Category Archives: Anxiety

Jan 18 2013

30 Before 30: #1 Register with the Anthony Nolan trust

Posted on by

I thought I should give an update as to where I am with my 30 Before 30 list because I’ve actually ticked something off. And it’s an important one too. In fact, when I first wrote the list, I bumped this one up to the top and promised myself that whatever happened, I would complete this thing first.

For various reasons, I’ve been going to register with the Anthony Nolan trust for a long while. But it quickly became one of those things that I just never got around to doing. The Anthony Nolan trust is a charity supporting people with blood cancer who need stem cell or bone marrow transplants. Being on the register means that the folks at Anthony Nolan can match the donors on their register with people who need a transplant and y’know, save more lives. But they always need more people. More people, under the age of 30, to register as a donor.

There are lots of myths surrounding bone marrow transplant: that the process involves having a limb snapped off so that the bone marrow can be scooped out and it’s THE MOST PAINFUL THING EVER, and you might not ever recover from the procedure.

That might be a bit of an exaggeration – except for the “IT’S THE MOST PAINFUL THING EVER” bit on the end, because the second you mention bone marrow transplant, that’s usually the first thing people say after screwing their face up. Usually people who probably know nothing about it but heard somebody else say that once, and so they feel they should pass the information on.

If you’re a regular(ish) reader of this blog, or if you’re someone who knows me, you’ll be roughly aware that I’m not a very brave or confident person. Hearing that the charitable thing I wanted to do was possibly THE MOST PAINFUL THING EVER was, admittedly, a little off-putting.

Alongside my complete lack of confidence are feelings of guilt. So you can imagine how conflicted I was feeling having already half-decided that I was going to register and at the same time being terrified about it being the most painful thing ever. To illustrate my point, it all looks a little something like this:Inner Conflict

I went round and round in circles for a long while until eventually, I told myself to stop toying with the idea. I was either definitely going to register or I definitely wasn’t. So I went on to the Anthony Nolan site and did the research for myself (which included watching this little animation all about what’s involved in the donation process). After spending a good couple of hours clicking through the site, my mind was made up.

I realised I had to do it. And what’s more, I wanted to. Even though I don’t like hospitals, and I have a low pain threshold, and I don’t like blood or operations and I’m incredibly squeamish. I shrugged all that off and filled in the form, because the only thing worse than registering after everything I’d learned about the process would be to not register.

My stem cells could be used to help someone whose own immune system is failing. Those stem cells could potentially save someone’s life, and what I realised was that however painful or uncomfortable the donation process was – it could save the life of someone who had been through far, far worse.

So before Christmas, I registered. Last week I got my official donor card.

Huzzah!

If I only did one thing on my list before I turned 30, it would most definitely be this one.

Nov 27 2012

30 Things to do before I’m 30

Posted on by

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).

Jul 19 2012

Four Bad Things About Email…

Posted on by

I love email. Email is my absolute favourite form of communication. There’s nothing I love more than getting into a long email chat with someone. Generally I find myself more comfortable composing an email than making conversation with someone. I’m not sure why, maybe because I have more time to think about what I’m saying. But as much as I love email, it is far from perfect and sometimes emails can go wrong. Here are four reasons how that can happen:

1. Tone 

It can be hard to convey the right tone in email. Sometimes you can unintentionally come off sounding overly serious and formal.

Bad day 1

Littering emails with LOLz and exclamations marks (or both) changes the tone from serious to idiotic.

bad day2

So what’s the alternative?

bad day3

2. Length

Sometimes you might spend a considerable amount of time composing an email. So much so that your email is less like an email and more like a light-hearted friend essay.

Long email

After clicking ‘send’ you might feel pretty satisfied with your work and await an email of similar length in return. Instead, you get this:

Short reply

3. Kisses

A common problem which can occur when you’re emailing your beloved during work times:

Kisses

4. Delayed Reply

This is especially bad if you spend nearly all of your time emailing and waiting around for replies and so commences a bout of endless paranoid mind-trickery. It’s bad news for both people involved. The original sender freaks out because they spent ages writing an email to which they never got a reply. And the recipient has unknowingly caused upset by not replying because they’re either too busy or just forgot. On rare and sad occasions the sender might completely flip out and follow up their original email with something like this:

Angry email

To conclude: I love email but every now and again it can cause severe social awkwardness, send your boss the wrong message and can prompt people think you’re stupid, devoid of a sense of humour and/or hate you by accident.

