Flickr is an amazing thing. For some reason or other I didn’t have an account until today, even though I do take a lot of pictures and it’s a great back-up for when your computer crashes. Like mine did last week. I ran around like a headless chicken for approximately two minutes and sixteen seconds, uttering the f- and c-words in an intermittent stream of cursing El Gran Hombre so many times my soul is now definitely damned. I carried my laptop off to the nearest computer shop and waited in agony for two days. All my pictures, documents, films, series…could have been lost! What was I supposed to do now instead of reading through all my old Words documents I made in secondary school? Where was I to find nostalgia now?
Lucky as I was, they were able to retrieve all my data, so I could expand my vocabulary from ‘fuck’ to a whole host of other words, and I have started uploading quite a few pictures to Flickr. So I present thee: Kate’s photo stream! There aren’t a great deal of pictures on there yet, but there will be more to come over the months. Yay!
Flickr. September 11, 2008
Books. June 10, 2008
Starting with stating the obvious, it is incredibly hard to choose a favourite something. Can I name my favourite food? No. I can say what I will retch at, namely praline, but there are too many things I would love to eat before they sink me in a muddy hole. Can I name my favourite song? Again, I have to confess I can’t. My idea of torture, though, I can give you: a lifelong sentence of, say, Children of Bodom interspersed with Cascada would do the trick.
So when I tried to make a list of my favourite books, I knew it would be Mission Impossible:IV. The list kept growing longer and longer, and I felt compelled to add almost every good book I have ever read. But as I hate those ’Top Ten Books You Should Read’ lists, because they make you feel guilty for not having read anything by Ian McEwan, and they keep pushing the same revered old dusty shit at you, I am not even going to make any suggestions. No “you should read this because…”. No “society will label you a dumb fuck if you don’t read…”. Just a list, not exhaustive in the least, of a couple of books I love.
Umberto Eco – ‘The Name of the Rose’: absolutely awesome in the original sense of the word.
Douglas Coupland – ‘Life After God’: bloody damn great.
James Jones – ‘From Here To Eternity’: I fell in love with Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the main character.
Takashi Matsuoka – ‘Cloud of Sparrows’: beautifully written doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Nelson DeMille – ‘Gold Coast’: nothing like a good thriller once in a while.
Adelheid van Beuningen – ‘Terentia’: I love history.
Gabriel García Márquez – ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’: still, I have an irrational hate for the main character.
Robert Louis Stevenson – ‘The Master of Ballantrae’: Stevenson is one of my favourite authors.
Bernard McLaverty – ‘The Anatomy School’: utterly compelling.
C.J. Sansom – ‘Sovereign’: a detective AND history in the same book? I am bound to love it.
J.R. Tolkien – ‘The Hobbit’: I read this in one go, couldn’t put it down.
Brett Easton Ellis – ‘Glamorama’: very interestingly written, I like the way he shifts perspectives.
Jane Austen – ‘Pride & Prejudice’: must-read classic?
Zadie Smith – ‘White Teeth’: I have read it countless times.
Albert Camus – ‘L’Étranger’: vraiment fascinant.
J. D. Salinger – ‘The Catcher in the Rye’: what can I say? I read it every year, now shoot me.
And one book that I have just started on and is definitely going to end up on this list: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. His writing style, use of language and play with words are enough to keep me from my work.
Serenity now. June 6, 2008
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
I would rather give them to the morningbright person who came up with that saying and see how he would get along. When lemons come in the shape of Arabic vocabulary, it is just that tad bit harder to add some sugar, stir and gulp it down as if it were an amazing thirst quencher.
Bitching and whining aside, I have got exactly seven more minutes to get my lazy bum off this chair and get to work, so what better than to start my day with some wishful escapism in the form of music.
As some of you might know, Admiral Freebee is one of my favourite artists, and his ‘Mediterranean Sea’ is one of my favourite songs.
Maybe because I have trouble staying in one place for too long – the song reminds me of the countless lazy travels I had, evoking sounds and smells that contrast sharply with those of work and stress. Cars rushing by, my nervous tapping on the keyboard, the smell of a recently run shower and the scraping sound of a knife buttering toast…all pushed away for a blissful moment, replaced by the smell of dusty, dry, hot summer air and the sound of curled up leaves crinkling under my feet.
