Douglas Adams would love this.

On a completely random note, I was watching Project Runway for the umpteenth time and I have decided to give up atheism and adhere to the church of the living and breathing god that is Tim Gunn. I will follow your wisdom blindly, Tim. I will make it work.

Yesterday I went to Aldi with my mother. I hadn’t been to an Aldi since I was eleven and still harboured a love for their breakfast cereal and ice tea. To be honest, I still love all the shit they sell. There is nothing like a Leo bar that goes by the name of Olé and thus saving you as much as Tadjikistan’s GNP of the last century. You can get two pounds of potato croquettes for 50p there for Pete’s sake, that is cheap even by Zimbabwean inflation – which, by the way, is over 250 million percent; it is even estimated at eight quintillion by a man named John Robertson. That is 8 000 000 000 000 000 000. Damn.
Anyway, mum wanted to get a product that was on offer, and consequently, that product wasn’t there. They had most likely made it so cheap it went into negative price, so you would get money for taking it home with you. Queue up society’s Harpagons and Rab C. Nesbitts. So we are standing there, in the middle of an extremely busy Aldi, when we spot a shoddy pile of cardboard boxes. “Ugh. How very Aldi.”  All you see is a yellow tile floor bathed in a sickly brown fluorescent light, littered with shit Aldi sells. Shit that is arranged into artful piles according to the main ingredient: sugar, milk or alcohol. Your gaze roams over the boxes and you wonder if this is what hobo heaven looks like. Probably not, as the boxes are filled. A main requisite in the elyseum of homelessness would be that they are empty. If the boxes are full, were would hobos sleep? A full-box afterlife would probably be hobo hell.

Probably the only Aldi with shelving.

But hark! What does my roaming eye spy? Wine! There are litres and litres of a certain very good Italian wine on sale. Wine that would cost you well over twenty-five quid at Oddbins. We go straight for the wine, pick up a bottle and head for the check-out. A route that takes us past the bargain bin, and what do we find there? Matches! A hundred for 10p! *Swipe* goes mum. Now we are close to the check-out, and to the flower stand. God, is there anything more pathetic and forlorn than supermarket flowers? Apart from having bought them for cheering yourself up while spending your Christmas with a Bernard Matthews meal and a christmas cake for one? No. Ok, maybe Gordon Brown on a down day. He just looks so sad, like a big St. Bernard behind a fogged-up, slobbered-over car window.
But back to the flowers. Mum decided to buy a bouquet. Now we had a shopping trolley that contained: one bottle of wine, a box of matches and red roses. Just conjure up that mental image for a minute. It is terribly heartwrenching.
When we left and I got the purchases out of the trolley, I felt like I was a bloke that had just shopped in preparation of a cheap date. Nothing like “I am only really hoping to get laid, you can forget expensive gifts, so have these slightly wilted supermarket flowers and a bottle of wine. No, it’s not from Waitrose. And oh, some matches. It was an afterthought. What do you mean, chocolates? That’s hardly original. I am original. Now, couch or bed?” It was a bit like that time I went to the supermarket for a courgette and a bottle of vodka at 4pm.
So I was standing there in the dim glow of a streetlight, waiting for mum to bring around the car, clutching that bottle of wine, and I felt a bit like Ricky Gervais as David Brent at the Office’s christmas party. So very sad. Later I watched Dara O’Briain: Live at the Apollo and the world was alright again. But now I know that if I were a man without hope, I would probably shop at Aldi.

I got out the Olympus again this month, and so far this is what I have come up with (not very hi-res due to resizing):

I am being haunted by Van Morrison and Led Zeppelin. In the last three days, I have been ’skipping the light fandango’ in the cinema, in front of the tv and to my brother’s iTunes. I have bought at least four stairways to heaven.
Is it just me or does the snow make people melancholy, burrowing themselves in comfy cinema seats or worn sofas, absentmindedly munching popcorn and floating away on the soaring bars of ‘and so it was that later…’ ? ‘Tis the season to be merry? Nay, ’tis the season to be cocooning with a whole box of Cadbury Cream Eggs. ‘Tis also the season to wrap those classic songs around you like a soothing winter blanket, it seems. Or that is what the radio stations seem to think, at least. I agree.

