The record shows I took the blows and did it my [fill gap with word of choice]

I’m alive. Mm-hm, contrary to popular belief I am alive and well and have been alive and well for the last however-long-it’s-been-since-I-posted-last. As I intend to continue in this generally alive-and-well state, I think I’m giving up blogging. All my kneejerk self-analysis isn’t really very helpful. It’s so not-really-helpful it’s unhelpful. (As is excessive hyphenation, Suzanne.) I need to phase it out.

(It was all so perfect I couldn’t decide which line to take, but obviously I finally settled on one barely more apt than the rest…)

Then again, maybe Rhiannon can win

‘Me and Rhi had the classiest time on the train, taking embarrassing photos on her digital camera and going on about her cat (boring, I also have cats, I know what they do, but endurable). We’ve been friends for six years now and besties for two of them when I fell out of love with Danny, and maybe I spent a year or so hating Rhi’s guts too but I’m way over that now, and face it, kiddo, she’s a gem. An attention-seeking gem who thinks the world of herself. I get to wondering what I ever saw in Danny and frankly I don’t know. Rhi is there for me.’

 

Rhiannon – will you ever win? No. Definitely not.

And I’m back! Obviously. But I am, and I’m happy to be back, and I’m happy to be catching up on all your wonderful blogs too. Yay!

OK, now let’s press on. I keep a diary on holiday but this isn’t from it – I decided that I was in the mood to blog while I was away but I didn’t have computer access, so I just wrote it down instead. So, I wrote this post about three days ago. I’d put it in italics to give you a sense of time having passed since, but that’d play silly buggers with your eyes sooner or later. So I won’t. Here it is:

It’s really awful being on holiday with someone whose presence just sends me straight to angry muteness, and yeah, Rhiannon’s done it again. Right now, she’s a a couple of metres away singing along to Grease in a stupid high wobbly voice. There are problems occurring lately with her. And again it’s a yeah – I need to get ‘em out my system. Let’s go!

Retrospectively scary diaries

When I was thirteen and about to turn fourteen I kept a diary. I wrote all kinds of stuff in there; and if you read how I write instead of what I write, you can chart the onset of psychosis – it’s unbelievably creepy.

 

(I’ve just found out how to work this Read More thing and it’s a bit of a buzz – it means I can fiddle with techie stuff and feel like a computer whizz and fit more posts on my home page! I’m sure it’ll wear off soon…)

 

The empty beauty of Australian rainbows

When I’m meant to be going to sleep but not quite getting there (not quite? I miss it by miles) my mind goes off on the weirdest tangents: things which make perfect harmonious sense at the time but as soon as I wake up turn to so much illogical distractible fluff. Last night it was the future. What do I want to do with my life? It didn’t start there, though; oh no. It started here.

 

There’s a brand of notebook, of school diary, made by an Australian company – I had one in Year 9 – that have really nice covers. Some of them have road signs (Warning! Koalas ahead! – that’s what I had) and some of them have surf-like designs. There’s one that’s just got a rainbow cover, red through pink through orange through yellow through green through pale blue through indigo, and it has white designs creeping onto the cover. White designs that look like rose stems, and a white border.

 

That’s all I was thinking about. My head was full of this image of the diary cover. And then:

 

I wonder who designed that cover? I don’t suppose that whoever designed it had an epiphany; had a moment in their life when they realised their destiny; I don’t suppose thy ever went to speak to their careers advisor, sat down, said I want to design the fronts of notebooks in the colours of alternate rainbows – I will be the one who pioneers the white stem. That didn’t happen; they fell into it. I wonder if they’re disappointed at the way their life has turned out, making graphics for notebooks, but they oughtn’t to be, they’ve made me happy, those beautiful empty patterns make me see things the way they are. Maybe every notebook cover is just as beautiful and empty, when you see it the right way. Maybe that’s the secret. Not everyone has the mind to notice the beauty of the covers but I do.

 

Of course, this progressed quite naturally to:

 

When I’m older I’m going to design covers. I can’t make beautiful empty things in a city, so I’ll live in a hut on my own at the edge of the beach. It’ll be a cove, a tiny cove, and no one will know about it because it won’t exist for anyone except me, and I’ll live in the centre of a hollow web of fame drawing things with no centre at the edge of the water. It’ll always be sunset and the water will shine pink until the sand and – why not get up right now and draw a picture? Why not? Yeah, I’ll do that!

 

So this is what I drew (in the dark, feeling inspired):

 

 

That’s me in the window, drawing covers for diaries. I think I intended to leave them all piled up under my bed so that when I died the company would be guilt-forced into publishing them.

 

And then I let myself chill a little and I spent an hour or so thinking about that ‘hollow web of fame’, which I think was probably a reference to my wanting to live unnoticed like I’m not alive but not to be forgotten – so I think I meant I wanted to be famous but unaware of it – but I’m not that sure. That phrase sticks in my head, though. It sticks and it drills in and it demands that I keep it there but I don’t understand it.

 

So really, I guess, I just wanted to say that when you’re half-asleep, everything seems like the greatest idea you’ve ever had. And I also wanted to say that the Maths exam I just sat was seriously unfairly hard and I hope the calculator one has more areas that we’ve covered in it or I’m not gonna get me that A.

 

Happy Monday, everyone!