the best thing for you would to be queen, so be queen

i am alive. i worked a lot, created bonds, had an affair, wrecked a home, got fucked around and left alone, bought some arts and crafts in a disused mill, got a tattoo of a raptor on my wrist, became ill.

there was a time when every day was marked on the calendar which hung on the wall above my desk. blackly inked X's told me what to do and my energetic, organic flatmates herded me into a pattern of how to be. i drank strong coffee and spread rumours inside my head to pass the time.

i am an angry young woman, i think.

this is the place i made my first mistakes

Rain

I
you never asked to see the weather report
said it made you feel cold and anxious
even if we were predicted sun.

II
you smelt of popcorn
or hope. a burnt shell atomised
and tumbling through life,

reminding me of that first fight
over nothing, saying something,
your body vibrating next to mine

or the day we caught the bus
to somewhere else, you snatched at
my fingers like a responsibility
and I pulled away.

we couldn’t be bothered to shout -
but dull clouds gathered overhead
as you took your things
and left my house.

III
last night I sat outside
my cigarette tracing the thought of you
and was surprised
when it rained.

love on paper plates is great and you make me smile

gwendoline riley came to keele. unsung number four launched. then some other things happened. freed up was good. my housemate wrote an article for rainy city stories. we went to the event and saw socrates read about chinese food. ate chinese food. chris killen is reading at keele on monday. keele is 'buzzing' with literature based fun. meanwhile, i sat around hyperlinking.

i am writing a novella about facebook. is facebook a good subject for a novella? seems appropriate.

this evening i 'test-drove' my new grey coat. felt like paddington bear. underneath it i was wearing a purple top and a green belt. i felt 'powerful'. went to sainsburys twice in one day and was paranoid that people knew. get that a lot; worrying that people recognise me in shops i go into a lot and think 'she comes here a lot'. i don't know.

feel moderately addicted to 'dating advice communities' on livejournal.



i have a 'motherfucker' of a headache.

a loan shark took his daughter up the arse for ten pence

psst, internets.



i just thought you should see this.

and it's boring to hear of another young truth and what a typically shit thing to do.

i sent a lot of terrible emails this week. the first thing you need to know about me is that in emails i talk to everybody like they're my friend. even strangers and ex-boyfriends-who-ruined-my-life. so if you're one of those and have recieved an email from me this week - i'm sorry, probably.

my old classmate michael announced on facebook that he is going to be a dad next year. i feel like 60-70% of my highschool class has or is having a baby. i am twenty-one.

manchester orchestra aren't actually from manchester.

getting up at 5.30AM for work is an odd experience. i couldn't walk in a straight line on the way there. i ache from wandering around the first and second floors trying to work out what part of the law section a book called 'moot law' went, and reading the first pages of island and city travel guides so i knew which country they were grouped with. my geography is appalling. copenhagen is in denmark - i am learning something every day.

i went to keele and opened old wounds. i feel/felt/am pretty miserable, but ollie bought me a singing pumpkin that we had both danced to in sainsburys earlier. it cheered me up, so i'm sharing it here to cheer you up too:

simon cowell has no sense of humour

what what what am i doing?
i feel like i want to push nice boys against the wall and kiss them.

i won't.

i feel 'pent up' and 'restless'.

my friend has a friend who is exactly like me. he likes 'the animals of farthing wood' and uses too much bonjela. every time he twitters it's like he's stolen my identity and i scream. my throat hurts.

i found a copy of an email i wrote to my professor during my dissertation panic.

Subject: Spirit, H. "The Bible" Heaven Ltd, BC?
From: "R. Newsom"
Date: Sat, 28 March, 2009 6:32 pm
To: Ann Hughes

Ann!
How on (God's) Earth do I reference The Bible?
- Red

she never emailed back.

bonding over goosebumps books

i got a job! working as a book seller! at waterstones deansgate!

i feel the use of exclamation marks accurately captures my pure unadulterated joy at gaining employment. the shifts do, however, start at seven in the morning. i am not a morning person. everyone i spoke to about it laughed at me, even the lady who called offering me the job. damn.

my housemates and i had drinks with stretch tonight and discussed keele writing. keele writing has a room with lamps and a lineup of guest readers which apparently include carol-ann duffy. as well as a naughty tequila habit from the 'old days' (last year). we are slowly taking over the world. so everybody who lives in travelling distance of keele has to visit when something interesting is happening, ok?

brandon wrote a haiku and i really like it. i wrote it on my wall. am I allowed to quote it? oh well, here goes:

"I want to buy love
on ebay and bury my
worried face in it"

(brandon please don't sue me)

in other news, i am probably in love with David Mitchell.

a heavily romanticised idea of autumn

taped to a window on canal street is an advert by a pakistani woman who is seeking a gay pakistani man for a fake wedding. i felt bad but envious. i would quite like a fake wedding. i'd like to get married for a joke to prepare myself for the real thing. i feel like it would 'take the edge off'.

big brother is over. i'm glad. i became very fed up with people criticising me for watching it. i like watching people. if there was a couple arguing on the street i would be interested. if there was a man crying on a bench i would feel sad. how is that any different? or do people generally not care about strangers? i like to think i do.

i want to live inside my head and poke at it's soft walls and love everyone.

the topless black man who walks around manchester carrying a white rabbit spoke to me today. i felt like i was in the presence of a celebrity. a really bad smelling celebrity. i wonder if he has any friends.

quite often i feel the urge to email people who were previously significant in my life and say 'THIS IS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU'. just so they know.

And at the gate of the embassy our hands met through the bars

my eggs are sad, but i am not because there is a boy in my kitchen making salad.

inside my heart there is a box of spray cans. when it explodes it is going to paint the word LOVE! in every colour on every surface it touches and it will be beautiful.

but for now i am taking a lot of photographs and smiling a lot.