Staring out at the yellow-grey air I frankly don’t want to do anything other than skipping the light fandango and turning cartwheels across the floor. I want to have Van Morrison making me just a tad bit sad and wistful, and I want to buy a stairway to heaven when I walk outside in the crisp snow, with ink-black sky above me and puffs of breath swirling around me. I also want to sink to the ground amidst the downy white covering and listen to the stillness of a late cold night while staring up at the streetlights.
Even though I want all of this, you will still find me inside, cradling my coffee infused with fabulous Orkney whisky, staring up at the snow flakes falling down until they seem to be falling up. And then I get melancholy. And then all I want is to watch her face turn a whiter shade of pale.

I think alcohol doesn’t exactly kill brain cells. It renders them temporarily inactive through a vodka-induced stupor, and it isn’t until you get embarrassing flashbacks of the night before that you realize alcoholic dementia doesn’t last and the bloody brain buggers are still alive. Damn you, vodka shots, you promised me oblivion and all I got was severe dehydration and a sudden craving for chicken tikka masala five hours later. And yet, I seem to be the worst recalcitrant. How I look forward to an English fry-up at three in the afternoon! How my body craves caffeine to the point that I end up shaking on my feet and being directed towards the coffee machine by pure muscle memory lest I forgo my daily dose!
A drunk student’s resolutions go straight down the nearest gutter with his lamb korma. Many a hard-working office employee have I seen losing his dignity along with five pints of lager, two bitters, a packet of crisps and some roasted peanuts. What drives one to involuntarily showing the contents of his stomach, his genitals and/or his middle finger to all passers-by? Why does it seem like such a good idea to tell the police to kiss yer arse, ye bunch of fookin’ tossers?

Deserted streets – the only way home.

What feels like a medal of honour at two a.m. is a dunce hat and a badge of shame in your eleven a.m. morning class or your two o’clock business meeting. Bessie mates from the night before only vaguely remember having shared a spontaneous acapella performance of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, and to be quite frank, don’t want to be reminded. There goes the only moment of chummy nostalgia.
When backpacks or neat ties replace the conspicuous stains on your clothes, tales will already have spread far and wide and no respectable average or recommendation can stop them. Only one solution then: begrudgingly admit to shameful behaviour and exploits of the night past, or look for people that revel in the praise and glory nights on the town earn them. You won’t feel at home in either group of people. You feel like a pariah in the first, and like an IQ-divested primate in the second. Maybe there is another solution: laying off the drink. But will a fry-up ever taste so good again?

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!

Jetlagged and suffering from a ludicrously bad head cold, I have uploaded the pictures I took during my travels on the US East Coast. I will update my blog with more read-worthy stuff later, but for now, this is all I can manage. I need a bed. Or a doctor. Or maybe both.

I just got back from Salzburg, where among many other things, I had the chance to try out my new camera. It doesn’t have numerical reflex and it is really only good for taking lovely holiday snaps, but I did manage to take some pretty good pictures with it. (For information on Salzburg, visit Pack Your Bags)

Boredom can lead to the most exciting things. More often than not, though, it leads to more boredom. Yesterday, of a kind that caused me for reasons beyond myself to trot down in heels to the shopping street in the moderate Western European heat, through throngs of tourists, fat people gobbling down burgers and slopping ketchup on the pavement, and fans of our version of ITV, who swamped the city centre to participate in an Ugly Betty look-alike contest. I am convinced that half of them didn’t even have to dress up. A perfect day. I decided to pass the time holed-up reading on my roof. Logically, I had to procure some reading material, but the 2006 Chinese calendar on our loo door had gotten a bit repetitive.

Ready for some excitement, I may have subconsciously embarked on a suicide mission going through the city centre on a Saturday, with more chance of success than actually strapping on a couple of pounds of Semtex, and giving the detonator to a Parkinson patient racing down a Polish secondary road in a ruddy wheelchair held together by the elastic of your ninety-four-year old neighbour’s panties.

I found myself in the English Literature department of a well-known retailer that sells anything from MacBooks to maps of Anantanarivo and Bin Laden’s hide-out. The place was crowded, the air was stuffy and whenever I turned myself in a particular direction I got a whiff of bad breath coming from a man perusing a Chuck Palahniuk book.
The world being quite discontent that it hadn’t yet peeved me off sufficiently so I would whack Guanobreath in the face with a tome of the collected works of William Shakespeare, it decided to make me realize that every single person in the English Literature department, apart from me, was male. And all men were sporting proud paunches from indulging in too much foie gras and Merlot, with puffy red faces and sweat stains that would have a pregnant woman stare in astonishment. It made the ‘chick-lit’ section completely redundant. Not that naming the section ‘chick-lit’ hadn’t already done so. Or the fact that the books on the shelf looked like a giant My Little Pony advertisement smattered with an extra dose of glitter and curly writing for good measure.
But back to the males inducing asexuality in an otherwise perfectly functioning young woman. I felt rather out of place, especially when two of them caught me looking at the Lee Child ‘Jack Reacher’ series. I felt like I was to be dragged out onto the town square after having my birth marks prodded with a hot needle and being declared a witch, to be burned at the stake for overstepping the boundaries of the flailing-testosterone section that English Literature seems to be. For God’s sake, it is a blooming thriller series, not a copy of Martin Luther’s manifesto.

