It made perfectly logical sense.

So I went back to bed.

But I couldn’t sleep.

And after half an hour of not being able to sleep I started to punish myself. Because not being able to sleep when you’re really tired just doesn’t make sense. And so I told myself I was a failure because clearly I can’t even sleep like a proper person.

And so I returned to moping. Moping and talking to an empty house.

“Why can’t I do anything today?” I asked the staircase.

“Why do I feel so rubbish?” I quizzed the bedroom walls.

“Why am I so useless?” and when the kettle refused to answer, I realised that wandering around the house asking inanimate objects questions about my feelings of uselessness was definitely more tragic than the initial cycle of moping I had resigned myself to. Perhaps I was actually going crazy.

“Come on, Jo.” I said to myself – deciding that talking to myself was less mental than addressing various household appliances. “Pull yourself together.”

And with this Tyler Durden-esque conversation with myself, I decided to take action. I wasn’t going to let inactivity pull me into an unnecessary depression. I was going to do… something… Something that was guaranteed to stop me from feeling shitty.

I played Singstar. BY MYSELF.

Indeed, drastic times call for drastic measures. And nothing beats feelings of lethargy and crapness like belting out a tone deaf rendition of Africa by Toto to an audience of no one. It’s worth noting that ‘Africa’ on Singstar is stupidly difficult – even on ‘easy’ level – and involves shrieking your way through the chorus to win maximum points.

My sympathy was with my neighbours who were probably hesitant to wonder what the hell was going on next door. Incidentally, I’ve already had a bit of run-in with them over noise disturbance. Apparently my cackle-like laughter sounds a lot like a distress call. Our at least that was what was suggested during out brief conversation on the doorstep last summer, when they knocked on the door to ask if everything was okay because they ‘heard a woman screaming.’

Naturally, I was hugely embarrassed and have since made several attempts to modify my shrill laughter into a whimsical giggle-whisper to prevent from similar events from occurring.

That said, I do worry that should I ever be attacked in my house, and my neighbours hear me screaming, they will assume that I’m just watching something funny on TV, and not attacked by wild dogs who broke in through the window and are chewing my face off.

Anyway, back to Africa’s impossibly difficult chorus. My competitive nature spurred me on to make several attempts to win the top-spot on the leader-board, but I couldn’t put my neighbours through repeat renditions. If they had to listen to my terrible singing, the least i could do was offer a bit of variety. So I whaled my way through ‘Brass in Pocket’ by The Pretenders, ‘It Must Have Been Love’ by Roxette, ‘Time After Time’ by Cyndi Lauper and amongst a great many other 80s hits.

I had hoped my grand finale would be Foreigner’s ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ another classic 80s song with an impossibly high chorus. After an hour of singing, I couldn’t face shouting my way through the song and risk having another neighbourly call – this time demanding to know why I was torturing them with my hopeless renditions of 80s hits. So I ended on a much safer option of ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries – which involves less shrieking, but I can’t help but sing it with a pseudo-Irish twang (to win maximum bonus points).

When my solo-concert to my empty-sofa and coffee table audience came to an end, I felt a lot better. So much better, in fact, that I even tackled the mountain of laundry that had been piling up. And afterwards I made an enormous chilli. Then I ate almost all of it.

By the time Saturday evening came around, I was curled up on the sofa watching films with lots of car chases and feeling eleventy-million times better.

Sometimes, the only way to shake off a bout of depression is to do something completely ridiculous, like singing your way through beloved 80s hits or inventing new dance moves or… I dunno, trampolining. Either that, or this time I really have gone completely bonkers.

May 30 2012

I Need a Slanket…

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If you’re unfortunate enough to follow me on Twitter or be a fan of this blog on Facebook, you’ll know that I’ve whinged (somewhat endlessly) about my new found desire for a Slanket. That’s right, a Slanket – the ingeniously named blanket… with sleeves. I don’t know who invented the Slanket (some dude called Gary, apparently) but the Slanket was a genius creation, and I’m loathed not to have one of my own.

