As is the way of disasters, this one started well. Organisation was sound, age-appropriate presents were duly sourced without draining my will to live or the family finances, my child was behaving beautifully and I was feeling somewhat smug. This, I believe, is known as hubris and verily verily my nervous system was about to crumble like the House of Atreus.
Thus at 11am, with 40 minutes to spare before I needed to head off for the memorial, I didn't see the flare of danger when Matei went off to investigate tricycles and Z found himself mesmerised by tiny helmets and bycicle seats for children. However, 15 minutes later I was feeling somewhat less relaxed when we hadn't moved despite a flurry of customer service activity and so, still determined to seize organisation by the balls I told Z:
'I'll take the buggy and the child to Tesco's next door to buy some food for the memorial, and I'll meet you by the car'
and he said:
'Please watch the child and make sure that he doesn't get decapitated' and with a flustered sigh I went off to locate the offspring who seemed determined to weld himself to as many objects of transportation as possible. After five minutes of that fun, I saw that Z was gone. Vanished, with the buggy.
5 minutes of steering the child and the tricycle he had attached himself to through the shops using the power of suggestion and the odd shove didn't reveal sightings of Z, although it did bring us face to face with a man dressed in a Spiderman costume (creepier than I can say). By now it was 11:25 and my good humour was vanishing faster than human rights in China.
After Z's failure to answer his phone, I decided that the time for diplomacy had passed, so I swept Matei up from his vehicle with a bright: "Let's go find Daddy!" amid rigid-backed wailings and fist flailings and cries of: "Don't want Daddy! Want Tricycle! Triiiiiiceeeeecle"
By 11:30 I was racing around the store with adrenaline pumping, radiating grim determination and despair like Jack Bauer, while an unwiledly bag dug into my shoulder and a toddler repeatedly hit me on the head, chanting "Tricycle! Trycicle!" and my mind swivilled between homicide and divorce.
And then it was 11:35 and my husband was still nowhere, nowhere and I could feel my blood pressure rising exponentially and the prickling of furious tears in my eyes and Matei was still hitting me and still screaming like he was being flayed alive and everyone in the whole shop was looking at me and when he managed to wrench my handbag off my shoulder and hurl it away in an arc of frefalling Oyster cards and loose change, adoption was the mildest of the fates I had in mind.
Instead I just plonked him on the floor with a furious hiss of 'Stay there!' and set about trying to restore my posessions with the blood pounding in my ears, battling between the desire to primal scream or strangle at least one male member of my family when I heard a cry of :It fell... it felll... and turned around ... and saw my child weeping heartbrokenly holding up a pound coin like a peace offering...
and everything slowed down...
and I sat on the floor with him and wept for 30 seconds with him because it was 11:45
and then I pulled it together and gave him a hug and said that everything was going to be all right...
And then Z phoned and I shrieked Where the fuck are you? and he said in offended tones I've been waiting in front of the car for 20 minutes, where the fuck are you
and then the earth ruptured, and the walls exploded in a shower of crashing masonry and sparks
although in the real world everything went on as before
and as I bore down towards the car it was probably a good thing overall that by then the burning power of my angst and rage had rendered me speechless.
Having spent some 9 hours on a plane contorted like an Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus in an attempt to inch myself as far away from the overflowing arm and thigh flesh of the man next to me as it crept into my seatspace, and distance myself from his varied but unpleasant body odours, I greeted London like a beloved friend, a friend who offers the possibility of falling face first into a bed and not moving for many hours.
I had slept for an hour on the plane, and that was all the rest I'd had in over 24 hours and it turns out that this level of exhaustion makes me delirious and unfit to make decisions.
As part of this deliruium and our post-holiday financial crunch Z and I were all: "let's keep doing things we can't possibly do with the baby by taking the tube home from the airport! It will only cost us £6 and we will spend all the money we didn't give to Heathrow Express and London's Black Cabs on pizza!" And we congratulated ourselves on our hardiness and fiscal wisdom and stumbled off into the bowels of the Underground like a couple of zombies.
Here is a list of tasks which sleeping for only one hour disqualifies me from performing succesfully:
1. Remembering where I put my goddamn Oyster card after each barrier, necessitating deep rifling through two bags and three pockets before each interchange or exit.
2. Moving in anything but an underwatery slow-motion.
3. Balancing my suitcase on escalators without at least one of us swaying.
4. Hearing the words "No Jubilee or Victoria line from this station today" without making a noise that's a cross between a scream and a caveman wrestling with a bout of constipation.
5. Carrying my suitcase up the non-moving stairs without bumping into hapless strangers, pausing every so often to stare into the middle-distance and sway gently and appear on the verge of toppling backwards luggage and all.
(Thankfully extreme sleep deprivation does not disqualify me from being married to someone whose prowess at carrying our baggage up endless staircases has previously been demonstrated on holidays).
