First drift

I got food poisoning on Friday night, which wiped my weekend into a muddle of cautious water-sipping and failed attempts at sleep and the odd wisp of hallucinations when I started to overheat (think I've documented my lifelong propensity to hallucinate when I get too hot before - even now when I'm old enough to have at least part of my brain urging me to calm down when it happens, it's still pretty awful). I didn't mind too much, though - it wasn't nearly as bad as the bout I got this time last year. Went for a walk last night to buy some fruit gums because they were the only thing I could face eating, and the first swirls of this winter's snowflakes were being all cliched-but-delightful under the streetlamps, flecking onto my skin and hair. When I got home I got back into bed and felt a wave of comfort, like I'd fallen back into myself again after months of feeling steady, robotic and uninspired. Had a few ideas for my book and lay grinning in the darkness. It's hard to explain that relief; there have been days recently when it's been impossible to see myself as the person who wrote the poetry I have sitting on my laptops. Now I'm feeling more like my dysfunctional, slightly cracked old self, and I quite like it.

Ghost

If you stop by here every so often, or, worse, if you're actually one of my friends, you may recall that I used to post a few times a week, and I also used to actually turn up to things and reply to emails and texts and pick up calls. I'm not doing much but work so I'm not writing much here. My employer is committed to hiring someone to take on a chunk of my workload in the next couple of months, so hopefully I'll start being a bit more normal when that happens.

The Holiday weekend was nice. I joined Mel and her visiting family for Thanksgiving. I've realized, having celebrated four Thanksgiving dinners, that the meal is - especially when, like me, you remove the meat element - basically a mixture of sweet and savoury mushy stuff, much of it corn-based, all on one plate. I hope that doesn't sound derogatory; it's very Erin-friendly nutrition.

The rest of the weekend I spent sleeping, lounging, just being motionless. Dyed my hair. Saw Frank and Angela for brunch on Sunday then wandered around with Angela. It was a beautiful day: sunny, cool, crispy leaves everywhere. Today is bastard freezing; I thought I had tons of winter coats but none of them seem to match anything. I've resolved this by buying a bright pink one.

The year is winding down at a startling rate, and I have to go to Spain and France for work before Christmas so I don't have much time left to make up for my recent miserly solitude. The next week I'll definitely see Marla, Andrew and visiting London friends Sophie and Paul. A couple of parties, excuses to wear glittery things. Then Madrid and Paris, then home, to begin to gnaw my way through the unfathomable amount of food my mam has been preparing for Christmas. My dad made the mistake of relenting to her persistent demands for a chest freezer in the shed. When I spoke to him this morning they'd just come back from grocery shopping to fill it and he sounded frightened. She's a bit manic this time of year. Mel is coming to Newcastle for New Year, the only question my dad asked was, "Is she a good eater?"

Flair, Fatigue, Madness

Dan finished his latest drawing. It's big and took him months. He really is quite a talented young lad. Incidentally, just to act as a sisterly pimp, I get a lot of traffic here through clicks on Google images for Dan's previously-featured artwork. If you want to commission or buy a piece, leave your email in the comments and I'll put him in touch.





Head reeling from today. About to leave the office and go home with my laptop to keep plugging away. 8am meeting tomorrow.



If you've seen The Devil Wears Prada and been horrified by the increasingly ludicrous tasks the assistant is forced to perform for her boss, such as finding a flight during a hurricane or getting a pre-release of the latest Harry Potter book, then you'll have some sympathy for our assistant at work, who is currently attempting to get me a work visa for India so I can fly on Friday. It being Thanksgiving week, everything will be shut from Wednesday lunchtime. She has a single day to get the stamp. Also I only have 4 months left on my passport and you're supposed to have at least 6. Executive assistants being called in to 'pull favors with the Embassy'. It all sounds terribly glamorous. Granted, I'll spend most of the time in a research facility in New Delhi, but I'm maintaining my international woman of mystery front nonetheless.

