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Bitchin Camaro

6 Apr

Apparently, I am very punk rock. At dinner last night, Al and Morgan informed me that during a strange car trip the previous night, they had been discussing favorite songs. And Morgan mentioned that he and I had only just had the same conversation days earlier. And apparently I had said, “Favorite song? Or favorite punk song?”

And Al says to me: “That’s just it, isn’t it? About you? There’s punk rock and then there’s everything else. All the trivial crap. There’s Britney Spears and then there’s drinking in your hotel room until 4 am, breaking glasses in the sink, dancing until dawn, sleeping in your clothes, writing bits of your novel on newspapers on the train ride home at 6 am…there’s everything else and then there’s real punk rock, there’s you.”

I was pretty well flattered by this comment. Because I just don’t see myself as that at all. I see myself as very safe, very boring sort of person. But then I realized that maybe that is who I was when I was younger, but that’s not me anymore. But the expectations of people I used to know still linger in my head and tell me who I am. Which is silly.

My parents, my highschool friends, my neighbors growing up would tell you that I cannot read maps, that I get lost and frazzled very easily. They will say that I am easily overwhelmed and that I cannot carry my own luggage. That I over pack. Even Holdstock sincerely wonders if I would be able to survive living more than a 20 minute walk from Harvey Nichols.

But then these newer friends, these friends that have only seen me as the sort of girl that head rushed right into London, see me as independent and fiesty. And I like that image a lot better. I like being told that if our lives were a slasher flick, that I would survive. What a great image to have in my head: me hacking a serial killer down with a machete.

This week I have the house to myself and I have been writing and printing up a storm these last two days, feeling very vicious towards anything in my way of finishing up my project. I’ve been listening to the playlist Nils left on my grooveshark account, because new music is a beautiful thing to have around. And I like his mixes.  But I feel so torn about what I’m writing about because on one hand, the warm weather gives rise to all sorts of fantastic, resplendent imagery, but my gut instinct is still always to write out the pain and suffering. We’re getting too self-destructive around here, but at the same time, we do always have to tear shit down to the ground to get anything fresh coming up, don’t we?

A certain little birdie told me to check out the movie Last Summer yesterday and I did and I feel all sorts of fucked up about it now. That title has the link to the actual film, so you should give yourself and hour and half in the bath and watch it.

This song is one of the ones on the Nils playlist and I am listening to it on repeat while writing about murder. I don’t know how well they go together, but now you know how my mind works…

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Throw away all those extra words…

20 Mar

Since I have returned from NY, I have made a conscious effort to be more self involved. I am pretty sure that isn’t how most people go about enlightenment, but I did realize that I needed to spend more time and energy on myself, rather than on others. This meant that a few people received brisk text messages and emails from me (mostly they were hard to write, one gave me such a thrill that I did wonder what on earth I had been doing speaking to this person in the first place) and this is how I cleared my social calendar.

So today, for whatever reason, I woke up at 4 am. That is incredibly early. It’s so early that people in America were still awake and I managed to waste the first two hours of my being awake talking to people on MSN. That was silly, but good, because I was all interneted out by 6 am. And then I sat down at my desk and started to re-work my novel, which has been laying around, unhappily untouched for several months now. Which was extremely silly, because it is finished. By finished I mean, all of the chapters, plus a few more, that I had outlined originally have been written. There is a beginning, middle, and end. Plot, climax, dialogue. Oh, snap.

But all writers know: just getting that all done does not make a piece finished. It just means that you are now onto the next stage of writing, which is editing. This is maybe my least  favorite stage of writing. This is because it involves re-reading every single line you have written, out loud, maybe with a funny voice here and there, and being ruthless. But I discovered a very happy fact: Letting a manuscript age in a drawer, as somebody famous once said, I am sure, is the best way to get over my biggest writing block, which is my love of my own words.

All through college and university and even most of my writing jobs, I was writing on a really tight deadline. So, I would get an assignment and start my research, take my notes, sketch out my papers or stories. I was never the sort to put a paper off to the last minute, I was always a very meticulous student. But I wouldn’t leave myself much time to let a paper simmer– what student does? You have so many papers to write, even if you start each one the day you get it, you are still working on a tight schedule. So my editing of all my papers and stories took place very very soon after my writing them. And so, even when I knew I needed to cut a paper by 200 words (or worse still, 1,000!), all I could see was how achingly beautiful my sentences were. I have a lot of ego about the beauty of my prose. My main problem is that each of my sentences do tend to be very well crafted, but they don’t always flow into the next one very well or advance the story or point of the paper in any way. As Mr. Holdstock says: line by line, you create something lovely, but as a whole, the thing needs help. Ouch. But true. And so editing was always a bitch: how do I know what to cut? I love each sentence independently, so how can I possibly cut any of them, just to make ‘cohesion’, that foul little word used by editors.