Eventually though a combination of trains and buses deposited us in the proximity of our house (which hadn't been robbed, or burned down) and our two fat cats and my bone-aching missing of the baby became a gratitude at not having a small person's demands standing between me and the bed I had been dreaming of for the past sixteen hours. The cats and Z and I all piled into it like a fat lazy tribe, and there we surrendered to the unconsciousness and the certainty of fucking with our body-clocks and facing a cocktail of full working day and serious jetlag tomorrow.
Actual, proper America travelogues coming soon but in the meantime an anecdote that demonstrates Z's wallet curse and the combination of fortune and absent-minded chaos that is the time-honoured Rainsinger Way.
Therefore, let us wind back in time to Saturday August 1st. At 5:55 Z and I return the rental car to the airport and then take the Courtesy Shuttle to our terminal enveloped in a smug cloud of self-congratulation on the subject of our Magnificent Organisation Planning Skills which enable us to cruise to the airport without a worry in the world and the moral superiority of people who have four hours in which to leisurely stroll through the duty free shopping before catching their flight.
This is Act 1, and it is called Foreshadowing and Hubris.
We peruse watches in an attempt to find a promised birhday present for me. In the process of reaching for his wallet to pay for this watch, Z comes to the horrifying realisation that he has forgotten this wallet in the door of the rental car. The rental car which we have just returned. The wallet with all our cash and credit cards in it.
His face goes through a mime of outrage and disbelief depicted in various shades of pallor and redness. His forehead develops a fine sheen of Many Sweat. My stomach and jawbone plummet, my intensines wring themselves like laundry. We both burst into spontaneous and frenetic activity, sprinting back out of the terminal, dividing our forces between trying to call the Lost and Found office (closed), the Hertz customer service (non-responsive) and locating and flagging down the shuttle to take us back to the rental area.
This is Act 2, and it is called The Advent of the Craziness.
Once we reach the rental area we burst from that bus like grenades out of a rocket launcher. We have the determination of heat-seeking missiles and the overpacked rucksacks of EuroRail travellers. We fling ourselves into the hallogen-lit stale air of the returns park with the desperation and sharpened senses of people who know that the only thing standing between them and endless insurance documents is some good fortune and the moral codes of strangers.
My senses have grown as sharp as Terminator's. Adrenaline has gifted me with drive and fire. And across the lot I suddenly spy with the acuity of a hawk our rental car. Being driven away. My lack of coordination and distaste for physical activity brisker than a walk is well-documented but suddenly it's as though my feet have spurted wings. I sprint across that lot like a motherfucking hurdle-jumping steeplechaser on steroids, heedless of inappropriate shoes and parked cars and the weight of trailing luggage.
For a single bright moment of my sedentary life I am like the sports hero that scores a goal in the last second of the game. If this were a movie there would be the sight of my body hurtling itself ill-advisedly through space in slow-motion and to the tune of an inspirational soundtrack whose strings swell just as I manage to execute a bold leap straight into the path of our rental car.
"Stop!" I shout, and pretty much hurl myself at the bonnet of the car with outstretched arms like a stricken Jesus. The car stops and from behind the windshiled I see that I am being watched by a nice couple and their two small children whose gaze suggests that they may be frightened and scarred by our encounter and I think they're expecting me to follow through with something like "There is a bomb in your trunk! Run for your lives!" but all I inquire about is Z's wallet.
It's not there.
They drive on, shaking their heads.
I stand there, deflated, my anxiety mounting, my inner fire quenched, my thigh muscles throbbing gently.
The inspirational soundtrack ends and we hurry into the rental office where we encounter a queue stretching almost out of the door and we break 12 years of attempts at English Integration by asking whether we can trespass and jump ahead of everyone on account of our plane.
We do. The wallet is found.
Act 4 would be the Happy End except that the heroes are seriously behind schedule now and there is more Running With Luggage and Desperate Boarding of Shuttles, and there is some pleasing Confusing of Airport People who dispatch us through security for the second time in a row and then we are in the boarding lounge embracing as fundamental truth that we are haunted by a powerful karma which teaches that obviously no matter how early we leave, or how well we think we have prepared we are doomed to never encounter an airport without at some point having to sprint through it.
And then after a prolonged faff about Brands in which I read lots of blurbs of people talking about Their Brand and How You Promote Your Blogging Brand, I started to feel more and more inadequate because I'm fairly sure I have no Brand unless you're looking for "People Who Injure Themselves In Ridiculous Ways" (and if you are then step right up because I'm your girl).
Therefore, the only logical solution seemed to be disregard my history of Terrible Hair Karma and go consult a scissor wielding professional to even out my mop and make it sleek. Ahahahahahahahaha That's the sound I imagine that the Universe makes when it laughs. Ahahahahahahahahahha, you poor dumb tool.
I don't know what it is about me that renders me anathema to hairdressers. I thought that hairdressers are meant to be chatty people but around me they simply lapse into a deep and sinister silence and don't so much as ask me about holidays which is probably Official Hairdresser Code for: "We hate you and we want you to suffer".
This latest in Nina's Hairdressing Disasters involved a 2 HOUR HAIRCUT (pretty much 1 hour per inch of hair) in which an OCD hairdresser obsessively snipped and snipped and snipped and even though I couldn't see anything on account of having removed my glasses I had a sinking feeling that it was going to be terrible and my God how right I was.
