failed writer

Fuck's sake!

I had such plans, such dreams, such visions of the amazing volumes of work I was gonna churn out this summer. Did you know that i'm related to William Thackaray? Yeah not by blood! By marriage! Thats why he writes Vanity fair in two weeks and it takes me a summer to fart a book review for the school paper, half a poem and a first draft of a short story. What is wrong with me? I was gonna write a fucking novel or something and instead I ended up spending four months of my life on dad's computer watching very heavily pixilated episodes of father ted on you tube.
On the plus side, there's the fanzine! Fuck now that's something I've put some effort into! I may never have children and in 50 years leave all my worldly possesions to a tattered old copy of 'scollops and bollocks' I hope people like it, I know I'm not supposed to care or be all spiritual or something and 'we are worms we could all die at any minute bla bla' but I hope someone gets something out of what i write like I got something out of Lucy Sweet's work. I still haven't got the guts to tell her she's my favorite hero so I just stole this from her blog instead.



ONE: Five Places you Have Lived

1) 13 Cyril Street: I lived in two houses during my childhood before settling into this one for almost 15 years but I hardly remember living in them let alone the address. We had some odd neibours like Sue and Columbus (I know! and I grew up thinking it was a normal name and the explorer was named after him) They had a son who I used to play with,he was alittl older than me so naturally I was very enamoured with him, he was the Aladin to my princess Jasmine, this makes little sense in the context that he would grow up to be a paedophile who the police removed from their house for having child porn on his computer.

2) 8 Darby road: This was the first proper house my dad lived in after my parents split up and it was all about the animals if I remember. I had a hamster with the personality of Cinque from Armistad 'give us us free!'. He had such will to better itself and be more than a hamster in a cage that he kept escaping from his cage and trying to fend for himself, once he lived behind the bathtub like a wild mouse for three weeks and my dad found it blue nosed and half suffocated in the draw we kept the bin bags in. Then he broke his leg trying to escape another time and had to have it chopped off. My dad missed a very important lecture if i remember rightly waiting at the vets with my hamster. The third time he escaped the lodger's cat got him poor bastard, he probably would have had a happy ending if we had lived in the country rather than a peg leg.

3)8 Watkin Terrace: My dad got dinky flat off one of his rich student friends and has lived there ever since. It became very multicultural over the past five years with it's polish food sections and Indian bakeries with jilebes in the window. Which is just what you want when you were a quiet teenage shut away who wanted nothing more than for brooklyn to sprout up from betwen the cracks of the pavement and save her from boredom as her home town collapsed into an unrecognisable melting pot of crime, prostitution and low rent so she could walk around pretending she lived in a Spike Lee film. Y'know, teenagers are selfish like that.

4) Orchard House: This is where my mum, stepdad and sister moved about three years ago to, I only lived there properly for a year and a half while I finished my a-levels before buggering off to the states a few weeks shy of nineteen to start smoking, lose my virginity and get offered my first writing job.It was this detatched 70s looking house that wouldn't look out of place as a bachelor house in the sunday times or Dirk Diggler's shag pad. It's on the poshest street in Northampton so it's full of racist golfers (it's unpc to talk about the darkies these days so now everything is those damn Poles fault!), Horses, Porshes, borderline alcoholics and eccentric self made millionaires who spend all their time playing with their remote controlled helecopters and 1/4 scale railways that go through their mansions.

5) 484 North street: My mum wouldn't let me live on my own in New York so when I finished my A-levels my Aunt invited me to go live with her in Connecticut, it's was my first proper grown up homewhere I had to pay rent and do my own food shopping. I worked several different jobs while I lived there, as a nanny, in a cafe and I only lasted one weekend at this horrible pancake house because it was so fast and confusing so I just stood there all day trying to look busy by wiping the maple syrup off the spout of the used syrup dispensers, this didn't fool the boss who gave me eighty dollars and wished me luck (silly woman, no way did I talk to enough customers to earn all those tips!)





TWO
What were you doing 10 years ago?

Trying to stare my boobs into growing hating all the girls at school with tits, wanting a boyfriend and hating all the girls on telly who had one, being a runner up in a girl talk magazine competition and winning a jewel hair mermaid barbie, Writing silly poems about my pet mice.

THREE
Name 5 things on your to-do list today

1. Sew the buttons back on my dress
2. Write some quizzes for my stepdad
3. Go to a seminar at 5pm
4. Go to punksoc, get someone to buy me a beer
5. Give my boyfriend a kiss

FOUR
What snacks do you like to eat?

Snuff, ginger snaps, cake, cake, any kind of cake, actually yeah just cake.

FIVE
If you were a billionaire...

What is it with all these 'if you were rich' questions? Is money all you selfish bastards can think of? I tell you what I'd do, I'd get some huge slaggy silicone tits like Lolo Ferrari and pay two short rugby players to walk in front of me all day carrying them above their heads as I kicked the homeless with my pearl encrusted jimmy choos.

Ladies

I think every young girl at some point in her lifetime ponders over whether or not she could ever be a lesbian...

I'm not so sure if I could handle it though,
I mean, what if I failed to satisfy them!



They'd fuckin rip me to shreds!

Filthy, delicious capitalism

Not that I'm turning into her or anything


But I really really really really want these things






to listen to






and these to wear

Why do you always needs things so intensely when you don't have any money.