But editing is like packing: easier to do if you let something sit in a drawer long enough. And by this I mean, when I move, and I move a lot, the first things to go into the trash are the things I haven’t looked at in months. I just started packing up my things the other day, in a fierce rage of having too many things and feeling weighted down, and it was incredibly easy to look at a lot of things and go: well, I haven’t used that in MONTHS. I don’t even remember why I bought it or why I thought it was important. I won’t pack that to take to Istanbul, so why do I own it now?  In the end, I have far fewer things in my room and I am very happy about all this.

In my novel? Well, I haven’t looked at it in ages. And I forgot why I told Holdstock and VanWinkle why I had to keep this chapter or why it was incredibly important that this scene appear in a certain spot. In the end, I am chopping and splicing my novel as though I were Dr. Frankenstein, just checking to see if it would actually be better to have an arm coming out of the forehead. I am even experimenting with cutting in pieces of my other, partially finished, novel. It’s like a crazy laboratory in here today and I am loving it.

So, my new literary advice: forget about what you are writing about. Leave it for a few months. Go and get an all-consuming hobby, like doing everything on the “101 Things to Do in London Before You Die” list.  Go on a mini break to your home town for a month. Be too social. Feel like everyone around you is doing so many more creative and wonderful things than you. Feel a bit overwhelmed. Have a sort of breakdown where you become a hermit that bakes cupcakes. Then tuck right back in. Well, at least do steps 1 and 8. Just try and enjoy yourself in between and don’t beat yourself up too much, because we can’t all be productively creative every day.

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exactly

17 Mar

“The secret of life,” said sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. & the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

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Even Dutch Pedophiles Are More Focused On Their Long-term Goals Than I Am

17 Mar

Oh, god, could it be true? Probably. I was, once again, reading other people’s blogs today, while I was half thinking about how I really needed to start focusing on what I am going to do after London and after I travel. I was focusing on this huge decision by reading about celebrity gossip, how to make a lemon meringue pie (Easter is coming up after all and my mother always makes one on Easter), and checking my email. To be fair to myself, I was a bit tired from going on a very long walk with Emily, all the way up to Hampstead Heath, around it, and back home again. She runs. I do not. You can imagine what I looked like. Ahem.  So anyway, there I was procrastinating, thinking about doing some writing, probably.

And then my phone rang. And then I got a text. And then another. And then I remembered that I am going to the opera tonight and so I had better pick out something to wear and wash my hair and put my contacts in and suddenly, I was overwhelmed. And pressed for time. And I knew that I wasn’t going to get any writing done today at all because my social life is eating my professional life. Which is very confusing to me, because when I lived in Edinburgh, I got a lot of writing done. I was always writing. I wrote in my bed, I wrote at the kitchen table, I wrote on the couch while the girls I looked after watched The Simpsons. I think this is because the truth about Edin-burgers is that they are innately lazy and enjoy a good self imposed exile and so my social life was never so all consuming. Despite Edinburgh taking no more than an hour to walk from end to end (I lived in Leith and worked in Murrayfield and it took me an hour to walk or 20 minutes on the bus, and those sections of town are pretty darn far removed) and yet, no one will travel farther than 20 minutes walking time to see someone. In the winter (8 months of the year), they won’t travel more than 5. So, this means that when I moved to Edinburgh and lived in Tollcross and a boy I was dating lived on Easter Road (20 minute bus ride) we were in what is considered to be a “long distance relationship”. It did not end well for us.

But in London, people generally allow that they are going to spend at least 40 minutes getting anywhere and so they don’t really mind meeting up any day of the week and no one really plans that far ahead, calling you up last minute to do things.  So all of a sudden, I have a lot less free time. Although, another issue is that surely, I would rather be out of the house right at 7pm so that I don’t get reeled into reading the kids a bedtime story. (For some reason, lately they have been trying to convince me that ‘Beano’ is a book. It is not. And I do not read stupid comics, and I most certainly do not read them aloud). So that means all the times that I used to spend curled up in my bed, writing away happily, is now spent in dark rainy streets, using up all the money on  my oyster card to get away from suburbia.

