A is for Armistice, B is for Banana;

My head and I are having one at the moment (not a banana, the other thing), which is rather pleasant. I haven’t felt this...amorphously good in a long time. I say amorphous because it’s not a set-in-stone feeling, or a particularly grounded one, or one that will be around for a while to come. Words like ‘content’ and ‘positive’ and ‘ambivalent’ don’t quite fit the bill. It’s more this kind of heady scarlet cloud of sedateness, so maybe I’m a little high on it, I don’t know. But I am going to suck the marrow out of it, that's for darn sure.

A is also for; avocados, which I have reintroduced to my diet because they are full of GOOD FATS GUYS, and they look like nature’s little cups of lime sorbet; for Archie, Stephie’s alpha male collie-cross-something hybrid dog, who has developed an immunity to chocolate and the closing of doors; for August resits at 9.30 in the morning grumble grumble; for my deep, undying love of Amazon; for ¡Ay caramba! because if Bart Simpson was real I’d be in deep shit *swoons*; for Aunty Dave, his anger issues and his mystical tea powers; for new baby Abby (who should have been named Summer since she was born on the summer solstice, goddamnit); and last but not least for ARGHGHAUKDYJKHDUDYYYEUSGYDDJG, i.e. ineffable frustration of the artistic kind.

It’s also, duh, the first letter of the alphabet (and it’s at the beginning of the word alphabet, harharhar!), which kind of nicely parallels this After The Storm business when you begin again. (I would have said A New Beginning, but again that’s not an adequate description.)

So what’s been going on?

Well, Rosie went to the doctor (whose name began with an A, funnily enough) and was all YO, I FEEL LIKE ALICE FALLING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, HELP US OUT WILL YA. Although she put it a little more eloquently than that. The doctor was beautiful, there is no other word. He was philosophical on the one hand and theological on the other and he chatted to Rosie about Prozac Nation and how he ought to read it and Rosie got very excited and gushy and did everything but Superman it home and Superman it back with her own copy to give him. The doctor gave Rosie a questionnaire to fill out about how she feels (she and Meejin later laughed at the ‘I feel cheerful’ statement and how it was completely uncheerful), asked her to compose an A4 sheet of DARK STUFF for him to ponder over, handed her the contact details of a reputable therapist and advised her to enroll in Zumba classes…

*segues out of third person lunacy*

Ahem.

I have been unprecedentedly social over the past fortnight. Allow me to elaborate.      

Davidoff came to visit and to bestow gifts of metaphysical tea and assume the persona of Aunty Dave. This was lovely, even if he did deliver earth-shattering news that prompted me to scream for about ten minutes and then to periodically shudder like Sideshow Bob stepping onto all those rakes. It was still lovely despite the fact he spieled the synopses for European torture-porn films and laughed derisively at me when I began dancing to Splish Splash by Bobby Darin. We now have this little unofficial tradition (and unofficial traditions are the best kind) that when he’s walking home from work at ungodly hours and knows I am on the cusp of sleep he will phone me and I will not pick up and he will leave me a voicemail and I will reply to it via text and then he will leave another voicemail and you get the picture. It makes for some rather entertaining conversations, if you can call them that. (Seriously, if someone opened up my inbox they’d think I was off my rocket.) During said visit, we talked about What We’re Going To Do When We Grow Up, and I voiced my empathetic terror for those who don’t know what they want to do because I have always known and this reduced Davidoff to an even paler shade of white, because he does not know what he wants to do when he grows up, which happened in February, since he’s already twenty. So during this most recent transaction he yelled down the phone, and I quote; “I can’t deal with working with people. I’d rather work with the dead. I’m thinking of becoming an undertaker. Is that ambition enough for you?!” This was followed by his high-pitched freak-out on crushing a snail. The downside to this otherwise glowing friendship is the fact Davidoff does not care for The Simpsons, and in my world that is quite a faux pas.