His image is forever linked with the word ’smorgasbord’.

Then I picked up the sequel to Jeremy Clarkson’s “The World According to Clarkson”. Guanobreath had noticed I was looking at the sequel, thus rightly deducing I had read the first one, his eyes going more bloodshot in wonderment, a trickle of sweat dangling from his nose. This had more men hearding around the Clarkson books. Maybe a collective “don’t let the woman near it” reaction. Just as we are not to go near cars, lawnmowers, barbecues and camping gas bottles. For fear we might set them afire with our oestrogen levels.
Or maybe I am seeing this all wrong and I had just barged in on “The Middle-class Gascony Lovers’ Secret and Inconspicuous Bi-weekly Meeting around the Clarkson Books”. It would be like crashing a Freemason’s lodge in nineteenth-century Belgium wearing nothing but a shawl emblazoned with ‘Capitalisme, Dieu et Roi’. Rather out of place.
I think I might have redeemed myself a little with picking up ‘On Chesil Beach’ – did you know that you are more likely to get ostracized for not reading anything by Ian McEwan than if you were a guest at a WI garden party in Somerset and mistook guava chutney for mango? I once accidentally did so, and I must say, Royal Doulton makes for bloody nice ostraca. That said, I do much prefer the Clarice Cliff; more practical and I would feel like I had actually contributed something to society – I would instantly have cured half of the UK’s pensioners of cataract caused by staring at ugly lumps of moulded, glazed and overpriced clay. It would also blow most bingo hall frequenters’ pension plan to smithereens, but I’d say you would be better off to keep going at bingo. You might not win enough money to pay for your plastic hip and Eau de Formaldehyde, but you will have fun dying at Harborne’s Gala Bingo.
But I digress. After another bad-breath dousing hitting me with the full force of a Cape Good Hope gale, I scurried past the guts of men ogling Will Self’s “The Butt” towards the check-outs – where I had to queue behind a bloke who most likely went by the name of Gazza, his chip shop smell somewhat covered by Jean-Paul Gaultier’s “Le Male”, buying a book on sex. Look here, mate, if you smell like fish fingers – and look like them, too – you are going to need more than a book. I’d say start with some kitchen roll to mop up the excess grease.

I did end up buying afore-mentioned Clarkson sequel, and I have just finished reading it. Now, if you would excuse me, I feel the sudden need to piss off some environmentalists and shoot up some wily foxes, preferably in Surrey.

Now, does he?

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.

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.

Every time I come home, our garden looks different. Yesterday was I greeted by a plethora of poppies where only a week before there was a sea of blue and yellow irises.
I confiscated my dad’s camera again (until he finds out where exactly I have muffled it away), and here are some of the results of lying sprawled across cobblestones to get the right shot:

If only I were a little better at this photography lark; these pictures don’t really do our garden justice, but you get the gist.

You all know them. You have all at least once directed words at them pertaining to the ‘one that performs lone sexual acts’ category. Tosser seems to do it, quite often. You have repeatedly given them the death stare while clenching your steering wheel in a death grip to keep from overtaking them in the wrong lane.

I am talking about the Middle Lane Hogger.

This special subspecies of man exists solely for the purpose of annoying the shit out of you. There are two types: those who shouldn’t be allowed on the motorway because they live to instill road rage in their fellow drivers, and those who just shouldn’t be allowed on the motorway full stop. Both of them have a tendency to drive people-carriers, Vauxhall or Renault being favourites, preferably decorated with stickers, those sun shade-y things they seem only to give away with double packs of Johnson’s Baby Oil, and at least one fluffy animal staring at you from the back of their vehicle of doom. There are of course many others, such as the Suzuki-driving granny, or the single middle class man who really shouldn’t have bought that Audi RS4 because he just had to remortgage his flat, and now he is afraid to damage his piece of german überness made for tearing down hairpin roads in the Alps. Point is, I just had an encounter with the first kind: the people-carrier driver. More about that later.

 
A tad bit too extreme?