Somehow instead of a sleek assymetrical bob (shorter in the back, longer in the front) what I ended up with was looking like someone had stuck a bowl on my head and cut around it. Dear Lord it is bad. And the worst thing about this prolonged butchery was that in the end I felt so sorry for the hairdresser who was clearly investing so much effort into the creation of something apalling that in the end when he asked me how I liked it I didn't have the heart to say anything but "It's lovely!"
Does The Poster Child For Bad Haircuts sound like a catchy brand?
Also, this:
Correct
Incorrect
So last week when Matei with no breathing difficulties suddenly acquired blue lips and an azure cast to his skin I consulted these handy notes and thought to myself "Something isn't right!" and proceeded with Z to A&E with some haste.
It was 7pm when we got there - not quite the witching hour - but already full enough of crying children and surly flirting teenagers (Teenager 1: Shut aaaaaap! You're such a wanker. Teenager 2: You shut aaaaaaaap, slag!) to promise a lively evening even before Matei launched into his own operatic recital (Ode: How I hate all thee).
So I walked the hallways up and down with a wailing feverish overtired baby waiting to be seen by medical professionals or for Surly Teenagers to relocate their bonding rituals (now with shoving and mock-sulking!)off the only available seating. After a precarious nappy change and an unsuccesful attempt to distract Matei with bubbles from the horrors of having his pulse rate measured we were ushered into a room of our very own with instructions to make the baby nekkid and collect a urine sample in a receptacle about the size and shape of a test tube.
We took off his nappy. He peed for 0.03 seconds. Unfortunately my human reflexes were not able to catch it. Z berated me. I berated him back. To present a united front we gave the baby a bottle of watered apple juice (240 mls) and a bottle of milk (240mls) delegated tasks and settled down for a grim stakeout.
I can think of a number of tasks more rewarding than waiting for an overtired, pissed-off infant to pee (such as tilling fields, and rolling a rock up a mountain) but alas none of these options were available to me. Instead there was waiting. And more waiting. And then more waiting after that interspersed with some screaming and protesting. Matei refused to pee. We decided to step up the offensive by making him drink another 200 mls of water by serving it up in a syringe. Matei still refused to pee.
The doctor came and tried to listen to our son's breathing. Matei fought this insult by becoming possessed by demons. The doctor left. No pee came. Another hour passed. Then another hour.
I re-read the same three books fifty times. Z made balloons out of latex gloves. Matei burst them. His cast-iron bladder remained unmoved. We jiggled him up and down but this made no difference. We turned on the tap in the room but this did nothing except add to the world's water wastage problem. Matei's stomach was so swollen from all the liquid that it looked like a mountain and he couldn't move without making a sloshing sound but still, he didn't pee.
The doctor came to take a look at his ears and throat. There was much infant Resisting Authority and Fighting and Terror and Screaming but no pee. We waited some more. My despair took on the colour of NHS hospital rooms. We tried whispering Pshhhhhhhhh psshhhhhhhhh to our son but it made no difference. Z and I passed the time by bickering. Jesus wept.
Finally like a light in a thankless tunnel I managed to scavange a chair from somewhere and stand Matei up on it so that we could stick his hand under warm running water. He peed gallons. I nearly peed myself with happiness.
Matei was diagnosed with gastro virus NOS, we were told that his blue episode was Just One Of Those Unexplicable Things but most importantly we were told we could leave. We did. It was nearly midnight. Then we all got home and slept like the dead although no one actually died.
Happy The End.
*Letting child roam around the room at 7am, left to wreak what havoc he pleased while his father and I slept under the guise of 'ignoring the bad behaviour' and 'enhancing his independece' but mostly'laziness'
*Getting dates of meetings confused
*Forgetting Very Important Unique Keys at home and needing to return for them in my lunch break
*Spilling a mugful of hot tea all over my nice dress and trousers just prior to Big Important Meeting thereby making it impossible to follow the First Aid guidelines about Removing Clothes and Sticking Thigh Under Cold Running Water for 10 minutes.
*Attempting to look as cool and collected and professional as possible for a person with a soaked lap.
However, there is sunlight today my friends! And 20 degrees Celsius! It's nice to see global warming finally working for us and bringing us an early spring so I'm all 'What are first degree burns amongst friends?' and 'Pomegranate tea was my least favourite flavour' and 'What dress was not enhanced by brown stains?' and 'I wonder if my misfortune can generate sufficient compassion to make my bid for funds succeed?'
Oh yeah. Rocking out with sunlight and lowering expectations in the workplace since 2000
But I still wake up some nights in a cold sweat, haunted by the thought of having dropped him. My family history is full of lost boys. Boys who fell. Who drowned. Who became suddenly and unstoppably and unaccountably ill, and the sorrow of their mothers still dwells in me.
I am healing well, but my right leg still looks terrible - all inflamed and scabbed and twilight-coloured.