This is what you told me:

I have a cheaper version which generates a crazy amount of static, so I can’t use it when I’m working on my laptop. Which kind of negates the point of having it. – @Radshef

I really like it, it’s all snug and warm. – @lizigree

I wear mine and pretend to be a wizard. – Emmarrrr

I have one and it’s amazing, use it all the time. Get one. – Jo

We got one for my dad. He LOVES it. – @TheSuniverse

It’s all about the slanket! I sometimes double-duvet in mine for extra cosy comfort. – @jane_bradley

I have one and I love it – keeps you so cosy even when reaching for the remote/writing etc. – @ttofee

You NEED a slanket. – @samkayk

I own a massive hoodie. That may be the closest to a slanket I can get within the constraints of manliness. – @NickMB

In the interests of cosiness and snuggliness, I need a Slanket.

There comes a point in the evening (usually on Pizza Fridays*) where the wearing of regular clothes to loaf about on the sofa digesting a meat-feast pizza and watching films, becomes restricting and generally uncomfortable. So a swift change into something with an elastic waistband – my infamous pink cake pyjamas or jogger bottoms (that to this day have never been worn for the purpose of jogging) – usually does the trick. And while the comfort issue is tackled, the cosy issue is not. Our lounge is the coldest room in the house. In fact, that’s an understatement – it is permanently cold in that room. No matter what time of year, the cosiness factor of the lounge is seriously lacking. After eating pizza, I like to be able to assume the foetal position, snuggle up while I devour vast amounts of chocolate and watch terrible sci-fi films.

*Pizza Fridays – Friday night is spent eating pizza and watching films. Sometimes Pizza Friday accidentally spills into the rest of the weekend and I have Pizza Saturday and Pizza Sunday too. This is followed by Regret Monday and Exercise Tuesday.

This is where a Slanket would complete my evening of slobbing out in true style comfort.

Sadly, due to unemployment tuition fees inherent laziness circumstances beyond my control, I am unable to afford such luxuries. So I have improvise, using a blue Ikea throw.

The Slanket boasts two features which an Ikea throw does not:

1. The Slanket is made of warm, fleecy cosiness crafted by unicorns from the clouds of comfort land.

Unicorn

An Ikea throw is not. Ikea throw is made from coarse fabric woven together by Satan. The Ikea throw is not warm, comfy or cosy. This is largely due to the fact that the Ikea throw’s purpose is either to be thrown over ugly furniture in an attempt to disguise its hideousness or tossed onto beds with some cushions to make a bedroom look stylish. It is not to be thrown over a person who is still digesting pizza while curled up on the sofa watching films.

2. The Slanket has sleeves, enabling the wearer full use of  their arms (such as reaching for the remote, eating ice-cream from the tub) whilst retaining warm feelings of super-cosiness.

Jo in a Slanket

My friend (also called Jo) kindly agreed to demonstrate her Slanket for the purpose of this blog post. Thanks Jo.

Ikea Throw does not have sleeves. Ikea throw restricts all arm movement, and therefore makes the spooning of large amounts of ice-cream into mouth and reaching for the remote difficult and usually results in entanglement.

Aside from these two main points, I have discovered that ‘wearing’ an Ikea throw has also thrown up a shed-load of other difficulties:

Ikea Throw does not satisfactorily keep all body parts warm and cosy.

It is impossible to successfully ascend a staircase whilst ‘wearing’ an Ikea Throw.

Wearing an Ikea Throw to the toilet is both a logistical nightmare and really unhygienic.

Ikea Throw does not aid the act of typing.

Ikea Throw does not create convincing illusion of being a wizard or evil-overlord.

Ikea Throw is not waterproof, and therefore cannot be worn outside when it is raining.*

*To be fair, neither is a Slanket – but that’s something they should definitely consider.

In conclusion, I definitely need a Slanket. The only downside being that it might cause my legs to spontaneously combust if I wear it whilst using a laptop. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Incidentally, this post was in no way endorsed by the creators of the Slanket, or the Unicorns of Comfort-Land. However, if you’re reading this and you work for The Slanket Company The Slanketeers Slanket I think it’s only right that you send me a free Slanket for pimping your product.

PS. I’d like the one with Dinosaurs on it, please.

Also, I know it seems like I’ve given my Ikea throw a pretty bad review, so with that in mind it’s worth pointing out that as a throw it is fully functional and satisfactorily hides ugly furniture and makes my bedroom look stylish (when I’m not attempting to wear it).