I experienced déjà vu when I accompanied Meejin on her BlackBerry quest, although I was of absolutely no help at all, not only because I am technologically incompatible, but also because the tariff I signed up for was an introductory one and no longer exists and all the other Bold options were not student friendly. However, Meejin resorted to the Curve and Cheryl hooked her up and Sean was a grumpy bastard and in a hop, skip and a jump Meejin became the proud owner of the aforementioned Yay For Homogenization & Social Conformity/Nay For Independence-pushing contraption, thereby contributing to the World Domination Conspiracy. But don’t worry, Mulder and Scully are onto it.

We continued on to Stephie’s new house, which is like a loft apartment with the convenience of being on the ground and near a Greggs, with the intention of finally getting around to our long-awaited Movie Night. But inevitably, as with all planned Movie Nights, we watched a total of zero movies, instead opting for a four-hour bitterathon with hot chocolate made in a sexy little Italian machine and a helluvalotta junk food. There was even a mini-vending machine for cans WHICH YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO INSERT COINS TO GET, dates with convicts and chaetophiles, and this; “I’m kinda hating my dog right now for being a forty-two-year-old paedo called Archie.” Golden.

The next day I went to register with a new swanky dentists’ and then utilized the early start by resolving to WORK when I got home. Of course, first I had to eat, and by the time I sat down to actually make good on my promise, it was already three o’clock. I don’t know how. Now, no sooner has my ass made contact with the swivel seat when my phone beeps and this appears on the screen from Meejin;

MEEJIN: How was the dentist???????

ROSIE: A telt ye already D: it was f9, but a need aboot four million fillings X_X

MEEJIN: Fuck mannn Btw me and aimeee are at hardgate its sunny do u want to come out a wee walk???xXx

ROSIE: Awwwh :O <3!!! I really really would but I am woefully behind on writing and I will have to kick my own butt if I procrastinate any more :(!! I’ll be there in spirit (Y)

MEEJIN: Awwwww man just for like half an hour Its nice and sunny :(

ROSIE: Quit tempting me :(! I really really can’t, or I’ll be writing this till am toothless (N)

MEEJIN: No I respect your writing but it is sunny and u will do it later :(

ROSIE: You smell mccanny :(

MEEJIN: Okay? Its gonna be pishin all weeek

ROSIE: It better be or al batter you like a fish m8

MEEJIN: It is my mother told me very gleefully

ROSIE: Cool whip

Half an hour turned into three hours and a walk turned into a trip to the shop for crisps and chocolate and then vegetating on my bed. Swell times.

Today I met Suzy for a very, very late lunch (Linner? Dunch?), made even later by the fact we spent half an hour trying to decide where to go. Eventually, we decided on a ritzy place on the top floor of Princes Square and we caught up on eight months’ worth of Life and finished by testing out the BlackBerry barcode scanner (it works!). I love that even though we don’t see each other often, whenever we meet up it’s like we were never apart. If I ever get married, she’ll be at the wedding, because I’d want her there and she’d want to come. (This sentiment should not be undermined by the fact that when we saw a hen party walk past, we both agreed we couldn’t see ourselves getting married. That was probably more a result of the bright pink hard hats, my aversion to white dresses and the fact men are gigantic piles of poo.) A year of higher physics and PSD with eight guys really fortifies the old female bonds, I tell ya. *shudders*

The world is small because it transpires The Other Chick from philosophy works at Meejin’s new place of employment. She remembers the polar bears, bless her.

Also-also, anyone else besides me and Suzy a little discombobulated by the specificity of one particular question on the DVLA provisional license application form? It was something along the lines of ‘Can you read 54mm wide lettering on a registration plate stationed 60.5 feet away?’ I’m sorry, I don’t actually carry a giant tape measure on my daily excursions. Jesus.