Between this and the bruises on my arms and face from last week starting to look like a poster child for domestic violence. Also, it's probably just a matter of time before my explanations ('Oh I slipped on a lef', 'Oh I banged myself with the car boot') start to sound like an allegory for spousal abuse.
Yesterday, when shutting the car boot I accidentally slammed it down onto parts of myself. Soft parts of myself (like my arm and my nose) which strongly objected to this and have turned all kinds of purple to teach me a lesson.
Saboteurs
This morning Matei slept-in until the unprecedented hour of 8:45am and so did Z and I. He was very chirpy but we were ridiculously late for everything.
Also the cat is preventing me from doing my coursework. He's all touch me, not the keyboard! I am soft! Here, let me headbutt your hands and walk all over the keyboard stepping on the delete key in the process just to show you the foolishness of attempting to do work when there are cats to be loved
I think he has interpreted the phrase 'Security Object' too literally
Since birth I have been attempting to ally my son to a variety of cuddly toys, soft blankets etc. in a shamelessly self-serving ploy to wean him off his preferred comfort routine (incessant, endless breastfeeding). And although he stopped nursing he still never showed an attachment to any one cuddly thing, in fact showed no preference for things at all until he laid his paws on a plastic hammer. Since then, he won't let it go. He eats with it, sleeps with it, sings to it, gesticulates wildly with it.
It is like living with a minature God of Thunder (although his hammer doesn't magically return to the owner when thrown; MAJOR DESIGN FLAW). Z and I live in fear of being smited, unrepetant sinner that we are.
Using Ur Fearz Against U Since Infancee
Although Matei becomes a helpless fan-boy at the sight of ducks, cats and squirrels, dogs largely revolt him and he is frightened of frogs.
Nowadays, when I don't want him to touch something I put a wooden frog on top of it.
And discovered we'd run out at 11pm when three starving cats were casting themselves upon the ground and/or looking at us imploringly and then we were all "We know! Let us give them that dodgy fish from the fridge because cats! They're animals! They can digest anything!"
And that night the baby was sleeping, and I was sleeping, and we could hear the cats outside the bedroom crying piteously and I was sleepy and didn't want to play CatButler to let them in and out and in and out and in and out because we were all "it will be fine! They have a clean litter tray in the bathroom!" and "What can go wrong with them in one night anyway?"
Well lo and behold, in the morning there was cat poo in front of the bathroom door (because my mother had unthinkingly closed it in the night, and the cats could not get to their litter tray but did courteously poo as close to it as physically possible) and there were pools of cat sick in the living room (well i guess some of that mewling was pained mewling) because apparently they don't like dodgy trout.
Agh, bad animal-parent guilt. Good thing two of them are deeply forgiving animals, and one has the memory of a goldfish.
I've also been called upon to mediate because my mother left out the sweater she is knitting for the baby not realising that it's like crack to the furred ones and they kindly unpicked most of it and unspooled the wool throughout the house in the manner of gleeful Andrex puppies and because it's not my knitting I was all "Oh shit" but mostly AWWWWWWw and my mother was mostly $%$^&*O)&^%%%%!!!!!!!!!!!
You know what's even more amusing than being sent a bill for backdated Extra Service Charges (merry Christmas to everyone!)? Having that bill sent to the wrong address.
And, what you may ask, is even funnier than that? Having court proceedings brought up against you because you neglected to pay this bill which you didn't know existed, and then being held responsible for all (steeply rising, bedecked with interest) costs for the legal proceedings.
And the punchline, the height of hilarity? Why, only learning about this situation upon receipt of a letter from your mortgage lender. A letter and copies of correpondence that uses an emotive turn of phrase such as 'blah blah violation of lease due to nonpayment of service charges' 'blah blah bad credit' 'blah blah remortgaging application on hold' 'blah blah sort it out suckers or look into the stony raging jaws of the repossession of your house'.
It's all been a barrel of capitalist laughs I tell you.
Actually, I am deeply proud of the way Z and I have dealt with it all. Nobody shouted, nobody blamed or accused or shook hands at heaven while shouting 'WHYYYYY MEEEEEEEEE'? Instead, we just pulled together in a steely team-like fashion to devise a plan and sort out the situation as quickly as possible and spent the in-between hours clinging to one another like
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
chiller's kittens re-affirming the depths of our affection for each other and the the most important thing which was not losing sight of that or of our excitement at the nearness of baby.Because if you do get stressed, if you do lose sight of that? Then the bastards have truly won.
So while the last few days have been embellished by all kinds of new and interesting stresses of the Plutonic 'let me strip you down to your naked shivering cores' sort, they were also some of the most deeply intimate of this year. Because the only antidote to harshness of the world? Exchanging ever-more tender language with your husband. And knowing that as long as you yourselves are okay, that is the key, the deepest heart and bone of it; that everything else will resolve itself.
Also, I have hope, for I have seen that men and God are not immune to the tears of women. How do I know this? Because yesterday the Cats Protection people phoned me up to ask if I wanted the little cat back.