May 16 2012

Dancing in the Moonlight…

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Here’s something that probably won’t surprise you. I don’t deal with stress well. I have never been able to deal with stress very well. And I’m not even talking about STRESS, stress – the type of stress important people with lots of responsibility suffer from. On a daily basis I give myself a hard time about almost everything – issuing myself with serious mental lashings for even the slightest mishap such as: waking up late or forgetting to pick up milk from the supermarket.

So when I’m presented with something that a ‘normal’ person might find actually stressful, my fragile mental state hits warp speed and I start behaving in slightly peculiar ways. These can include: constantly frowning, crashing into doors, dropping things and being generally non-responsive. My consistent reaction to stress is to start eating. Lots. And often. It’s not so much a comfort-eating thing, it’s just pure, good old fashioned self-indulgence – a non-stop gorge festival of consuming as many calorific items as possible and refusing to feel full.

Sometimes I get a double-whammy of stress, which is caused by a slightly overwhelming fear of failure. This is something that I feel so intensely that I just stop thinking logically – my brain is using so much of its resources to torture myself with feelings of failure that I can’t be practical about the task in hand. It’s like this:

Is this shit

The harder I try to be practical, the more failings I see in whatever it is I’m doing and the worse I feel. Next thing you know I’m in floods of tears, tearing open a third packet of Jaffa cakes.

Stress also affects my sleep patterns. I stress so much that my entire body stiffens with tension until I’m suddenly completely rigid, like a taxidermy version of myself. When I send myself off to bed, I’m still tense and can’t get comfortable, and if I can’t get comfortable, I can’t relax and if I can’t relax I can’t sleep which, I’m told, is pretty normal.

What isn’t normal, however, is the way in which my brain chooses to torment me during those achingly awful moments where I’m telling myself to hurry up and relax so I can doze off. My brain, like demonic version of iTunes, will select an annoying song, at random, to get stuck in my head and loop (continuously) until morning. Recently, these songs have included (but are not limited to):

*Best. Video. Ever.  

These are not songs I listen to regularly. They are not songs I have on CD or MP3. They are not songs I have even heard for several years (with the exception of today to aid writing this blog post). They aren’t songs I used to like, they aren’t songs I cheerfully sing along to every day torture my friends with at karaoke.

I feel like I’m subliminally picking them up somewhere, but where? It’s not like these songs are on any adverts or TV shows I’ve been watching recently. I don’t know where they’ve come from, but they get in my head somehow and they do not leave. It’s like I’m being haunted by a poltergeist of crap music. The song starts slow and quiet somewhere in the back of my mind. At first, I barely even notice it:

Moonlight1

Then it becomes more prominent and I can hear it in-between thoughts:

Moonlight2

Then I hear it more fully, I’m conscious that I’ve got an annoying song stuck in my head:

Moonlight3

I try to ignore it as best I can until…

 

Moonlight4

I go to bed. And it’s all I can think of. It’s becoming painful. I might have to start going to bed wearing headphones whenever I’m stressed. Of all my weird stress-related behaviours, this is by far the weirdest.

So, how do you deal with stress? Anyone else suffer from annoying-song-itis – if so, what’s the song that plagues you?

Apr 23 2012

How Compliments Make Me Feel Awkward (and how I keep thinking my brain operates like Windows)…

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This isn’t a real post, it’s half a post. It’s another one I redrafted several times, but I kept lapsing into serious rants about self-image. In short, this is really just a follow-up to the previous post, about getting a compliment during a note passing incident with a strange man, and feeling very anxious about a post I had written (about me feeling anxious about writing).

Firstly, I can’t cope with compliments. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t really know how to react. My brain gets a Windows error. Then I freeze up. Then this happens:

It’s really hard being me. And having a brain that runs on Windows XP.

I also said, y’know, that no one had ever said… that  particular thing to me before. Which, wasn’t strictly true. My point was, it sounded completely alien. Seriously, like klingon or something. It’s not a word I would use to describe myself… I mean, not that many people would (except maybe narcissists. And Christina Aguilera), but in my case it really clashes with my haphazard personality. I spend my days sitting at my desk in joggers or lurking in coffee shops wearing ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors with gaping holes in them. This reality makes compliments like that hard to take. Also, I have an extensive catalogue of disparaging comments that stretches waaaaay back into those dark days of ‘high school’, which contribute to my general deflection of compliments.