That’s why, every now and again, you should see people in person to talk and give each other hugs.

Jul 11 2012

I’m Recruiting: Could You Be My Mentor?

Posted on by

I wish I had a mentor. I can’t really explain why, but I think that it has something to do with my neediness abandonment issues aspirations of becoming a writer.

I recently committed myself to becoming a full time writer. That’s the dream – writing… ALL the time. Making the decision was easy, but once I had finished celebrating my decision-making, I realised that was the easy part. The reality of my decision involves working really hard all the time and not getting distracted or losing motivation. All the things I’ve perfected being terrible at.

Writing is lonely business. I’ve known that from the off. As a complete social recluse, I guess it’s part of the appeal. But every now and again I’ll get a crisis of confidence – a week will disappear and I’ll question what (if anything) I’ve actually achieved. Then I panic, because I don’t have the right work ethic. My writing isn’t good enough. I’m not marketable as person. I am an impostor, a fraud. I’m not really a writer – aspiring or otherwise and everyone knows it.

This is where the mentor comes in. The mentor has to kick my arse whilst also being supportive and reassuring. But not too supportive and reassuring. Encouragement is difficult to get right, particularly with weirdos like me. Too much encouragement and I’ll momentarily trick myself into believing I am doing so incredibly well that I don’t need to do much of anything for a while. I don’t really respond well to negativity so zero encouragement only confirms my fears of being an under-achiever and prompts me to fall into a depressive slump.

There are loads of potential mentors out there, and I’m sure someone out there might be right for me. But for some reason, whenever I think about my ideal mentor I imagine some dapper gent – someone sophisticated, wise, worldly, humorous, someone successful who can afford to by me mojitos.

Take, for example, Jonathan Ames’ mentor George Christopher in Bored to Death. Apart from the fact that he’s played by Ted Danson which automatically makes him brilliant, he’s a gent, an editor of a magazine, he makes martinis in his office and wears waistcoats. Brilliant. And to top it all off, he offers genuinely good advice:

Although, this is not the sort of chat I would want with my own mentor. Even if he was Ted Danson.

That said, George Christopher isn’t the perfect mentor. My perfect mentor is the mentor of mentors, the crème de la crème, the spaghetti to my cold left-over bolognaise, the Jack Donaghy to my Liz Lemon.

Without a shadow of a doubt Jack Donaghy is my ideal mentor. The tragedy is, my dream mentor is a fictional character played by Alec Baldwin. The only way this fantasy will ever be fulfilled is if Jack Donaghy actually existed and Jack Donaghy actually happened to be Alec Baldwin.

This pretty much renders my search for the perfect mentor futile and perhaps a little bit crazy. I’ve set the bar pretty high. When you set the bar at ‘fictitious character’ you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

I’ve contemplated trying to recruit a mentor  using an application/interview/test process. But I think that might put people off. And I wouldn’t know how to go about ensuring that my application form/interview questions/rigorous testing methods would result in me actually finding my ideal mentor. Also because it looks like a lot of work when I really should be writing. And because I seriously doubt any level-headed person would actually go through the process, so I’d probably just end up with someone more crackers than I am. Not ideal.

So the search for the mentor kind of continues whilst also collapsing and becoming redundant at the same time. My dream mentor doesn’t exist, so I can only hope that some day a Jack Donaghy/Alec Baldwin type will appear in reality. If they do, and they become my mentor, I suggest that their first job is to stop me from wishing fictional characters actually existed.

In the meantime, (and in case you have no idea who Jack Donaghy is) here are some of Jack’s greatest personal attributes.

Best. Mentor. Ever.
May 16 2012

Dancing in the Moonlight…

Posted on by

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)…

Posted on by

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.

Apr 13 2012

The Blog Post I Never Posted (and other stories)…

Posted on by

Before you go wondering whether I’ve fallen off the edge of the planet (again), allow me to reel off some excuses explain why I’m a little late with this post.