- Mood:
determined
October has been the month where I have found myself facing £3000 of bills I did not epect, not receiving the £2000 I was expecting and contemplating idly what life will be like next year when Small Squalling Thing is here and I'm bringing home the pittance that the British Government likes to call Statutory Maternity Pay. (And cheese, as we well know, does not pay for itself).
In a similar vein (because what are financial woes, without physical ones to accompany them?) my already-bad pelvic pain has been exponentially increased by the fact that on Monday afternoon a child barrelled into me in the library, smacking me in the most painful part of my pelvis, causing me to see every star in the sky and spend the next 45 minutes lying on the carpeted floor too shocked to contemplate anything but shallow breathing and getting someone to call a taxi to drive me the 500 metres home because I couldn't manage to walk that much.
Since then I've kept my walking/sitting minimal and my paracetamol intake high. I can probably go about half an hour of sitting and/or ten minutes of walking -I employ the word in its loosest sense, since I'm shuffling about with tiny steps, like a geisha with Parkinson's- before I feel like I'm being stabbed with a handful of fiery needles. The house looks like a bomb site and I haven't got the energy to clean it, even though just looking at it makes me want to cry. (I am a tidy person trapped in a disorganised person's body).
But! The month of October has still not dampened by resolution to Not Focus On the Negatives so let us talk instead about the gloriousness of the weekend past when Z and I visited
chiller and met her cats, and ate her scones (which also happen to be the finest scones I have ever had) and admired her interior decorating talents. And then there's also the fact that I found The Best Smart Maternity Trousers In The World and I will post pictures of their exquisite beauty as soon as I'm vertical again.Today I'm off work to rest and recuperate for a day in the office tomorrow, and I'm lying in bed piled high with kittens whose goal for Life Happiness seems to consist in molding themselves to my body and grooming my sweater (one of these days one of them will start spitting up blue hairballs).
One of my ex-colleagues is pregnant and expecting her baby a couple of weeks before I'm serving an eviction notice to mine, and by all accounts she is not only glowing with happiness but being amazingly industrious and sewing baby quilts and whatnot, which makes me smile in a wry sort of way since the most industrious thing I've done for my child is to feed it cheese and threaten its father with divorce unless he stops snoring.
Ultimately though, I am OK. One thing that this month has proved to me is just how amazingly strong and supportive Z is and how Things Will Be Fine. I have unshakable faith that as long as the baby is healthy and the two of us are as rock solid to each other as we normally are, then the world can fall apart and we will still be fine. We will find some way through the mess, work out a strategy, take out some loans if need be but ultimately work things out. That as long as we're together and good to each other, that's all that matters. That, and not letting the cheese run out.
So ultimately, I'm not anxious. Only holding my breath through a long dive underwater.
1.Book a flight that leaves at ridiculous o´clock
2.Make yourself overtired the night before and don´t do any packing
3. Oversleep by 20 mnutes
4. Stroke cats who have manifested on your bed instead of getting up
5.Clean house instead of packing.
6.Faff about with cats because you can´t resist their confused looking faces or their attempts to instill themselves in suitcases.
7. Leave house 40 minutes behind schedule.
8.Expereince roadworks on the way to Luton.
9. And then speed restrictions.
10.And then take the wrong turn.
11.Then more roadworks.
12.Get lost trying to find Long term Car Park.
13.Make a detour and get lost again.
14.Then a third time.
15.Locate car park and parking space and see bus to the airport arriving.
16.leg it to the bus while dragging bags between parked cars and across gravel.
17.At the doors of the bus have your husband realise that he can´t find his wallet meaning that he has most likely left it in the car.
18.Have him leg it to the car and back (with wallet)
19.Have the bus shut its doors in front of his arrivng face.
20.Wait 15 minutes for the next bus.
21.Have the bus break down.
22.Wait for new bus.
23.Arrive at terminal after the plane has taken off.
But it all turned out OK really because there was a vast amounts of flights to Malaga and we just got transferred to the next one allowing time for a leisurly breakfast and shopping at the airport.
After we made it to Spain we enjoyed more holiday firsts- namely an attempted mugging as soon as we stepped out of the door of our apartment (two guys on a scooter passing by who slowed down and attempted to nick the posessions which Z hung onto). Everything is fine although Z has developed a reflex that makes him reach for bricks every time he hears the sound of a scooter behind him.
On the other hand the weather is lovely and the giant squid are just as big and tasty as I remembered.
Hope everyone else is doing well and waltzing along rainbows with puppies and ponies.
Read you soon.
x
It may have involved the discovery that the computer parts did not come equipped with the right cables, and the discovery that no one had the right cables, and the discovery that the best way to remedy this was to drag LSAYLAU wife on another tour of the Godforsaken Places with Electronics Shops.
He might have then spent four hours of his life bent uncomfortably over various Computer Parts scattered all over the floor, handling them with the utmost care and latex gloves, cradling each one carefully as an infant and protecting it from the deadly static electricity of the cats (the very same cats whose curiosity made them circle him like sharks for hours and hours and hours). He might have then lifted out his motherboard and realised that a teeny tiny teeny mini bit of it had come loose in transport and snapped off and that in fact it was ALL FOR NOTHING and that once a new motherboard arrived he’d have to do all of it again. He might have (with a wild gleam in his eyes) hit upon the idea of welding the teeny tiny teeny mini emancipated component back onto the motherboard before realising that his idea was useless and undoable. He might have manfully resisted the temptation to cry, although not so much the temptation to relate his troubles to LSAYLAU spouse several times.
