Another Wednesday

I am exhausted. This week I am in a temping job which is sucking my soul out with a blunt syringe. I have tried a few things to cope. I have tried ignoring it, hoping it will go away. I have tried thinking happy thoughts. I have tried cheese twists (with mustard on them). Nothing works, and I fear that my options are diminishing rapidly.

(I am watching Top Gear. I find Richard Hammond curiously alluring and the cars shiny but inexplicable.)

I have a gig on Monday, as a result of the other gig we did a few weeks ago in Kilburn. My head has been whirling all day with songs, but now I'm home all I can seem to have the energy to do is sit, blog, ignore the television and be elbowed by the dog.

(I am at my parents' house, even though I now have a home of my own in Brixton. It lies empty. I have to wait until the weekend to get any of my stuff there. I still don't have a bed.)

(Jeremy Clarkson is being witty but irritating. My big sister will be round in a bit. My Mum is cooking nice things with prawns in. The dog appears to be licking a sofa cushion.)

I have nothing to write except for disparate nothings. Temping is horrible and it makes me cross and really rather void of personality.

The phone is ringing, and I have to go and do something to negate the hours I have spent staring hopelessly at spreadsheets today. Spreadsheets are not my friends.

A glass of red wine sits waiting for me so I will drink it and spur myself to do something productive. Hang on, let me find some enthusiasm.

Now I have found some! My sister is here! I will put the depression of temping and the pressure of lost productivity behind me, set the table and go and relax.

UPDATE:

It is just after six thirty in the morning. I am staring down the barrel of another whole day in a job the very thought of which makes me want to throw up. I can't decide what to wear because I don't own much suitable for the firey pits of hell (smart casual).

Last night I could barely even talk from horror at the thought of having to get up this morning. I made a phonecall, hung up after a meagre five minutes because I had nothing to say that wouldn't have just sounded like a series of high-pitched wails about my pathetic excuse for a life. I don't want to inflict that on my friends so instead I must turn to the Internet.

This job, it would appear, has brought out the drama queen in me. Never very far from the surface anyway, she has emerged in full regalia, bursting with anguish.

Today I will try to refuse to be paralysed by this, try to use every spare minute to plan and make changes. It is difficult, though, because I feel for all the world like a train just hit me.

Will Blog For Coffee Tables

I have started to write several posts recently. Most of them have opened with words along the inspirational lines of oh God! I am so ill. Sometimes it has even been oh, God! I am so very cocking ill. In all of them I have demanded sympathy, and more often than not there has been some pitiful call for cake.

Now, though, I am better. I no longer need you to stroke my hair and tell me I’m pretty even despite the snot and whinges. I could still do with some cake, if I am perfectly honest, but no longer for health reasons.

(Re: Cake: I prefer carrot cake or coffee cake, but chocolate cake would suffice very nicely, as long as the slice is about forty-five percent icing. If you could rustle up a small cafetiere of strong coffee as well it would round things off very nicely.)

Things have been strange around here. Transitions have been happening. We have been looking for places to live, which has been such a debacle I that I have now taken to calling it The Fiasco (2007). What happened was this:

1. We found a house! In Brixton! It was lovely.
2. We put an offer in.
3. They accepted!
4. We went to the estate agents to sign bits of paper.
5. The landlord called to say he no longer wished to furnish the property!
6. Oh no.
7. One us may have cried in an elegant and delicate manner.
8. We began looking for other houses.
9. Ad cocking nauseum.
10. There was much traipsing around the shadier parts of south London.
11. One of us may have cried again.
12. We decided to take the previous property, unfurnished.

(This was all over the space of three rather anguished and sickness-ridden weeks.)

No, before you ask. We don’t have any furniture. I plan to become extremely proficient in carpentry in the next few days, with a brisk sideline in sewing.

(Does anybody have a sofa I could borrow? Or a bed? Or a lamp in the shape of a kitten?)

(I have always wanted a lamp in the shape of a kitten.)

In other news:

I am going to New York! To see my good friend and fan of my jokes, Chris. Another friend and I are flying out on Boxing Day and flying back on New Year’s Day. It will be ace! My parents bought me my ticket as a Christmas present. I am a lucky girl. My method of saving up for spending money is to not spend every five pound note I get between now and then. It is rather rudimentary and juvenile as a system, but I am rather rudimentary and juvenile as a person so I think it might just work. I plan to keep all the notes in a big cardboard box with the words NEW YORK FUND written in purple crayon on the side, which I will place under my bed with the crocodiles and ghosts.

(Re: New York Fund: Dear thieves who trawl the Internet looking for people who announce where they live and then where their money stashes are,
Please don’t rob me.
Many thanks.)

I am lucky indeed. Still all transitional and tired, but things are looking up. Now all I need is just a spot of cake and life would be well on the way to being rather rosy.

A Sulking Post!

Today is a day for eating cheese and sulking.

Yesterday was a day for not getting a job and a landlord retracting his acceptance of the offer on our new flat.

The Temping Lady sent me to an interview without really telling me it was an interview, and it turned out badly. Nearly as badly as the time I auditioned for a pop group without realising it was an audition and nearly had to take off my clothes and pose in tacky lingerie for slathering bling-encrusted "producers" with expensive cameras and cheap expectations. Not quite as bad as that, but still not great.

I am cross today.

No harm done, I can tell myself in motherly tones. I didn't want a job I don't have the skills for, and I certainly did not want shots of me looking alarmed and semi-naked plastered all over the Internet.

(To avoid confusion: I was not asked to strip in the interview yesterday. I am referring to a whole different event, which took place years ago. It is just that I am a bit cross and so my capacity for making rational links is severely diminished.)

Elephants!

(See?)

Outside the world drizzles. Inside I sulk. I have a cold coming on and I feel fat. The dog just looked at me funny. It is, in short, all going very wrong.

However! I am singing on Friday at a cabaret night at The Good Ship in Kilburn. It is a fundraiser for a theatre company and promises to be a super-ace night, packed with jollity and tequila-slamming nuns. We are on at about ten-thirty, so if you're around do come along. If you can't make Friday then maybe you can make Sunday at Madame JoJo's instead? More cabaret, more fun!

No, it isn't working. I am resolutely not being cheered up. I have writing to do for a Secret Special Project I am working on in my lair, but all I want to do is sulk and be a bit dramatic, perhaps with a small slice of cheese.

Sulk.