So anyway, during my time procrastinating, I read, who else, but Penelope Trunk. I often time think that while she’s sitting at her desk, pondering what sort of article she should write that day, that she thinks of me and creates something in that vein. Which is what she did yesterday: she wrote an article about how not having any long term goals makes it impossible to get any work done because you aren’t sure if any of the work you will be doing will be valid for anything and so you get stuck and you stop. And in my case, you socialize. Partially because I have been told over and over that knowing people and having contacts is a really wonderful way for you to advance your career, but mostly because it is so easy and so fun to just hang out. It’s so easy to leave the house and relax, and trust me: you don’t know job stress until you realize that for 6 hours of your day, you are listening to children scream at top volume. Or worse still, talking non-stop for an hour straight while you are walking slowly in the cold, your fingers going numb and your brain on fire…

Right. So as you can see, I clearly have had my mind eaten away by this job as of lately and it’s actually making it hard to focus on my long term goals. And apparently, while I am sitting here, flummoxed and confused, drinking gin and tonics in Sloane Square, Dutch pedophiles are plotting out how to legalize having sex with twelve-year-olds. That’s right, they formed a political group. And they are campaigning for office. And then deciding that campaigning is taking away from their LONG TERM GOAL of legalizing pedophilia, so they stopped running for office to focus on making the general public aware of and sympathetic to their plight.

I’m bemused. And devastated. I’m actually less organized than child molesters. Although, let’s face it, I should have known that all along. After all, child molesters are always really planning ahead and doing all sorts of crazy hard work to organize themselves, from building secret basement dungeons to buying up all the cotton candy in three counties so that they can lure the child beauty pageant winner that they have been stalking and photographing for the last two years into said basement dungeon. They really do plan ahead. I bet they even have to-do lists where they prioritize all the really important things in their lives. I also bet they are very capable of packing light on vacation because they have already narrowed down what is really important to them and never need excess baggage. Lucky bitches.

I, however, do not have such a straight forward long term goal. I do not know, deep down, that I want to do something so badly that I have organized my life, my political affiliations, or marital status to reflect this goal, nor would I stage a battle with the law to be able to do that thing. While I don’t think I want to ever see these crazy Dutch people succeed, I do admire their dogged single mindedness. I admire their ambition. I admire their organization. I wonder if they have a productivity blog?

Although, probably, if they had one, they would, like most people who have productivity blogs (and there are A LOT out there) they would tell me to pick a goal, focus on it, and cut out all the social crap. I mean, they would spend 1,000 words saying that and also add some things in about having notes on your wall urging you on to your goals and making charts with star stickers as well. But basically, they would say: stop being so damn social. So that is my new long term goal: to be less social.  I bet hermits get a shitload of work done.

Light Casting Day!

15 Mar

Oh wow, so today is lightcasting day, which is a phrase coined by this amazing guy Chris, over at Soul Garden. Lightcasting day is pretty much my favorite day out of the month, because it always seems like it’s breeding such hope and possibilty and because I get so focused on it, I feel like I always manifest something good. Just last month, over V-day weekend (last lightcasting day), I got so much more than I ever even thought possible, which is amazing.

My friends Becca and Nils also do lighcasting, although with a slightly less focused bent than me (ahem. Dancing with champagne is fun and all…ha!), and can I just say, I am terribly proud that today they are actually working their little red carpet butts off for a film they did recently. But I was trying to explain it to a ‘real world’ person and it was a bit difficult to say exactly what they should be doing. Then I remembered an article that helped me get into it, from Gala Darling. She writes:

The basic lightcasting formula is to sit down somewhere undisturbed, engage all your senses & just visualise what you want for as long as you can, then let it go. Detach. Don’t think about it any more. Don’t worry about it not coming to you — think of it as ordering a meal in a good restaurant. You tell the waiter what you want, then just wait, always knowing it is on its way, & in the meantime, you talk to your friends, check your phone, observe the scene & enjoy the present moment. This is the crux of manifesting; you just gotta believe that it’s coming & stop looking for “proof”. Just know.

And that’s what I do, basically. I demand. I tell the universe that there are no ifs, ands, or buts, what I ordered is coming to me, thank you very much or I am going to speak to your manager. You can read the rest of her detailed “how to” here, at Lightcasting Day!

I also always do at least a few rounds of EFT  (this page is great, it has loads of videos) beforehand too, to really focus on clearing out the dead weight in my head before I put the new, better ideas in there. EFT sounds zany (aka completely insane), but I was skeptical at first as well, until I used it to get over motion sickness, sort of as a test to see if it worked. It did. So now I use it pretty often and I see good changes. I have had friends use it against their eating disorders as well, and it seems to work for those who use it regularly, so I like to recommend it.  Gala did another great page of helpful tips as well, which can be found here, Gala’s EFT.