Mysterious

I'm horribly careless with my possessions. I average five pairs of sunglasses per Summer. But my gloves situation is simply crackers. Where DO they go? Having just replaced a bright blue leather pair a couple of weeks ago - after misplacing one and resigning myself to the permanence of the loss - I have now lost one of the new pair, and the widower sits taunting me. It's rather like losing an earring - another of my specialties - but at least I have a spare piercing in my right lobe to accommodate the leftovers. Amputating or growing a hand to make use of my partnerless gloves is the only option.







I'm feeling rather chipper today, by my standards. A gift and lovely email from Ally and further lovely email from my brother helped. I always know when I'm feeling better because instead of sitting in morose passivity, I get annoyed very easily. While my younger brother is perennially unflappable, my older brothers and I have all inherited my dad's lively impatience in the face of the most minor irritations. I'm not the world's sunniest person anyway, but the smallest thing - a stranger in my personal space, a slow-moving queue, a person with their feet on a seat on public transport - can bring about a meltdown of a ferocity that scares even me. And I experienced all of the above tonight on my way home. I remember being on a bus in London in the early hours, heavily intoxicated, and telling off a bunch of young women for having their feet on the seats opposite them. Astonishingly, they bowed to my request instead of caving my face in. Oh, and the thing that really got me tonight was, aptly, a piece of advertising. A poster for Filene's Basement (some sort of discount store here in the States, I don't believe I've been inside one so I'm not sure what its offering is) with the approximate headline: "Bringing you bargains for 100 years - Since 1909!" Now. It's been said that I'm a mathematical wizard - I did get an A in my GCSE a whole year early, readers - so maybe I'm underestimating less talented folks, but if I see what seems to be a new poster proclaiming the centenary of a business, and the year is 2009, it doesn't take me too much juice to work out that it was established in 1909. Putting both pieces of information in the headline is surpassed in redundancy only by the ill-deserved exclamation point. And all that aside, it makes no logical sense, does it? If you've been bringing me bargains for a hundred years since 1909(!) then either you've warped the physical world into some magical ball of bargain-hunting timelessness, or you've actually been bringing me bargains since 1809.



I'm much more fun when I'm fractious, no?



Looking forward to Christmas now. My mam is baking cakes in preparation and no doubt doing the first of several turn-out-the-cupboards-and-wash-all-the-curtain-hooks OCD pre-festive cleans. My best friends from high school are planning our convergence on the same city for what tends to be only an annual event now we're all scattered. I bought an obscenely short dress today for the occasion, for nights out in Newcastle demand nothing less. Or more. Of my seven closest female friends from home, all but one will be married by the middle of next year. And that one is in a 4-year relationship. I really am inadvertently becoming a horrible walking cliche, some sort of Carrie Bradshaw-esque city dweller with more pairs of shoes than cubic feet and a string of fucked relationships shadowing her. It's become a joke that every time I'm home I seem to have a different boyfriend - my love life is referred to like episodes of Friends by my family: the Irish One, the Tall One, the Sociopathic One, the One with a Kid.



There, I have petted my peeves and will now eat noodles and watch several episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, for Netflix has enslaved me.

Going bananas

I left my apartment once this weekend, to go and buy groceries. I suppose I should be ashamed but I was wiped out and spent almost all my time lying under my duvet or watching stuff on Netflix. Feeling concerned that my fridge has contained nothing for the past 2 months but a single bottle of beer, a stick of butter and a jar of marmalade I can't get the lid off, it seemed prudent to stock up. I am becoming the quintessential New York woman. Once I start using the oven to store sweaters, you'll know I've flipped. I bought more beer, orange juice and bananas. Probably not going to give me many culinary options but it's all I can commit to with the hours I'm working. Anyway, aren't bananas bloody brilliant? Such clever little self-packaged nuggets of goodness.