How to recognize type A, i.e. the full-blown ‘yes, I carry a box of Kleenex with me all the time and it isn’t because I am very emotional’ tosser, from type B, i.e. ‘yes, I carry a box of Kleenex with me all the time because our youngest/my Cocker Spaniel shits all over the seats’?
Because, my friends, type A always makes that fatal mistake of looking smug. He might even point to his lovely pine-scented air freshener in the shape of a teddy bear’s head dangling from the rear-view mirror to let you know that he does have the whole family car theme thing covered. He is armed and prepared. Poised to strike. You were thinking of switching lanes? Well, you can forget about that and just nicely crawl along behind that lorry, because the Middle Lane Hogger has got you boxed in. That is what you get for always nicely moving back to the slow lane.

Only two hours ago did I have the pleasure of encountering a Middle Lane Hogger. I was nicely cruising along, singing along to Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’ only to shut up after noticing my dad’s discomfort. I was minding my own business on the motorway, when all of a sudden I spot a black Vauxhall Zafira. Shit. Bumper sticker. And a learners’ L. A young man, about my age, with his mother.
Now, here I have to mention that I myself was driving a Vauxhall Zafira (new series, loaded with dad’s stuff from work) with a learners’ L in the back. But! But, before you say I am a pot calling a kettle black, hear me out.
If I would ever dare to hog the middle lane, my dad would glare, point to the slow lane, and make a lesson out of it. This young man’s mother just sat there staring at the cars that were passing them by on either side. She was basically encouraging him to keep hogging the shit out of that strip of tarmac.
I overtake him, not even having to go above the speed limit. For fifteen minutes, I could see him in my rear-view mirror, falling further back but holding just about everyone up. Meanwhile, I am still sticking to the rules of proper driving. Then, all of a sudden, this tosser comes speeding by – in the middle lane, of course. Now it was personal. How very dare he. The impertinence. He had boxed me in and I had to fall back, get around him again and carefully move back to the slow lane. He didn’t give up though, and kept hogging. He had just done as much as flipping me off with his behaviour. I was about to turn this into a petty pissing contest, but luckily for him, I had to get off at the next junction. I hope someone else stole his victory away from him. I hope someone else shook their head in a ‘tsk tsk’ motion at his mother.

Now, don’t lie to me and tell me you wouldn’t at least get a tad bit annoyed. Maybe you would even engage in some moral finger pointing yourself, never endangering other drivers like the tosser who feels the need to take the piss out of a rule that is understood by every normal driver: don’t. hog. the. middle. lane. Ever.
So to prepare those new to driving, some good nigh-on scientific literature: How Motorways Work.

All I can say is: you won’t win, Middle Lane Hogger. You won’t win. The middle road isn’t always a compromise.

It is that time of year again when exams are upon everyone happily – or not very much so - trotting along in the education system that is university. I have ploughed through what is not even a fraction of what I am supposed to be struggling through, but I think it is safe to say that we all know that feeling.
When you know everything should speed up and you are supposed to go into highly-caffeinated, sleep-deprived mode, but you fail to do so and everything just slows down. You, others, the world around you. Oodles and oodles of time, when the air is warm and comfortable and sleep lulls on the breeze like a song tinkling from a music box – so very captivating and enchanting.
If not for that calendar on my wall that stares at me with angry red numbers, I would stay in this eerie calm forever, have the hours seemlessly tick away into summer like time unmarked. The soft hum in the back of my head that I recognize as panic and stress has not yet made its way to the surface, and therein lies the harm that carries the eye of the storm.
For the life of me, I cannot concentrate; so it is to spending hours and hours of browsing whatever I can browse I turn, anything to take my mind off the impending exams. Leaping from one thing to the next, and this time I have ended up on literature. That seems to happen more often than not.
I feel quite melancholic, hence the highly dramatic content of the following snippets.

N’enquerrez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, ne de cest an
Q’à ce refrain ne vous remaine
Où sont les neiges d’antan?

~

Nulla rosa est.

~

On the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

~

Et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

~

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silenced and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crow black, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

~

It is too late now to retrieve
A fallen dream, too late to grieve
A name unmade, but not too late
To thank the gods for what is great:
A keen-edged sword, a soldier’s heart
Is greater than a poet’s art.
And greater than a poet’s fame,
A little grave that has no name.

~

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

~

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

~

I am armed with more than complete steel – the justice of my quarrel.

~

And a word of courage (or rather despair) to those who feel like the stacks of books are only getting higher:

Priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre.

Pretty rough if you are an atheist like me.

Yes! I am going to the US!