He might have then realised that on account of Easter his motherboard replacement would not arrive until well into the next working week, tainting all his endavours with a terrible yearning and frustration and sadness, the sadness that shouts at him whenever he passes the sad, non-working carcass of his almost-built computer on the living room floor, or indeed one of the mountain of boxes that housed computer parts, currently piled next to the sofa and incrementally increasing the various sadnesses of everyone except the Cats.
Speaking of Cats, here’s the latest instalment of the pet related soap operas in which Max (a fat, imperialistic neighbourhood tomcat more akin to a furry turkey than a graceful feline) attempts to corner the Professional Kitten and sexually abuse her. Professional Kitten manages to slip in between his paws and runs to the door of her house where she stands squeaking to be let in while Max corners her again. On the other side of the sadly-shut front door First Cat is yowling and growling and scratching in his eagerness to get out and protect her virtue and let loose some pheromones. The scene is saved by Z – the kitten flees through the open window and Max slinks off in a state of unrequited love but with a backwards glance as if to say ‘One day I’ll get you, Professional Kitten! You’ll be mine!’
Leading us all to wonder Whatever Will Happen Next? Will Max ever get his way with Professional Kitten or will a well aimed projectile find him first? Will First Cat ever succeed in defending his territory against insurgents? Stay tuned!
And before I could dash and snatch it from the gross metal jaws of loss it rolled and fell right in between the metal teeth of the grate.
I was powerless to save it, only to watch it from above as it lay between some unnamed rubbish and discarded crisp wrappers... lost to me forevermore.
the widowed earring and the miasma of loss
On a similar note, of all the unpleasant things which have befallen me one of the more original is discovering that what looks like a gang of spiders has spent the night feasting upon the luscious flesh of my right buttock.
This seems particularly mean-spirited on the part of the arachnids considering that whenever I've discovered them in the house I've been interceding with Z to let them live.
Then the ferry that sank in the Java sea.
Then the plane with 102 passangers that just vanished (Lost, I know you now!)
Then the two eartquakes on Monday.
And now The jet that crashed and burned on landing (Also JOhn Howard -pure class that man. 'Australia should prepare for bad news' because there were 9 Australians on that plane (among a hundred Indonesians) and now four are missing. Because obviously the news of just Indonesians coming to a bad end is not enough to shock and sadden Australians. Ah, those Indonesians. Always dying in large numbers in catastrophes. Such attention-seekers).
It begs the question, what next? Asteroids from space? The whole of Indonesia vanishing like Atlantis? Bush deciding that they are hiding nukes?
I am re-thinking my dream of going to Java and Sumatra.
In another headline news, via The Guardian You have been evicted. Please leave the Great Britain House - John Reid unveils plans to send text messages to those who have overstayed their visas.
Happy Birthday to <lj user="mzdt"> may you live long and prosper (I started typing this entry yesterday, when this first line was pertinent; but he should still live long and prosper).
On a different note here's an argument for atheism:
Walking back from church on Sunday I fell down (no idea how - one minute I was vertical, the next I was doing splits on the pavement, (sucking air in the shocked way of people who have no idea what hit them or in what manner the heels of their boots betrayed them) looking up at sky and Z's enquiring face through the red hazy fog of PAIN which happened to be shooting up my leg. (Curse you spiritual leanings! Without you I'd have just stayed in bed and sustained no worse mishap than being lovingly chewed by cats!)
I allowed myself to be picked up and supported home, while my legs and upper lip wobbled. From there on it was a gradual spiral into ever more emoness (highlight - crying as I did the dishes, tears falling off my face to mix with the suds like something out of a Laura Esquivel novel) and hobbling around the house like a pirate with a wooden leg. (Benefits - being able to go 'arrr, arrrr, matey' to the cats; not going into work on Tuesday and proving that you can indeed spend a whole day lying about the house in your negligee and it will only improve the day)
And it all went on in this sorrowful and decadent manner until Z decided to upstage my pity party by having a misunderstanding with a fence and coming home with a bruise roughly the size of the Indian subcontinent blossoming upon his manly thigh.
So verily, verily we are a bruised and dented household, including the cats. Big Cat came home looking like a miner, from rolling in the mud and fighting the other cats, while Kitten keeps banging her head into every available door in her mad rush to get Outside, so perhaps her seeming goldfish-like memory is explained by all this repeated head trauma.Anyway though, on a not unrelated note here is a list of my New Year's Resolutions:
I give my honourable communist word (the pledge they used to make us do in school) that this year I shall:
1. Wear makeup
2.Develop some sort of skincare regimen
3. Style my hair
4. Experiement with what happens when a lady and a man like each other in that special way without the benefit of contraception (although not until later in the year until it seems reasonably clear that neither party has the benefit of malaria)
.