So, wishing you loads of love and light and love! <3 <3 <3

And watch this video. Because this song is AMAZING. Aseop Rock is one of my favorite hip hop artists, but Daylight is pretty much an amazing song, even if you don’t like hip hop. I once dedicated the lyrics to my darling Rhea and, as I recall, she loved it. It’s a song about getting up and getting on, and it’s a positive, yet aggressive spin, which is how I treat my lightcasting. Plus this homemade video is a nice one.  Hope it inspires you bunnies!

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Hyper Love and Birthday Wishes!

9 Mar

This past Sunday was one of those glorious days in London that makes you insanely happy: bright and sunny, despite being icy cold, full of amazing people. One of those amazing people was my friend Deborah.

Her birthday party was this Sunday evening and honestly, if you have ever wanted to walk into a room and meet twenty or so perfectly-wonderful-spectacular-in-every-way people, Deb’s house on this night was the place to do so.

Morgan, her wonderful boyfriend (and otherwise charming friend of mine) had organized an amazing gift for her, that I, being out of the country, had not had a chance to participate in: a multi-media dvd/cd/booklet of music, art, poems, stories, and film made by all of her friends who would be at this party and presented in a most exciting way (a bit of performance art which surprised and hushed the crowd!). There were also a lot of cakes and cupcakes and delicious thai green curry and a lot of smiles all around.

Because I wasn’t able to participate in Deb’s present, due to my being out of the country at the time (It’s okay Morgan! You’re a star!) I’d like to make her a little present here. It’s not much (but I promise, I did make her cupcake kebabs!) but for an artist, sometimes a little extra exposure is just what a girl needs. So here goes:

Deborah Pearson, who has a delightful blog of her own at Confessions of a Young Playwright, is a pretty genius young thing. She has won numerous awards, including being named one of the prestigious stage 100, an annual list of power players in the UK theater.

As a girl who lost her heart in Edinburgh, Debbie means a lot to me, since she founded the Forest Fringe Festival in my beloved Forest Cafe, which is an experimental theater festival during the big August Festival that overtakes Edinburgh every year. She wanted a place where artists could make whatever art they wanted without having to focus on money. And she totally did it: it’s free for everyone, the artists and the audiences. And she started doing all of this while she was attending Edinburgh University. Ta-dah! You can read about this in more detail here: Post City Article!. Or you can read a quick interview with her here: 5 Questions: Debbie Pearson and see a quote from here her in The Guardian.

So this is sort of my love letter to another great North American girl. She’s been a bit of a hero, a bit of role model, and a lot of a friend who helped me leap before I looked and gives me a lot of faith everyday that if you do what you love you can never be sad. And in that spirit, I would like to dedicate a list to

“How To Be More Debbie Like in 5 Easy Steps”

  

  

1. Smile all the time.

Deb has this huge smile that she uses most of the time. She makes everyone around her feel instantly happy and at ease, which makes it a million times easier for her to talk them into doing things or teaching people (or sometimes Italian children).

2. Speak softly.

I’m sure that Deb yells. Probably. But I’ve never really heard her do so out of anger. In fact, it took me a long time of knowing her to even realize that she ever felt stressed because she keeps her voice soft and with an even, soothing tone. Only after being around her for a long time can I see on her face when she’s getting a bit flummoxed. I think I got very confused at first as I grew up  in a loud Italian household, where you yelled even if all you wanted to do was ask for the salt, and she’s a sweet Canadian, but she is patient and calm under pressure and this is what makes her a tremendous leader. Leaders should always be brave in the face of danger, and she certainly can do that.

3. Surround yourself by people you love and love you.

Don’t waste your breath on anyone else, it’s only wasting your time. Deb cultivates the most beautiful friendships and it’s a lesson to us all. On Sunday I saw lots of people I already knew, but also met a bunch more of Deb’s friends who were brand new to me. And while everyone was very different from each other, while conversations ran the gamut, their was an eerie similarity that everyone shared: they were all absolutely adoring of Deb and she was absolutely adoring of them. They were all friends that you could count on for anything and everyone wove in and out of each others lives fluidly. There was not a single person there who was not warm and friendly and interesting to talk to and it was clear that every single person in that flat that night loved Deb and was willing to work hard for her. And the best bit? She gives it right back. Which brings us to number four…

4. Be willing to work hard for people, because in exchange they will be willing to work hard for you.

Deb loves to say she is a procrastinator, but I would give my eye teeth to be able to procrastinate as productively as she does. She is always doing a million little projects and she is always trying to incorporate her friends as much as she can. And while a lot of people are always looking to see what they can get out of any given situation, Deb is a lot more altruistic than that: she always wants to see what greater good can come out of any situation. I think that’s why she’s getting as much credit in ‘the straight world’ as she does: she’s not greedy or selfish so people want to do nice things for her.