I have been wanting to go for ages, but unless I was going to hide on some cargo ship and hope for a hole in the fence at US customs, it was never going to happen. I got really lucky, though!
No, really, thanks to all my hard work and starving myself in order to save some money, I have accumulated enough dollars to make the trip across the pond. Blessings unto thee, Sir Richard Branson, for providing such cheap flights.
The East Coast is the place I be at chilling, from Boston all the way down to Charlotte, NC. Word.
Now, here are some childhood dreams that I absolutely have to experience:

The Statue of Mother-effing-Liberty!
The Empire State Building!
Dunkin’ Donuts!
TGIFriday’s!
Kool-Aid!

Oh, man. I am going to have such a good time.

What do you do when you have got a paper due in under twenty-four hours? Exactly: nothing. I didn’t know you could get writer’s block on a paper; bother for me! Meh, no stress, I will finish it tonight. I might even get ’round to doing some other stuff for university; stare at books, maybe arranging them in stacks, line them up. Scribble down a few words, underline. Nothing like feeling productive without actually being it: fulfillment at its best!

Yesterday I took out my bike and went cycling, just because. The weather is still absolutely wonderful, and it is pretty pointless sitting inside and doing fuck-all, so I figured I could go waste time outside. I had no set destination, but intuitively I cycled towards childhood memories. The problem is that by returning to those places that gave birth to my memories, you add to them or alter them, leave them with just a little bit less of their perfectness. The neighbourhood I grew up in, the routes I used to cycle with my parents, the places I used to pass on my way to my family…It is the same but not at all the same. Eventually I ended up on the cemetery and in front of the farm that is the cradle of my childhood. Wistful.

Black: childhood. Blue: what ruined it from age seven. I hate you with a passion, tomato factories.

It is rather sad when you don’t have one, but two graves to visit in the same cemetery at not even twenty years of age. Being confronted with death on such a beautiful day was all my own doing of course, and it is not like I am the only person in the world to have ever lost someone. Two is nothing. But the fact that I lost the people most dear to me, that is what really cuts me up. All pain is relative and time heals all wounds – the stoic who really believes that might want to protect their most private parts, I have a pretty fierce kick.
It is just one of these truths in life that are not true at all – if it is a comforting lie, well, then it fails to accomplish its goal.
You see, I am very rational, practical and calculated to the point of machiavellian, all for ‘the show must go on’. The queen of the blank, arrogant face. A blatant liar. But I could never tell another person to his face that wounds will heal. Sure, scar, dull, but never really heal. Time might numb pain, but it still feels like a remote, throbbing ache.
And in a way, I find that ache more comforting than being devoid of any memory or feeling of an inflicted wound. Maybe it is just me, but I rather live with that pain and never forget, than be left with a perfectly smooth surface. Perfectly smooth surfaces aren’t even devoutly to be wished. That is what makes calamity of so long life. It is more soothing being able to return to that small kernel of grief and to blow it up beyond proportion when you feel like it. When you feel like you need to feel. You don’t have to blank it out, like so many other things. You guessed it, I would rather bear those ills I have than fly to ones I know not of. I will be a coward, then.
Also, part of me should really have been born just before the turn of the twentieth century – I can be the epitome of spleen sometimes.

We have a very small garden, but it’s chock-full of goodies. We even have a pond with a fountain – one metre diametre. It has one fish in it.
Here are some of the beautiful sights to behold in our tiny piece of what should be considered a garden, but is just a very carefully coordinated and yet slightly overgrown patch of earth.

   
 
Seeing the pictures put together like this, it all looks rather garish, but I like our garden nonetheless.

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.

Another lazy day, and as I am student, I of course have fuck-all to do. If I was taking a major in ’sitting on my arse all day with interludes of strolling through the city, engaging in light physical activity and food gathering at the local supermarket’, I would graduate magna cum laude. And still, I pass all of my exams with mostly very good grades. I baffle myself sometimes.
So what do I do? Read, listen to music, watch films, write, be out and about. I always have the intention to do something productive, but then I get distracted and I am left watching half a season of Scrubs. Somehow I think I cannot keep affording the luxury of doing fuck-all. Meh. I will worry about that later. When it is too late.

While honing my skills in ‘fuck-allery’, I stumbled onto a goldmine of Twilight icons on ONTD. Trust them to make me say things like ‘lmao, omg! lolz!’ out loud.
And as the interwebs is made for sharing, I shall share with thee icons! And pictures! And giggles!
Somehow, I love doing these Twilight-related posts – any excuse will do to post some more Rpattz, am I right?

The best for last:

Flipping dazzling.