5. Learn how to walk properly.
To The Person Who Stole My Mobile Phone, I Hope You Get Brain Cancer.
And to the people whose phone numbers I had but now no longer do thanks to that little fingersmith please do leave them in the comments. For this reason, all comments to the post are screened
I have had much rage about this but really it's not that horrific since the phone was insured and my wallet with what happened to be a substantial amount of money did not get nicked, so in the grand scheme of things everything is fine. But I am Very Displeased and I give thieves the Paddington Bear Stare.
And now not to dwell on these negativities, let me relate some nice happenings from the last month in which I have been forbidding myself internet access in order to work on the papers for my course.
1) Z and I spent the whole of the holidays with each other and did not kill each other or anything, except through overeating which seemed like a wonderful sign for the future of our relationship.
2)I went ice skating with
ultraruby in Somerset House, and it was ace! And I did not fall down! In fact I enjoyed the whole thing so much that Z and I are going this weekend to skate at Alexandra Palace. Ice dancing rules baby. And I can see how I have developed from my humble un-coordinated beginnings where I thought "Hmmmm this doesn't look too difficult, look at all these people just gliding" and ended up with 62 bruises* to prove just how easy it was. Although this was all way back when I was a child and children are bouncy.
3) I found lots of really beautiful things on Sale, crowned by the fact that I bagged two pairs of Perfect Courduroy Trousers in Perfect Shades of Brown for £15 at Dorothy Perkins and I'm so gleeful and pleased with myself that I might start a Livejournal just for my outfits.
4)
miss_newham made me a hat! And it too is ace!5) I have reduced my gainful employment from 4 days to 2 days a week and now I'm poor in finances but in rich in spirit so that's all right then. At the start I had been worried how I'd do with having less structure in my life but that was before I realised just how much time can be spent snuggling in bed with fluffy kittens. Employed people have no idea what they are missing out on.
6) I have come to understand that the cat and I are in fact One Being that enjoys the same thing in life: food, the bed, snuggling in the bed, and insinuating ourselves into people's laps/heabutting them as a demand for caresses & affection.
7) I made Z go see Brokeback Mountain despite his many protests of "But why can't we watch a nice gorilla instead of nasty cowboys", and we both thought that it was excellent and beautifully acted and Z's head did not implode during any of the love scenes.
And now here's some recent pictures:
( Z's Birthday, whrein I cook a meal and we all have fun with the Pink Flamingo )
( First (and only) Snow! )
our wholesome firelit christmas
Originally uploaded by rainsinger.
*My cousin and I counted, and I won by three bruises. I am the martyrest of them all!
And on the subjects of golden hues, I saw Z’s sheets which thankfully are a lot less gold than I feared, and are really more of a buttermilk yellow.
Z: *Looking Hopeful* What do you think?
N: Well, they’re a lot less repulsive than I thought they would be.
Z: *beams with pleasure*
On Monday, Sandra and I went to the Damien Rice gig at the Palladium and it was the best gig EVER. I had no idea that Damien Rice was so good.
A chicklet called Kate Earle opened for him and the best thing I can say about her is that she was very slender-pretty and had lovely shoes. It’s not that she was appalling by any measure [which could have been entertaining] just bland. She was very willowy and pretty and sweet and she played piano and had a nice voice but her songs were a bit mushy with a high sugar content but in the end completely unmemorable. She annoyed me because she looked so clean-cut, clean-living and I find that sort of comportment terribly dull in musicians. I prefer my artists with an edge.
So Kate Earle – not worth it. Unless she acquires a beer gut, or a drug habit or starts writing songs after rehab. Then we can talk.
For the life of me I have no idea why on Earth she got picked to open for Damien Rice except as a study in contrasts.
Because Mr. Rice rocked the house. He was sooo soooooo soooooooooooo good. He followed raw, edgy numbers with sweet soulful ones. He played his acoustic guitar like it was electric, and the music erupted from him and hurled itself out into the audience to seize my heart like guitar strings.
It was completely utterly f-ing marvellous. I was gripped for the whole two and a bit hours. I left on a high feeling like I’d just had a profound and moving experience. I was so impressed I bought a gig t-shirt which enticed me with its pinkness.
And yesterday I was having a bad hip/back day so I lay around lots resting and when I felt better I did some painting and then in the evening I brought ruin to my boyfriend. But in my defense it was his own fault for asking me to cut his hair even though we both knew that I’d never used hair clippers before.
Although really the clippers made a pleasant busy shearing noise, Z shed more hair than my late dog and it had all been going absolutely marvellously until due to a small error of communication I accidentally shaved off the entirety of his left sideburn up until the eyebrow line.
It would be wrong to say that he was speechless for he emitted many cries of shock and outrage and distress at his maiming. It was the first time that I saw the good humour and positive outlook on life fail the man. [And it is a testament to his fine character that after we’d done some damage control and he’d had time to bemoan his fate he forgave me].