I am glad that I can be off travelling again in a couple of weeks; I am happy as long as I am moving. Sometimes the feeling of going somewhere is just as satisfactory as actually being in a place other than home. I suppose it is a kind of restlessness stemming from wanting to leave it all behind for a while. And once in a while I can indulge in this escapism through music, saving myself the packing of bags and the emptying of my piggy bank. I am going to stare at this picture of our holiday last year for a bit, wishing I was there and not here:
And now, off to work it is.
In Rainbows. May 2, 2008
Zero dark thirty and I have just finished baking the second cake in two days. Another side effect of caffeine, then. I am slowly building up my coffee addiction again, just in time for the exams. That’s me, practical as ever!
I am watching Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, and I have a whole host of stimulant-induced questions: when did Robert Downey Jr. get so fricking hot? Was the person that designed Ross’s tie on hallucinants? How much would I pay to touch Michael Aspel’s perfect hair? The answers have to be: ‘five minutes ago’, ‘do you even have to ask’ and ‘at least twelve pounds’.
Sadly, Gwyneth Paltrow is boring me a little, so maybe if I quickly change channels to National Geographic I will be just in time to catch the conclusion of Aircrash Investigation or something. I think the conclusion will be ‘yada yada yada and thus, it crashed’. Well, eff me. Highly surprising.
Also, on a completely different note, I saw the prettiest rainbow since…well, the last prettiest rainbow I saw. I think it was Wednesday, it was pissing down with rain like the bloke up in the sky was an incontinent drunk, and I was getting pretty annoyed about having to cycle through it multiple times. But then the sun came out and I got this view from my room:
It would have been nice if the pictures actually matched up.
If you look hard enough, you can see it was a double rainbow, and both were full arcs. I was going to call my homeboy in Mobile, Alabama to tell him there might be leprechauns, and thus gold and/or crackheads, but the rainbows had faded already. I Guess I missed out on two pots of gold. Damn, there goes ‘how to get rich’ plan A. “If that was plan A”, you ask, “then what on earth is plan B?”. If I tell you, I will have to kill you. AlI I can say is that it involves a yeti and George Bush. Don’t even ask about plan C.
Writing playlist. April 3, 2008
I had to do some writing for some thing or other today, and I made myself this playlist, titled ‘not quite the ubiquitous requisite fifty’
(somehow I found that sounds really nice, doesn’t matter if it actually makes sense or not):
Some pretty mushy songs in there, huh. Michael Bublé? Robbie Williams? John Mayer? What was I thinking.
I am sticking with all the other choices, though. Number 21 always knocks the air out of my lungs a bit.
Number 39 is one of my all-time favourites, and the next one is just hauntingly beautiful.
And for those of you who have never listened to ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’: check it out sometime. Be sure to listen to the MTV Unplugged one, too - pretty amazing.
Yael Naim I also love: brilliant songs, and she sings in Hebrew as well; best way to learn and so much more fun than studying lists of vocabulary – those lists make me shudder involuntarily.
Basically, just give the songs you don’t know a listen, there might be a few you actually like. Number 2 is really popular now; I saw Adele featured on a BBC2 show called ‘Sound’ quite a while back performing Hometown Glory, and wow, does she know how to carry a tune.
By the way, number 35 is just breathtaking.
How white. January 13, 2008
Yesterday I injured myself making pesto. The whitest thing to happen. It is white enough to make your own pesto when you are not italian, and it is even whiter for the maiming of a body part to be involved.
I almost imagine myself as an upper middle class housewife mingling with the high society, dahling.
“Oh, I always make my own. I find it much more pleasing, the whole experience to pop down to the farmers’ market and buy organic basil, organic pine nuts from the Levant and the purest extra virgin olive oil you can get — it just feels like Tuscany in my kitchen, which reminds me of that holiday when Lady Smith-Hughes and I embarked on such an adventure! This charming casa up on the hill, and the charming village at the bottom…I learned a great deal from the inhabitants, they are so hands on, they know the secret of real food. An endearing elder lady shared her recipe for the richest pesto — oh, but I am wandering off!”
So here is a picture of the maimed body part in all its clumsy middle-class glory:
My ring finger! Covered in gauze! Oh, lawd.
It could be the result of any white accident: getting your fingers between the door of your Audi A4, having it struck by a tennis ball when you were thirty – love ahead in the deciding set, spilling a piping hot expresso over it, and even getting caught in the reins of your horse when going from a gentle trot to full gallopping pace.
Thanks be to Jebus that I am not an upper middle class housewife, but a student living in a cramped room in a building shared with twenty-five other people, and that I have microwaved lasagna on a regular basis. Nothing like white flabby cheese on top of generic bolognese sauce.
