filler

This is when the daily thing gets tough. Two hours left in the day and I find myself staring a blank update page going ...dunno. I could write about... what's in my direct line of vision? A pile of clothes, half a Chocolate Orange, and a stuffed Loch Ness Monster with a derp face. None of that works.

OK, so what did I do today? I drank more milk than most people get through in two weeks. This is also not a good subject for a post.

Tomorrow? Work. Also discussing with my housemates what to do about our terrible landlord. I could write about that, but the rage is too strong and also she might somehow be reading this GO AWAY AN this is not for you the rights to my blog were not included in the contract with all the other shit you got and I didn't really mean you were terrible and YOU CAN'T EVICT ME I QUIT oh god now I don't have a house anymore and I should not write about this because it will break my mind.

Maybe I should look at my actual diary to see what's been on my mind. ...hah. No, the world does not need to know any of this. Sometimes the sixteen-year-old Goth with the long variety of stupid flowery OpenDiary handles takes over my fingers and makes me write some fascinatingly terrible melodramatic shit. Back in your box, Goth Jen. You can come out again next time there's a trip to Camden Market on the cards.

Other people on the internet are... taking photos of their children and watching Wimbledon. Nope.

Out on the street there are kids fighting, drug dealers sitting on front steps, and a local butcher who moves meat around by holding it directly in front of his face. I can't make a post out of that. Well, not right now. In the right frame of mind I could probably get a few hundred words out of almost being hit in the head with half a cow.

So maybe I have nothing to say. But I promised I'd say it anyway.

Tomorrow will be better than this. Promise.

sleepless

I have had five hours' sleep since Wednesday, and I'm about to go out to a party.

I don't have the talent for falling asleep that some people have. I don't sleep on public transport, or in waiting rooms, and I don't take naps in the middle of the day. I've spent a lot of nights lying awake alternately trying to will myself out of consciousness and trying to distract myself from my attempts so that sleep might be able to catch me out in a sneak attack. I'm rarely tired enough to sleep anywhere except in my bed, and when it does happen it unnerves me.

Time skips five minutes, ten minutes, thirty seconds, an hour, and it all feels the same. Every time I open my eyes I see something unfamiliar and I panic, briefly, trying to remember where I am and what I'm doing there, assuring myself that I'm done now, no more sleep required, I can stay awake in this place. And then I forget it instantly because things make more sense with my eyes closed.

blank

I have no thoughts in my head today. There's been nothing I've wanted to share.

I spent my lunchtime sitting under a tree in the park, not thinking.

I sat in the office all day, not thinking. No work to do, and if there was I managed to ignore it.

Things happened to other people today. The internet told me so.

 He's bought a house. I'm glad he's happy now. That was a rough couple of years.

I'm sorry, you named your child what now? 

That's an amazing photo. I wonder how they got up there?

Oh, she's gone back to her maiden name. They were only married three years. I'd like to ask what happened, but we're not really friends, no matter what social media says.

I still miss you. It's not fixable, but I miss you nonetheless.

on a dating site

Somebody asked me what I was looking for in a relationship.

I told him I wanted someone I could learn from, someone who wanted to learn from me. I told him I wanted us to be able to discover new things together, meet new people together, look at things in a new way together. I told him I was looking for rapport, for someone who appreciated and shared my brand of silliness. I said I wanted a relationship to make my world bigger and more interesting, rather than shrinking down to a tiny life with just the two of us in it.

He said, “That’s a first.”

Is it really? That’s a little depressing.

He said, “Women usually say they’re looking for someone they can talk to who makes them laugh.”

That’s a very nice sentiment, I said, but almost everyone wants that. I could give you that answer and you’d have no more useful information about whether we’d be compatible than you did before. I’m not trying to keep my options as wide open as possible; I don’t have a burning desire to get myself coupled up at any cost. If I do decide to start a relationship then I need to know that it’s going to make me happy, and I’m not going to get that kind of certainty from platitudes.

He said, “Yeah. Well, I want all those things you just said too.”

I stopped responding.

on fear

When I was five or six, my school started weekly screenings of a serialised educational programme that was meant to teach language skills through the medium of Exciting Adventure Saga. It’s a well-remembered Exciting Adventure Saga amongst my age group, and the consensus seems to be that it did its job well. It had an epic quest to save a magical land, with a dragon and a massive talking mouse and a singing swamp and a green man and an orange man and a purple woman and a big intimidating villain and lots of fun with letters and words.

It scared the everloving shit out of me.

