I hate my right ankle. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate when I’m walking rather giddily in town on a fairly okayish afternoon in the middle of the summer holidays, feeling ready to take on the world, and oh fuck, I’m on the pavement with all the physical prowess of an orphaned baby deer. I end up crying at random passers-by, both wanting to get out of town and bundle myself into a cab, but feeling that this sprain is not as sore as that time I sprained it a few Christmases ago and walk it off, needing lunch.
Even the Doctors at the local Accident and Emergency were just as ‘get over yourself’ as I was. I had to buy the Ibuprofen myself. No tubigrips for you – they don’t work on ‘pulled muscles’. If you still feel sore after a few weeks – go see your own GP. It was slightly pissy of them, having suffered a queue of annoying children and paid about £15 of combined taxi fares today to get this attitude, but well, it saved me aligning my right foot too far right and weakening my ankle once again/
So, my week is ruined and need suggestions. Anyone?
ITV1′s slightly low-prestige singing game show Who Dares Sings! has become my staple background television for babysitting nieces and nephews whose parents have ran out of biscuits. It’s awfully time-inappropriate for summer nights, really, I’m obviously not drunk enough to feel raring to go with the mass singalong sections (as a passive observer or cajoled audience member) and you have to wonder whether the said audience really are enjoying themselves. Still, apart from the odd focusing and amplification of a random bad singer amidst the crowds – everyone seems normal. No passionate detachment here.
The show is like a televised SingStar. There’s this complicated pitchy-witchy toney-woney vocal detection system in place called S.A.M. (as in, yep, that) that matches the contestants’ efforts to a sort of vocal optimum. S.A.M. grades the singers on their grasp of the ‘hot notes’ unknown to everyone else except some viewers cued for the out-of-tune lolarity of it all. Of course, what makes it even more knowing for those who are attuned to karaoke cliches is that the hot notes are not where you expect. So some poor contestant could have held an impassioned ‘Yoooooouuu!’ for so long, thinking that was a hot note, but it was actually ‘in’, which they missed out on. Bother.
For all my reservations, I hope this show never gets cancelled as ignominiously as Rock Around the Block(I remember this show and shudder at it like the wussy masochist I know I am). There are no personal journeys (apart from last night’s ‘losing winner’ Ian, who was a soldier in Afghanistan and could have had record company advances in his eyes were he actually any good) and the judges don’t claim to know their craft, even if Denise Van Outen’s oversinging is starting to get on my wick, insinuating once what John Barrowman has to state three times.
Most heartwarmingly, hmm, is that everybody there seems to have a good time, if it does seem really unfun and cajoled. No-one wants fame, fortune or dead relatives to keep smiling down on them, and they sure as hell actually want to make friends. Trouble is, with this ambivalence, I don’t know whether to send the producers love letters or name them in my suicide notes. I just cannot help but watch.
First of all, I spent the best part of a few minutes watching this and it reminded me of happier and less sloggy times.
A few links later and I find myself trawling the archives of Men and Cats – think of it as like a hipster readers’ wives but with male partners and y’know kittehs – and find myself wishing that I had a boyfriend IN A GOOD WAY.
Then, this. Pretty self explanatory really, but not. I sometimes feel that indie music is like the worst ex-boyfriend I will ever have and then I will end up gazing upon this on a really overcast day like today feeling less mopey. Lovely.
So this afternoon, I felt this need to pitch the cat fancy magazines with feature ideas. But what with?
I’ve been dithering about writing this cathartic-yet-apathetic blog post for a while. I wanted to explain why I’ve been so useless, quiet and internet-reclusive these days but you can obviously guess why it has taken this long. I don’t know why this is. I should be so enthusiastic about my future – having graduated, been published and the whole world and so many summers in front of me but it feels like a SLOG.
At the risk of this entry turning into a ‘sip a finger every time ‘I’ comes up’ drinking game, it’s time to reach a diagnosis. I’m binging a bit, and I hate the way the drawer at my desk is a depository for chocolate bar wrappers. My back aches with the stresses and weight placed on me these days. I’m going on holiday, then giving myself this cut-off date of the first of August where I sort myself out once and for all. I avoid my closest friends and even those I’ve grown to rely on, unable to take the anger and annoyance and routine any more. It’s such a bloody tragedy really, that the friendliest face and sole reason for smiling is a waiter who barely knows my name. A boyfriend experience for a fat girl, you could call it.
So what is this lowness anyhow? The clouds up above me contribute in some way towards this gloom, as passive-aggressive and huffy as the parents in the town centre asking their children how they want to be skelped, in which direction and how hard. Any minute now I could explode, releasing all this stress and anger, but it is more likely to be a ‘sigh’.
I would like to apologise for the somewhat selfish idea of starting the blog during my torrid time of exams and panicking about the world. I realise that it is a waste of a really good blog name and I really should use this space wisely. So what have I been doing to make me forget all about you? (more…)