In other news, I finally finished writing the long-hand sections of the Extended Short Story and all that was to be done was stitch the whole thing together and then I could write (with a tear in my eye) THE END. But, no. An experimental wondering I thought I’d repressed recurred to me the other morning whilst lying in bed fighting the urge to be vertical and join the land of people, and I am now in a kind of paralyzing void of indecision. I desperately wish I could splice myself into two and have a conversation with my intellect. In my imagination my intellect is sharp-nosed and pragmatic and her hair is always ruler straight and so shiny I could see my face in it, and she wears black and crosses her legs and she can probably walk in high heels and she probably even digs them, and she has a notepad and a pen and prim posture and spectacles and she doesn’t find my rambling amusing in the least. Sigh. Unfortunately, however, I am going to have to go it alone. Double sigh. Do cross your appendages for me.

Additionally, because apparently I just cannot shut the fuck up tonight;

• I ordered more books from Amazon which I really don’t have the time to read. In my defense, I only intended on buying one (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but Amazon was having a Two Books For £8 deal, so I added Into the Wild to my basket and have subsequently fallen in love with it, and the other book was free because I’m one of the Vine People. Although I did just point out that time rather than money was the issue… Someone stop me. If my rotting corpse is found beneath a mountain of books, I have no one to blame but myself. I have been warned.
• Mazzy Star blow my mind in a very tranquil way… When I listen to them I feel all nice and wrapped up in the 90s.
• I FINALLY got my solid aluminium turquoise elephant! YAYYY!
• It is both lovely and torturous having gorgeous dreams about certain people in which I have no makeup on and am wearing pyjamas and am lying in a sleeping bag next to them and we’re with hundreds of others watching a movie but they don’t raise their eyes to anyone else and I can feel that they are scared but that they care, and I kind of love the blurriness. Of course then I wake up and realize it didn’t happen, but it stays with me all day like a tangible, physical blanket or something. Yum.
• It’s also pretty cool having dreams about fighting in the Battle for Hogwarts alongside Hermione Granger and taking out some bad guys with a flick of my wand and a yell of Stupefy! I was pretty crafty and kept summoning enemy wands and then snapping them muahahahaha. Silly Voldiethingy.

Righto, I think I have sufficiently filled my Rambling About Shit-All quota for the century, and then some, so I’ll be off to agonize over this pivotal literary question; to fuck or not to fuck?

Seriously, someone needs to purchase a giant butterfly net and come catch me.

Word of the Day: exsanguinate  



Of Penny Whistles & Moon Pies;

So I’m back from North Berwick and I am in fact in a jollier mood! However, I have quite a bit to diary about, so I’m just going to rattle through it all.

Saturday, 29 May 11;

A certain someone came over to help sort out my head. There was a letter and Tegan & Sara and a giant pink elephant in the room. A few hours before I discovered that my copy of The Nutcracker Prince misspelt the word ‘holiday’ in its tagline. The strange indie movie my life has become recently played on and everything that could be sorted in a couple of hours was sorted and even after that I still felt like crap on toast. The remainder of the evening passed by in a languid void of The Simpsons and then toward night I panicked and begged for metaphysical tea even though I knew I’d regret it later and that didn’t pacify me one iota and I couldn’t sleep and so I got up and went into the living room and sat for half an hour watching some crime drama with my mother and then I told her everything. All of it, from beginning to end. The whole nine yards. Totally didn’t expect that when I woke up that morning. Didn’t really ever expect it. There was just too much to tell, and it was all so inextricable, and the longer I didn’t tell her the more I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t tell her before anyway when there was still so much to know. But by that point I guess I knew enough and I was laying in bed with this horrible realization pressing down on me, like, No matter how many little surface problems you try to fix, you’re never going to fix the real one underneath. As long as you keep thinking of it like a jigsaw, as a hundred separate components that can be solved with logic and rationality, you are going to keep feeling like crap on toast. And I do not care to feel like crap on toast. So I told her and it took a while and she didn’t get mad or react in the way I’d feared at all; she listened and she tried to understand, which was all I could ask of her. And then it was four o’clock and the birds were waking up and I finally fell asleep. In the morning she bought me Coke and a Galaxy caramel.