I’m beginning to wonder if insults stock-pile in the psyche. Maybe they’re like a worm virus: one negative comment sinks in, replicates itself and then forwards itself to… everyone in your address book… (Okay, maybe I didn’t think this metaphor through properly). What I’m trying to say is, maybe the damage control of negative comments is difficult to manage – much like that of a worm virus. You think you’ve sorted the problem and then months later, it will reappear and wreak havoc all over again and you become super-infected by negativity. Unless, of course, your psyche runs on Mac OS X.

In which case, my psyche got infected during my teens. Puberty wasn’t kind to me. My nose went from being one of those cute-button-noses to looking like it was broken (but it wasn’t). In addition, I had goofy teeth and it was only when puberty hit that I got landed with the hellish years of orthodontic treatment. My skin mutated into hideousness and my eyebrows, for some reason, grew seriously out of control (they rivalled Madonna’s in the 80s). In a time before GHD straighteners, my hair transformed from long, blonde adorableness to a frizz-tastic, static nightmare, which seemed to take on a life of its own – reaching forth from my head and attaching itself to the polyester v-neck jumpers worn by everybody in the school. On top of this uncomfortable set of changes, I was at an age where suddenly fashion and style were important. And I didn’t have a clue about either (I still don’t).

Here’s a run-down of a few high school incidents that readily spring to mind:

  • One day, a popular girl marched up to me (popular entourage in tow) and asked me HOW ON EARTH I could wear blue socks with black shoes. I was stumped for a response, mainly because I hadn’t even realised the error of my ways. Looking down at my shoes,  I flushed with red trying to think of something to say. Eventually, I uttered: ‘It’s a free country…’ a popular response in the mid-nineties as it was applicable to almost anything. Sadly, its applicability did not stop it from being super-lame. The girl snarled and stomped away with a herd of her fashioncentric friends, as if my mismatching socks and shoes had somehow been a personal attack on her.

 

  • Once, during an English class, we had to play a description game, where someone had to guess which person in the class was being described to them. My classmates described me as: ‘She’s got blonde hair, and big teeth’. Bingo. The boy who was guessing (who I also happened to have a pretty big crush on, at the time) instantly pointed (that’s right pointed, without actually saying anything) at the girl in the back corner. Me. Blondie big teeth.

 

  • In a drama class, we had to improvise an argument with another person. My drama teacher reiterated (several times) that the argument was to be purely fictitious and we were not to make personal digs at each other. My partner shrugged at me and murmured: ‘You got a big nose’. AND THEN DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING ELSE.

 

  • A boy I was going out with, broke up with me because every time he saw me, it made him feel physically sick. (True story).

It’s a fact of life that high school is hell for the under-confident.  I think the fourteen-year-old me is the one who hears compliments, and they’re just so hard to believe in and amongst the hundreds of big nose/big hair/big teeth insults. I feel like I’m being lied to. This is partially due to my school days, but mainly down to watching way too many American high school movies in which the “unattractive” girl is dated by a cool jock in order to win a bet.

For the record, I still don’t understand fashion. And sometimes I still wear inappropriately coloured socks with black shoes. Sometimes I wear socks that don’t even match each other. With holes in them (take that, girl from high school!). Sometimes, I’ll get up and I won’t even change out of my pyjamas – which are fleecy and pink and covered in little cakes. Sure, you can call me beautiful but you haven’t seen me eat cold, leftover bolognaise direct from the fridge. At four in the afternoon. Wearing fleecy pink cake pyjamas. Using only my hands (take that, boy I used to go out with!).

This post doesn’t really have any sort of conclusion. Except that high school was hell, and compliments make me uncomfortable.  But I think I said that at the beginning.

So, moving on… Here’s a little follow up about my anxious feelings of writerliness (that’s totally a word). A few things have happened over this past week to settle the nerves. One of them was watching Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity, which I found kind of beautiful (take that, compliment guy with red biro!) and inspiring.

Anyway, next time, a proper post. Promise.