Okay, I actually did write a blog post three weeks ago. It’s just that I never posted it. I couldn’t really bring myself to post it because it was… well… quite depressing. I redrafted it several times, each time trying desperately to make it sound a little more chipper. And each time I thought that it was finished I’d tell myself to sleep on it and review it again in the morning before I published it. The next morning I’d wake up and start the editing process all over again. This went on for days and eventually I realised that I just couldn’t bring myself to publish it.

The post was about the fact I was consistently worrying about my future. I was worrying about being a writer, why I wanted to be a writer and if I’d ever really be one. I also wrote about how much I was worried that people saw me as deluded – and how sometimes I felt like there was some sort of judgemental crowd regarding my writer-aspirations as ‘something I should get over’ and that I should grow-up and get a proper job.

In my post, I suggested that in order to combat such worries of being deluded, aspiring writers should join together in some sort of support group. It would be Alcoholics Anonymous meets The Book Group – but with more tea and biscuits. And we would wear badges like this:

hellomynameisjo

Anyway, not to completely launch into this whole debate all over again (and rewrite my original post for the 9 billionth time), but the reason I didn’t publish the post was because it was becoming a snowballing issue, and while it helped to write about it, I don’t think that the internet is the right place to broadcast feelings on an existential crisis (but it might make a very good book). I like to blog about my neurotic ways, and the embarrassing situations I get myself into on a fairly regular basis – but I couldn’t bring myself to confess all the anxieties I have about my future. That kind of chat is reserved for unsuspecting close friends after a few Mojitos.

So, basically what I’m saying is, by not publishing my post I saved you 5-10 minutes of your precious time. You’re welcome.

Realising the overly serious tone of my blog post of existential crisis (which I never actually published), I decided that (if I did publish it) I should maybe follow it up with something a little more light-hearted. So I considered writing a post detailing how much I cheated on my Primal diet – which involved scoffing a sausage and egg McMuffin, some sort of artisan luxury French chocolate gateaux and a pizza (or two). Sadly, I never got around to drafting it and since having the idea I’ve been on a jaunt to Spain and eaten my way through Easter. This means that previous diet cheats are comparatively insignificant. If you’re still curious as to how much I cheated on my Primal diet, then simply consult the following mathematical equation:

Lots

The day before I left for Spain, I was chatted up. Twice. In the same day. This was very strange for me, because I’ve never, ever been chatted up before. By anyone. Ever. This is because I have spent  my life, in equal parts, being every girl’s ‘unattractive best friend’ and a total social recluse.

What happened? Well, it was a sunny afternoon and I had decided to spend the afternoon in town reading. A folded piece of paper was slid across the bench in my direction. ‘For you’ said man’s voice. I quickly discarded my initial thoughts that God was addressing me, and looked up to see a man scurry (with impressive speed) from the bench in the opposite direction. I unfolded the note:

u r beautiful

Underneath was (presumably) his phone number.

I was about 9% flattered and 91% amused. The flattery stems from the fact that I’ve never been called beautiful before. Certainly not on paper. To put this in context, here’s a list of other things I have been called:

About an hour later, a boy (I don’t think he could have been older than 17) sat next to me and almost immediately struck up a conversation that went something like this:

Boy: What are you reading?

Me: Stuff.

Boy: Oh.

Pause.

Boy: Are you a student here?

Me: Not exactly.

Pause.

Boy: What do you do then?

Me: I want to be a writer.

Boy: Oh. Is that something you’re… passionate about?

Me: Er… Yeah.

Pause.

Boy: YOU’RE VERY PRETTY!

Pause.

Me: Er. Thanks.

Boy: [Laughs Nervously/Manically]

Long Pause.

Boy: I can leave you alone if you want?

Me: [shrug] It’s fine. – I didn’t have the heart to say ‘Yes, please go away…

Boy: Sooooooo…. Can I er, see you again?

Startled, I shook my head and in a slightly more frantic manner than intended blurted NO! Then modifying it to a more polite ‘No, thank you,’ before realising that didn’t really make any sense. Then the boy laughed nervously again. Then he scurried away in the same direction as the last one.

Then I decided to do the rest of my reading at home.

In other news, Smoking Guy has had a haircut and developed a cough. We have still not conversed. Also, someone recently found my blog by Googling “professional smoking job”. Seriously, is that a real thing?