North BerwHick;
Do not be alarmed, I do know how to spell, I have not completely lost my mind. It’s just that when Meejin and I were a little tipsy we resumed our conversation about Family Guy, or, more precisely, cool wHip, and got into the habit of over-pronouncing the letter h or confabulating it altogether. It’s fun. So when we decided we were going to North Berwick, it was an easy target. Now, originally we were supposed to be going to Durness, but public transport doesn’t exist in the highlands, so Meejin then came up with her childhood playground of North Berwick, which is actually in the south east. Rather confusing. (It was between there and Barcelona, and we opted for the former. Clearly we need our heads examined.) Anyway, by serendipity my father had just been down there, staying in his rich friend and his wife’s holiday house—a couple who feel so guilty about having the place that they practically force friends and well-wishers to stay there for free. Within a phone call and a couple of emails it was all set up and the only catch appeared to be the fact we would have to bring our own bedding. Au contraire.


So we trundle onto the train in the pishing rain at Singer’s station with our heavy bags and suitcases, have a minor tiff and dance with insanity at the ticket office, board the train to Edinburgh, note with horror the increasing disparity in opulence between the two cities evident everywhere, get freaked out by the shrunk-down size of the mall and are taunted by the Edinburgers’ accents, fall down some stairs in the act of doing everything to save half a poke of McDonald’s chips, board a final train that smells of onions and laugh at all the place names (Drem, Prestonpans), and eventually arrive in North Berwick where we get lost and the following conversation takes place;


“Where are you girls headed?”


“Fifteen, Beach Road, North Berwick.” (I really may as well have indulged in the joke we’d shared the whole time about the address and said “Fifteen, Yemen Road, Yemen.”)


*guy squints at us dubiously*


“...It doesn’t exist, does it?”


Thankfully, it did exist. With the help of the bizarrely friendly locals, we located our locale. (Just to explain the bizarre part; where we come from, if a stranger approaches you, you back away.) Kilmory House, with a Beware of the Dog sign, a dog my father had described as a ‘terry’ which apparently has a ‘snubbed nose’ and ‘thick, black curly fur’. What the fuck kind of dog is that?


Long story short, we had a great time. Highlights include; watching Meejin fall in love with Pretty in Pink, her watching me be horrified by Matchstick Men, the Turkish chip shop with the best pizza alive and the guy who looked like Luigi, our failed attempt to get to Bamburgh Castle via a train that doesn’t exist and how within five minutes the whole damn town knew us as The Girls Who Failed To Get To Bamburgh Castle, when BBC 2 mysteriously cut out and we were left with BBC 1 and ITV, when we watched The Scheme, when the tourist information board at the bottom of the Law said Did you know? the whale jaw bone that had been up there since 1709 blew down and was replaced by an IKEA replica whale jaw bone in 1935, when our shopping list consisted of Party Rings, Brillo pads and beer, the death seats and JD thinking faces, being on the beach at eleven-thirty at night with beer, my France hat, dancing to this, when Meejin read aloud the book of one-liner golfing jokes, arriving back in Glasgow and hearing some obscenity that we'd been starved of for five days and turning to each other and saying "Home sweet home".

La view.

Meejin & the first sunset.

Lol.

Another sunset.

Meejin's JD thinking face in her death seat cause they're where you ponder life, yeah?

Despite all of this festivity, there were downsides, such as Meejin stripping every time I turned around and contorting herself into disturbing positions, Meejin never shutting the bathroom door, waking up in the morning to find Meejin staring back at me like an axe murderer, and the biggest downside of all—the fact the house was haunted. Yep, h-a-u-n-t-e-d. That was the catch. Well, that and the fact nobody warned us.