5. Take the time to enjoy every single day.

Whether she is reading War and Peace just because she really really wants to (even though maybe she has been told she should be doing more with her day) or strolling through a Sunday market or eating cakes out of the box from Louis Hungarian Bakery because to get a plate would just be less fun or spontaneously deciding to make a curry for lunch and watching a few million episodes of Arrested Development with me and Morgan…she’s always enjoying her day to the max. Because life is more important than work, even if you are doing what you love, because having adventures and being with friends is what is going to influence every aspect of your life and work. It will make you cheerful, it will help build up that support network of friends, it will fuel your creativity, it will give you memories that will make you smile when you are far away from home.

DSCF2905 Deb and Me

DSCF2908 Cupcake Kebabs!

group! Pulls Shapes!DSCF2928 Open presents!group2 So fancy fancy!

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Never Travel With Anyone You Do Not Love

22 Feb

I like to write stories and I like to write stories about things I have done or seen, so it makes sense that I really love to travel. When I was younger I was so nervous about being uncomfortable, and I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, that I felt that it was an impossibilty to ever really get very far away from my home town. I grew up in upstate NY (I’m practically Canadian we’re so far north), so my youthful travels were mainly to Canada and nearby cities for concerts and camping. My parents had traveled extensively during their lives, as my father was in the Air Force, but I never had the travel bug. Maybe because I spent so much time as a small child moving around the world (I was born in Germany, then we lived in Cornwall, New Mexico, and then NY and in between all those moves my parents loved to go visit different places in Europe….camping with a 6 month old!?!), I never wanted to go anywhere that wasn’t absolutely familar. I didn’t even like to throw things out or rearrange furniture in my room because when things changed it made me very nervous.

So I think everyone was really shocked when I suddenly packed up my bags and moved to Scotland. And then didn’t freak out. And then didn’t come back. I’d taken a holiday there with an ex boyfriend a year before I moved there and trust me, I would have never gone that first time without him: I needed him to hold my hand and be the outgoing one. But for some reason, once I got there, once I saw that I could explore things on my own and make friends on my own, everything changed. When my white skirt got covered in mud on the first day during a hike in the highlands, I just laughed it off and washed it out in the sink later that night.  (For all my friends from Scotland, this was my first night in Stromeferry in Gordon’s house!). And by the time I got home, I was different, although I didn’t notice it at all yet.

I haven’t travelled as much as I wish I have; if I had an infinite amount of money (or a lovely trustfund), I’d be all over the place, every day. I also still retain a big part of that childhood need for comfort: I much prefer to live in a place then just visit it. So, when you spend  years living in a place, it does cut down travel time…

But this summer I am terribly excited that I have been planning on taking the Orient Express from London to Istanbul and stopping in a lot of places in between, like Brussels, Paris, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. If I don’t run out of money, Italy and Greece are on the list too. You can do the whole train trip in about a week, but I plan on doing stop-overs in a lot of cities and spending a month on the whole trip. A month could be a long time, and I thought to myself that I needed to find a travel companion, but it dawned on me as people looked over their work schedules with a furrowed brow that I certainly wouldn’t mind going it alone.

Because traveling alone means I can talk to anyone at anytime, write in my notebook without seeming rude, wear the same dress for five days in a row, and not have to visit anything I don’t want to see or, worse, miss out on something I want to see. Also, for some reason, whenever I am with someone else, I get almost nervous, like I won’t be doing things just the way they want them to be done, and then I mess up a bit. But when I am on my own, I hardly ever get lost (or if I do, I can usually resolve it pretty quickly), and I’m less stressed. If things aren’t perfect, I only have myself to worry about and that eases my worries.

Being the terrible girl I am, I did wonder how I would manage to survive a month on a train with limited luggage. I had already decided that the only bag I am bringing is my rucksack. And EVERYTHING must fit in it. So I was all productive (dorky) today and made a polyvore set. honestly, I’m beginning to learn the art of packing light. It’s taken years and the realization that if I really love an item of clothing I will want to wear only that, no matter what. So, if I only pack one dress that I really love, I’m good to go and that saves so much packing room. Another reason to travel alone: freedom to admit that changing your clothes every day is totally over-rated and not nearly as important as the story you are going to get out of the adventure.