I started taking some pills a couple of months ago to straighten me out and deal with my insomnia. They make me largely functional, which is a giant leap forward, but they have snuffed my zing. I can't write at all, don't get the little starbursts of ideas or lines of dialogue or general curiosity that I usually get a few times a day. So that's concerning, perhaps more so than the prospect of coming off the pills. It's a decision I'll have to make eventually, but for now I need the chemical crutch in order to be operational and lucid.

Dance

There's no need to talk about work anymore. Last couple of posts cover that. This weekend I'm trying to stretch after being crunched up in a tight little ball of responsibility, exhaustion and depression for a few weeks. Last night I saw 'Where The Wild Things Are' with Mel. I don't recall reading any reviews of it so I don't know what general opinion is, but we both loved it. Chatting in a bar afterwards, when someone asked me what it was like, I said that from the moment he lands on the island, I had the feeling I get in dreams, and especially used to get when I was younger, when the dream isn't strictly lucid but there's a cloud of your conscious self sitting over everything that's happening, saying, "This isn't going to last. I'm going to wake up. I need to absorb this and enjoy it," and it makes the dream feel so precious. It's not an especially happy story, it's sometimes scary and ultimately rather melancholy, rather world-weary, but even at the saddest moments you feel that special-ness, you grasp that this is an experience to be indulged and cherished. One of my favorite books when I was little - still one of my favorite books now - is The Secret Garden, for the same reason. A chance for a child to have something absolutely for him or her. I guess that's what makes Peter Pan so compelling, too. So I loved the movie.

We had drinks in the East Village with a bunch of people, then went to a club and danced for hours. I did ballet when I was little, then from the age of fifteen I was out clubbing in Newcastle, then Oxford, then London (a lot), then finally here. I am a big subscriber to the theory of the healing power of dancing your ass off. Haven't been going out so much this last year, but last night was medicinal. Lovely people, not too much booze, lots of esteem-building attention, home very late and falling into bed feeling deliciously worn out. I need to start doing that more; I think it may be what kept me sane for such a long time. It's pure happiness, self-indulgence, goodwill to all who surround you. The link between mentally letting go of the week and physically shaking it from your person is undoubtedly very strong.

Was supposed to clean my apartment today. Instead I had a 4-hour brunch with Frank, one of the few people with whom I can keep an almost headache-inducingly rapid and sprawling conversation going for what seems to be an unlimited time. I remember in Ohio last year we were both sleeping in the basement of the delegate's house and I could never remember quite when we'd gone to sleep, could only assume that we quite literally talked ourselves into subconsciousness with no "well, good night then" hard stop.

Reclusive

At least when it comes to blogging. I'm not very interested in myself or much else so it's difficult to find things to write. There's normally something that's intriguing me, but right now my only function is to be very good at my job, which I'm doing, just it's emptying me of all value. Feel capable but hollow. I worked 18 hours every day last week, and this week is only marginally better. On Thursday night I went out with some people from work for the first time in forever and had a pretty good time: I was tired but needed to let off steam, to detach from sobriety and the Blackberry for a few hours, and sometimes it's best to be with people who have a grasp of what your job's like so it's okay to sit around looking a bit stunned or complaining. Saturday was Hallowe'en. I felt ill-disposed and irritable, too many parties and taxis and friends wanting to meet up, then the group I was with got steadily wasted while I stayed inexplicably sober. It wasn't a terrible night, just more effort than I'm prone to expelling, and I've been feeling sad for a while and found it hard to shake that off. We did look fabulous, though. They may as well rename it Halloslut.

This weekend will be proper time with proper friends. Business trips to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Thailand are all possibly clustering together over the next month or so. If I can time them with weekends it could be good. My parents are here in a couple of weeks, too. I simply cannot imagine them in this city, will.not.compute.

This time last year I was in Ohio working like a robot on the Obama campaign. I felt at the time, and still do now, that it was one of the best weeks of my life. Such purpose and camaraderie and hope mingled with terror. It's been a quick year.