I’m sure the trauma of the situation wasn’t eased by the fact that I broke down and laughed [I didn’t want to laugh! But I couldn’t help it! He looked so damn funny, and there’s nothing that incites giggles in me as much as knowing that they are the worst thing I could be doing]. I tried to cover it as an asthma attack but it didn’t work because the guffaws just erupted from me.
He didn't let me take pictures, and out of respect to his dignity I leave you only with the mental images.
actually_not,+ Emma, miss_newham, and Tori Amos] when The Biblical Flood started and the skies emptied themselves upon my raiments. I did not have an umbrella and considering that by the time I found shelter I was half-soaked and the deluge did not show any signs of abating I figured there was no point and just grimly legged it to the station getting splashed by passing cars and drainpipe waterfalls, wondering whether death by lightning was instantaneous and grimly resolving to change my username to something like "SunWorshipper".
By the time i had reached Westbourne Park I was phenomenally, spectacularly, majestically soaked. There wasn't a single dry thread of clothing upon my person, my boots were transofrmed into paddling pools and I should think my jacket alone cotained enough H20 to irrigate a small African country.
But to not be unduly negative, at least the rain was fairly warm, and all the water in my boots was soothing and cushioning the blister on my toe.
At Westbourne Park the tube came quickly and I stood grimly in the carriage, shedding water on the floor and giving off the scent of unamusement and vaguely, wet dog - although I did contain myself sufficiently to not issue the smirking teenagers who asked "Got a bit wet did ya" with the immediate death penalty.
At Hammersmith Station I met up with mine intended companions, and while we waited for the arrival of the lovely Emma I did my bit to lower the moral tone of Public Transport by taking off my clothes to replace my soaking top with the dry one I fortunately happened to have in my bag.
Then off we went! to a lovely lovely Thai restaurant where I dried my skirt with the warm plates and fought off my impeding pneumonia with hot and sour soup and duck red curry, and I could happily spend at least quarter of an hour going *ooooh shiny* at the assorted jewellery and nailpolish of my dinner companions. It was gooooooooooood and
actually_not is my hero forever for getting us such a nice dinner. And then it was to Hammersmith Apollo and Tori! ToriToriToriToriTori who wore the weirdest pink dress I had seen in my life - think netted curtains- teamed up with some kind of weird salwar/pettycoats - all in all echoes of strung out shepardess- but very cute shoes.
But it doesn't detract from the fact that Tori is FANTASTIC and sings like an angel and plays piano like a dream. Such a huge voice for such a tiny pretty person! I enjoyed every minute, although the people taking contraband flash photography were a bit annoying [one for your poll,
hoshuteki.And speaking of music, I got tagged by
verlaine soList your current six favorite songs, then pick six other people that have to do the same.
Crni Labud [Black Swan] - Djordje Balasevic - A love song with a great rock tune and literary references.
[a segment of roughly translated lyrics]
Come take me, Black Swan, I suspected your arrival!
Come, kiss me and kill me, I'm ready now, I can go.
Come, deliever me, Black Swan, and don't spare me this night.
Come, lead me, free me, we all have to go through it sometime.
Sjecam Se Prvog Poljupca [I remember the First Kiss] - Jura Stublic & Film
[lyrics, roughly translated - they sound much better in SerboCroat]
I had a hundred women
And they had me
I gave all my love
And now I no longer have it
It's good, now there's no more problems
I don't feel anything, I just remember.
The Night Santa Went Crazy - Weird Al Yankovich
Weird Al's offerings unfailingly make me laugh
Born- Over The Rhine
You can listen to it here
A lovely, soothing song. I'm going to be a fan of any tune that contains the words:
I was born to laugh
I learned to laugh through my tears
I was born to love
I'm gonna learn to love without fear
After All- Dar Williams
Probably one of my favourite songs of all time, and its lovely lyrics are here
but an extract:
Well the sun rose with so many colors
It nearly broke my heart
And worked me over like a work of art
And I was a part of all (that
The Other Side - David Grey
Melancholy and haunting to me.
And meme-tagging
lillfive, auzerais, tjej, scarletdemon, rhodri, dubaiyan if they feel like it.After a week of it not abating, I am tired of the constant ache, and I think I'm developing a tolerance to Panadol Extra.
Most times I'm okay with it, but sometimes frustration is harder to shake off, frustration with myself and my illness, with the pain in my hip, my hands. I think some of that frustration comes out in my relationship with Z because I worry that it bothers him to be with me on the days when I feel like some aged cripple, but so far those fears have been unfounded.
Of course my own impatience with myself is harder to shake off.
I am so... restless... wanting to jump out of my skin. Or at the very least drink myself into a stupor. because I'm 24 damnit. I am too young for this bullshit.
And today, I lost my phone on the bus! This would be my lovely little silver phone with the hypnotic-blue screen.
And everyone's numbers in it!
And to top it all off, I am too far from the place where
rhodri is offering free drinks!I feel near-nigh inconsolable. If I weren't mesmerised by
tjej's userpic I would be weeping copious tears right now.Somdays
rhodri's icon sums it all.Profile
- rainsinger
- deep sky, firefly
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