"I'm not surprised but I never feel quite prepared"

Manchester has 'gone weird'.

A man with obvious intentions fed me lines and called me 'delicate'. There is a perfect boy who works in a shop and smiles a lot whenever I look at him. On Monday I spent five hours on the phone with butterflies in my stomach and giggles in my throat. Tonight a friend gave me a pre-loaded Starbucks Card because he was scared to ask me to coffee himself.

What is going on?

please forgive me if my hands are where my head should be

I stayed awake until seven in the morning reading my 2004 – 2006 diary. My life is a succession of destructive relationships and worrying about my face. I slept for five hours and dreamt of people I used to know better.

I wanted to apply for a job so I found an advertisement. The description said “Writer. Online Reviews. 350 a week”. I asked for more details. They said it was to review porn websites. I applied anyway.

I made a lemon sponge cake and took four photographs with my film SLR camera. I feel inspired in a sleepy, distant way. I feel like I have thirty-five poems inside of me. I want to drink coffee with a stranger and sit in a canoe.

I am looking for someone who will love me even though I have a sunburnt nose.

there's nothing prettier than a pretty girl digging a heart-shaped hole in the ground

Still unemployed. Funky bookshops and intimidating pubs do not want me. At the start of the month my Dad was very forthcoming about a chunk of "rainy day"/"emergency" money my family had put aside for me. Now, when I quite need some, he's being remarkably vague. Have they spent my nest egg?



Yesterday I went to a Poetry Reading Event in the Northern Quarter. Becca won a vintage Coronation Street Mug and we wandered around Canal Street with two guys we met at the reading. One was uncomfortably drunk and laughing to himself. Another acted like Stephen Fry on crack. It was fabulous.



My last wisdom tooth is coming through and my gums are infected. My mouth will open approximately three centimetres and then gives up. I am eating a lot of food that can be swallowed without chewing. A trip to the dentist cost me thirty pounds and I nearly cried infront of the receptionist. The mouthwash makes me retch. We'll laugh about this later.

The wine is disgusting but acceptable, largely because it is free

Sometimes I don't know which is worse; the hopelessly depressive or the shameless optimist.

Other times, I know exactly which one I'd least like to be stuck in a room with. I just spent ten minutes of my life fending off "u just have to listen to ur heart not ur head", "follow ur heart n evrything will b alright" statements regarding a previous relationship of mine. Back up, didn't I discuss this with you when I visited Sussex in June? You know, the relationship which I completely threw myself into trying to save? I put every ounce of emotional strength I had into that tragic trainwreck of a situation! I made myself completely vulnerable and was (probably justifiably) destroyed for it in the most heartless of ways. So shut the fuck up, ridiculous facebook user, and don't try to tell me that things happen if you want them badly enough. There's a reason I usually disable the Chat option.

(There's also a reason I made a blog as well, one that doesn't involve "using it as a rant station". But really, judgemental people and the blindly naiive have got to go.)

In other less soul destroying news, my alleged "novel" has lost even more of it's resemblance to fiction with lines such as "My drink tastes of overdraft" (Being poor can be quite inspiring but I feel like a massive hypocrite for mocking Joe when I found out the backbones of his novels were more or less true stories), my housemate Ollie has left on a five week babysitting-job in France and had already secured a coffee date with a gorgeous French boy before she even left the airport (She is some sort of wizard; surely these things only happen in films?) and we are discussing an idea for a collaborative Manchester Blogging Site. I have listened to the entire Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe audiobook and plan to investigate the infamous Deaf Institute tomorrow with remaining housemate Becca. We lead a rock and roll life.

Ugh is an onomatopoeic representation of an aspirated sigh or gasp, used as an interjection to express disgust, annoyance, boredom or tiredness

I think I would throw all my grandiose dreams and aspirations away to live in a tree-house. I'm tired of this wireless internet, running water bollocks. It has taken me five hours to wash my bedsheets this morning and they are not even dry yet. Life is a mountain rescue unit which has given up searching for me. To combat my inability to afford festival tickets I am chain-drinking coffee and pretending to write. The story I am writing is pretending to be about three unemployed students. It's a mystery where I get my inspirations.

Happier Things: Abandoned warehouses covered in graffiti, heart-shaped bracelets full of inspiration, Dirty Dancing, drops of water hitting electric oven hobs, writing on bedroom walls with chalk, cowboy boots.

brief feeling of extreme stupity when i forgot how to spell my own surname

hello internet.
I have locked myself out of my other blog somehow so am starting again. For more information on the kind of person who could accidentally block herself from her own blog, watch this space.

(relatively) new stuff:
i am living in manchester. for an accurate approximation of how i feel about this, you will need to mix fear and anxiety together whilst jumping up and down excitedly. fearcitety. fear city. i have not yet found a job but apparently this is normal and i will spend many months in a state of poverty and distress until i get lucky and find a career in, i don't know, waitressing or something.

i am watching a lot of gilmore girls, drinking a lot of coffee and smoking a lot of cigarettes. admittedly, reading Rules of Attraction isn't helping with this.

yesterday i went to a literary festival / book festival / festival of books at St Anne's Square and bumped into Joe and listened to him read then Tom Fletcher read then we all went to the pub which seemed like a pretty good end to the evening except it was the afternoon and my housemates and i were drunk by seven pm. whoops. today we went back and listened to Nick Royle read an excellent story about taxidermy and twitter which was pretty spot on as stories go. everyone in manchester writes. everysoddingperson writes. Fearcitety, etc.

i feel very writery right now, in the sort of way where i haven't written anything in months.