Not in the sense that it made me jump, or gave me a couple of nightmares. It wasn’t just that I covered my eyes when the baddie came on screen. I didn’t sleep properly for years. It was the first thing that jumped into my mind when it was dark, or quiet, or when I was alone. I used to squish myself into the tiniest little space on my bed and barricade myself in with whatever happened to be in my room – teddies, magazines, empty boxes, inconveniently pointy plastic toys. (Having written that, I realise I’m still not quite over this nesting-in-everything habit. Hmmm.)

In defence of baby Jen, the villain of this particular show was an eight foot tall bird-skeleton thing who could melt people by touching them. I still think that’s a legitimately horrible thing. Admittedly, baby Jen was also scared of pastel hippos and being stared at by a live tomato with no face (my father accidentally traumatised me with sarcasm), but that passed much more quickly than the fear of melty skeleton man.

My parents had me removed from TV time when they realised that it was causing me some fairly serious problems, and I spent the rest of the series sitting in the library (or what passed for such in my fairly rough local primary school) with the kids from the friendly neighbourhood cult who weren’t allowed TV. This was rather less helpful than you might think. That terrifying bird thing was burned into my brain, and it followed me everywhere for the next three or four years. Being hauled back into the TV room for the final episode, where nothing happened to the bird thing at all until the closing credits, when it DISAPPEARED as it was walking RIGHT AT ME was also somewhat less reassuring than my teachers anticipated. Damn you, show. Damn you.

As an adult, my memory, imagination and sense of empathy have kept me from watching or reading or listening to any number of things. Horror is out. Gore is out (“oh, it’s not that gory,” people say reassuringly when trying to persuade me to watch something. But there is some gore? “Yes, but it’s really not - ” Thank you very much, I have noted your recommendation and will be over here assiduously NOT WATCHING IT). I point-blank refused to read one of the books on my university syllabus on the basis that it was fucking gross. The three-line synopsis given to me by one of my classmates was more than enough. But mostly, my fears of bird-skeleton things and coal-eating dragons and green trolls lurking under bridges followed the more common path and developed into mundane fears of what-if and other people’s reactions to things I did, or said, or was. Those mundane fears kept me static and terrified for an uncomfortably long time, and there is pretty much nothing to say about that period of my life, because nothing happened. I understood boredom. It was comfortable.

My fear of the unknown is now all but gone. I think everything is an EXCELLENT idea, especially if I’m in the company of people who can also be persuaded to think that everything is an EXCELLENT idea.

Actual email conversation between my mother and me last year:

Mum: Just back from visiting Pat and Paul! Are you in for a phone call tonight?

Me: I’m actually in Italy with an Australian I met on Tuesday. I can call you on Sunday evening.

I’m still a fraidy-cat at my core. I can find really interesting ways to be scared of something. But the voice telling me to be scared is much smaller these days. It has to compete with impulsiveness and curiosity. It has to compete with the rational voice explaining why the thing is not a scary thing at all, and also with “do it do it DO IT it’ll be funny”. The comfort I used to find in monotony is pale and disinteresting in comparison to the comfort I now find in my equally silly friends who clearly aren’t scared of the thing at all.

Sometimes the fraidy-cat still wins, and that’s OK. Some things will pass me by. But I am busy and happy, and I don’t have holes in my life that I need to fill with regret. We’re good, my fears and I, and these days they shut up when they’re told to.

on writing

“Write something every day. Even if it's shit. Even if the subject is vacuous. Even if it's a transcript of that email conversation about the sarcastic blue gremlin in the call centre. Even if you know it'll look like a waste of words tomorrow, write something today. It doesn't matter what the words you choose to write say about you. Bad writing gets you closer to being a writer than no writing at all.”

 Alright, July. Let's do this.

Scenes

This is a thing I used to do back in the days when I had a LiveJournal. I'm starting it again in the hope that it'll get me in the habit of writing more frequently.

[I am doing a shift on the door at a social dance. A couple approaches]

Guy: So, what is this?
Me: It's a blues dance night.
Guy: So, it's blues music, but you have to dance?
Me: Yes, essentially.

[The guy puts his head round the door to have a look]

Guy: Oh! So it's a dating event!
Me: No, it's not.

[He looks at me sceptically]

Me: It's really not. That's just what the dance looks like.
Guy: Oh, I see, so these are all established couples?
Me: No, people just come and dance with anyone.
Guy: So it IS a dating thing. Just going up to strangers?
Me: Most of the people here know each other. They come for the dancing.
Guy: It must be a dating thing. Like couch surfing.
Girl: What? What are you talking about?
Guy: We're going to go somewhere else.

[They turn to leave. As they go up the stairs:]

Girl: What do you mean 'it's like couch surfing'? What do you think couch surfing is???