In retrospect I suppose it’s only fair that in order to have the penthouse apartment in a Victorian mansion with seafront views for five days free, we would have to face death every night of our stay there. It was like The Shining meets The Blair Witch Project meets Paranormal Activity. Seriously scary. Our house was bipolar, it had a split personality, which kind of makes horror-movie sense when you take into account the fact the guy who gave us the house was called Dr. Hyde... By day it was known as Albert, and by night as Norman. Norman was evil. Norman made the fires of Mordor burn behind our heads in a chimney without a fireplace, he made the flimsy wooden door three flights of stairs away sound like it was being rammed from outside by an escaped lunatic, he made the attic with one of those pulley staircases creak right above our heads, he made K-dawg’s phone unusable and cut off Davidoff’s reception and he made Meejin ask Rosie, what would you do if that doorknob started to turn? I was nearest the door, so I would have got it first. He also made us unable to open the fire escape in our bedroom, and then not find the key until the last night, and then he made us get the key stuck in the door so we were royally trapped, and then he made us realize the next day on the way home that it was the key for the cupboard we’d found it in... Besides Norman there was also a malicious oven called Rick (or Rickle, affectionately) who liked making the first thing we done when we got to the house scrubbing inch-thick grease from God knows what animal off the pan, burning our dinner and not heating up pie and letting the butter run out the bottom of garlic bread, even though that is clearly impossible. We actually began to dread the sun setting, and watched its safe glow slowly fade from our death seats... There were also two real-life encounters, both on the last day. Around five o’clock Meejin and I were sitting out on the roof eating lunch and not looking particularly come hither by anyone’s standards (my slippers have no soles and Meejin was eating mushroom soup), when three guys across the street caught her eye because one resembled her boyfriend and I happened to look over my shoulder to investigate without much interest, and next thing we know they have disappeared round the back of our house and are knocking the door and sitting in our garden...waiting. I know that sounds like a nightmare that turns totally banal in reality, but if you’re a girl you’ll understand. I think. At any rate, I’ve had quite enough of sexual harassers this year thank you. And then later that night whilst we were watching Matchstick Men, an unearthly wailing rose up through the window from the dark street below, and it went on for two hours, and the words How could you do this to me?! were the only discernible ones amongst the Exorcist-esque screams. We thought at first some ass was just dumping his girlfriend in the street and she was taking it rather badly, but then it sounded like she was giving birth to a rhinoceros. Eventually the police showed up—one car, one van, no sirens—and after two hours of disembodied torch light bobbing about the golf course, she was coaxed from the shadows and brought to the road where she had several mental breakdowns in the foetal position until her husband dragged her into an embrace and into the ambulance and crazy was driven silently away. No signs were left. Cue the X-files theme music.


All this dramarama resulted in us getting absolutely no sleep the entire holiday. Okay, that’s a lie. But what we did get was precious little and turned us into vampires. One morning I woke up and said “High-five for being alive” and I was quite serious. Death was bloody everywhere, from the top of the Law with the guardian angel/murderer and the Wizard of Oz wind, to the roof verandas devoid of railings and offering a three-story drop onto a parquet brick driveway. I wasn’t this tired even when I came back from Australia, and that was a looong trip. Anyway, all in all, great holiday, if you can call it that. Best quotes; “Can I ask you an honest question? What would it have been like if you were wearing flip-flops?” and “Life’s short” “Short and shit”.






So now I’m back home and I’m going to the doctors and then hopefully to therapy and a happy ending! I’m a nut, it’s great. People seem to be saying this to me a lot; "...Rosie...what did you mean the other day when you said you were scared of what you might do if you were left alone?" Summer’s kicking in now and I have a few resolutions;


- Read all of these books (plus Sisterhood Everlasting, out on June 14th :D!) and review each of them to keep my brain’s analytical side exercised

- Get a job


- Learn to drive


- Finish writing the Extended Short Story and send it off to agents and then wait with bated breath for the inevitable rejection letters


- Put on at least four pounds and get my BMI out of the underweight category. Hello Dominos!


- Quit biting my lips


- Be happy!






Okay, I was totally going to end with that last one kind of fulfilled—especially because of the breaking news that I just found out I got a B in philosophy thanks to everyone’s praying to trees and gods and LSD apparently, and so I will get into second year uni and not become a bum—but I just made a silly mistake and then saw a spider crawl across my desk seven minutes after said silly mistake so that’s out the window!




Still, I went out on a limb last night and Suzy just text me out of the blue to meet up because we are becoming a pair of old women and I have Coke and friends and things can only get better right :)?

Woy Woy Bay, Australia, October 2009.



Happy June :)!