And now, to bastardize my hero Ernest Hemingway:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Scotland as a young woman, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Scotland is a moveable feast.
 

and also:

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

 

 

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My Hero

16 Feb

I sometimes wonder if it is wrong to love Penelope Trunk as much as I do? I think, in real life, we would probably argue a lot and that she wouldn’t be that fun to have drinks with. But she also reminds me a lot of women that I have had in my life that I have thought of as mentors. And I love her latest blog post, “Do you want to be interesting or do you want to be happy?”

Well bunnies, I think it’s pretty clear which one I pick and that’s why I love Penelope. She absolutely would rather be interesting, no matter how much she attempts to live her life in such a way that would make her happy. When faced by the choice of doing the sane, rational thing, the thing that will give your life stability and comfort, or leaping before you even know what you are jumping for, Penelope is always out on a ledge, flailing around. If she’s afraid of failure, you can’t see it on her. And she’s not some crazy blessed person: she fails all the time. She’s gone bankrupt, she’s been divorced, she’s lost book deals she already spent the advance for, she had a very public scandal about her tweeting about her miscarriage. She has no filter and this gets her in trouble all the time. But she picks herself right back up and goes at it again, almost instantly. Of course, she may change her mind about what she wants to do and alter her course every two seconds. Who cares? Let’s be honest: what makes her happy IS being interesting, even if it’s only to herself. She is absolutely my “Fuck Fear” hero.

I love this article as well, My Financial History, and Stop Whining About Your Job. Everytime I start to get a little bit stressed, I re-read it and I think: yeah, if you are even a little bit unhappy with what you are doing, pick up and change it, even if it means moving to Wisconsin. Or Montana, as the case may be ;)

This qoute should totally be tattooed on everyone’s forehead:

I’m not saying you have to live in rural Alabama or forgo having kids. I’m saying you need to be an adult, and realize that adults make big decisions. Things don’t just happen to you. You have power to decide what your life will be like.

And if you set your life up so you can’t change jobs, take personal responsibility for that. It didn’t just happen to you. You are making decisions about that.

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Light Casting Day!

12 Feb

Today is such an amazing day, so take advantage of it and have a beautiful one…

Lightcasting Day

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full mOOn

5 Jan

This past fortnight has been maybe the craziest time I have had in a while and I’ve been having nothing but crazy in my life for the last year, so that’s really saying something.

You see, I spent my holidays in Scotland, where my heart is. Before I left, I spent a few days organizing my room and setting up all my goal boards for the year. I also meditated on light casting day. Are these things dorky? Yes, and beautifully so. Because terribly horrible wonderful fucking brilliant smash up beauty happened to me over the holidays.

The Highlands, Stromeferry and Skye to be exact, were covered in snow and unrecogonizable from what I had known before. And I was unrecogonizable to myself as well. I hiked, I wore waterproof trousers, I chopped wood, I stuck my head in a freezing cold river because a boy dared me to (and it was the river of eternal youth…), I pushed a van out of the snow, I caught and ate scallops, I climbed on the bow of a boat and watched dolphins,  I built a fire, I drank gin with no tonic, I went to a ceilidh dance and danced with Gordon a most wonderful man, flirted shamelessly with everyone, and wore my bunny ears. I fell in love a million times and in the end, fell out of love with someone I have been meaning to fall out of love with for a long time. I finally discovered something that has been alluding me since childhood, when I was first stabbed in the back by a girl: friend love is real love.

Sometimes you fuck your friends and sometimes you don’t, sometimes they just hold you when you are crying or simply eat all the food you made and ask you for more. Sometimes they buy you a gin or they buy a few guys beers so you can talk to their hot friend on your own. Sometimes they dance with you until 6 am and sometimes they let you stay at their place when your boyfriend chucks you. They let you borrow their shit, they kiss you when it’s midnight on new years, or better yet, they never kiss you no matter how drunk they are.

But I do think I’m quite happy that I asked for a few things (from the universe) for Christmas and I got them. Almost exactly what I asked for and now I just need to work out what that means.

The full moon made me howl and my inner child was a bitch and all sorts of things fell out but that’s that. Because I think: it’s a clean new slate.

WHEN THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO BURN

YOU HAVE TO SET YOURSELF ON FIRE.

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