There's this book called 'Down and out in Paris and London' George Orwell's first and he basically lives like a tramp in these two places to see what it's like. Theres this one bit where him and his friend have completely run out of money and are almost starving to death; all they want to do is write carefully planned imaginery menus with all their favorite foods on it, what they would order if they had any money. I know that feeling 'if I only had a hundred pounds I could buy this or that and then I would be satisfied. An it's wierd because you always know exactly what you would do when you dream of getting something which is slightly out of your reach finacially and you think you know that one thing will make you content.
That's how people get addicted to shopping, it's the adrenalin rush of 'this is the last thing I ever need to buy because it's going be your tool for accessing what you are currently barred from and when you do get it, it's going to totally change your life.' Particularly buying on credit because thats sort of a way of getting what you want without it really being yours at all.
I think that's why some rich people have horrible taste, because they have all this money and they forget about all the things they used to want so much or they are in the wrong context, they sort of sold their imagination.

Well, I do need some new summer stuff, that's my excuse anyway

xxx

Catchcup

It seems for the first time in my whole life, I have a reasonably decent sized rack.
I was in Topshop with my friend and she remarked that my boobs looked really big and it was then that I realised none of my bras really fit anymore, it just hadn't really registered.
So I went to Marks and Sparks and got fitted and I have officially gained a cup size
34c awwooooo!
Kinda cool, I've always been pair shaped but now I have a waist and boobs.

...I hope I haven't joined the pudding club!

fatty

I just ate a steak sandwich with cheese



Now I don't have to worry about riding my bike in a skirt.

I've just spent four days writing a poem about this chic!
Serious hard graft!

My grandma thinks it's quite good but that I should do a few more drafts. Some words don't fit the rhytm very well. Time to get out the thesaurus I think.

I'm going to enter it into some poetry competitions this summer, although I hope I don't win. The prize money would be nice, but I think that winning something so young would sort of make me give up because I would know how little I need to do in order to succed and that's depressing.
I get motivated by not getting things, it drives me to work alittle harder and do alittle better. The juice of such strife is me at my best, I think.

Sorry about the bad spelling, I've just been dancing my ass off to some rio baile block party music, in the style of Josephine Baker and I can hardly see straight.
Oh yeah, I forgot, no one actually reads this.

I'm going to loose ten pounds for summer, if my ass gets any bigger I'm going to have to rent two rooms in Auckland next year.

Roll on June, Kathleen, I'm gonna come get you, squeeze you and possibly never let you go!

sincerely
loaded on endorphins

Phoebe xxx

Pease pudding

Does anyone remember that nursery rhyme about pease pudding?

Pease pudding hot
pease pudding cold
pease pudding in the pot nine days old

some like it hot
some like it cold
some like it in the pot nice days old

mmm chopin would've have sweated blood from the stress if it'd been his job to write that one!

It was a very disturbing song to me as a child, because at first I thought it said 'please' pudding, but why would anyone ask to have pudding that had been cold and festering in a cooking pot for over a week. This led me to believe that it was a song about a horrible, tasteless 'alsorts' cassarole that working class victorian mothers would make by throwing anything they had into a big pot and simmering it into a grey, gruel-like mash with no nutritional content, serving the same purpose as polyfiller on a child's stomach. The song seemed to be some sort of children's anthem of defeatism, a way of making poverty and childhood somehow pleasant and normal.
"mmmm cold nine day old porrige again mum? Well thank God, some kids like cold pudding, some posh bastards like it heated up alittle, but not me, I like a pudding that has been caked to the bottom of a pan for atleast a week. What's for breakfast tomorrow? Another beating? AND a week in the broom cupboard! Oh mum!"

I had totally forgotten about this 'David Pelzer novel' of a song until a few days ago when I saw a product I never knew existed.



Apparently pease pudding is a sort of vegetable mash which comes in a can and is mostly found in the industrial towns in the middle of England. Intended to be served with meats such as beef or bacon, although the can suggests that you can also eat it in a quiche or dolloped on top of a scone.
I'm such a foreigner! I only tried cornedbeef hash a few months ago. Next I'll start talking in an American accent about how England is boring with wierd food and that Europe is so small that you can walk from France to Russia in a day.

Anyway I bought a can of pease pudding and I don't dare open it, it looks so old I feel like my mum has just sent me down the road with a farthing before school to get her three packs of cigarettes for the day and a can of pease pudding for dinner.

Errr I'll have mine hot with lots of salt and cheese please
xxx

Bad photo

There are unflattering photos, then there are confidence crushingly bad photos that take a day to get over, and then....


There are those photos that make you look so unhumane that you wonder why nobody has ever pointed out the flaming similarity between you and john goodman.



what....the...fuck!

If I'm going to look like I eat 6000 calories a day I might as well enjoy it, give my clothes to charity, put on a bin bag dress and eat myself into imperturbation.
As a start I'm going to go stick my head in a bathtub of lyle's golden syrup and eat my way out.

A change of skin

I was really bored the other day so I decided to dress up as my friend Haariet. She was staying at her boyfriend's house and always leaves her door open so I borrowed a blonde wig from Abbie, knicked some of harriets clothes that were lying around her room. As I painted my eyebrows ginger and practised various 'Harrietisms' in my mirror, I sent her a text explaining that a woman was in her room who was claimed to be her but I wasn't convinced.
She got such a fright when she opened her bedroom door.

Harriet



My crude imitation


It was wierd standing in her bedroom, trying on her clothes in her room, I creeped myself out a bit over how much I got into it, I think I even put alittle bit of her purfume on so I'd smell like her (eeeuughhhh!)
It reminded me of this bit in a novel I read called 'the scapegoat' by Daphne Du Maurier, about a french teacher who one day meets a man who looks exactly like him, they get drunk together and he wakes up in the morning in a strange hotel room to find the man has gone, taking the other mans things with him and leaving his own, essentially swapping his identity. The man has no choice but to wear the other man's clothes out of the hotel, and as he is dressing he describes how strange it is to suddely become somebody else simply buy wearing their clothes. He has an uncontrollable urge to take the other man's brush and style his hair in the same way and wear a bit of his cologne. I got a similar feeling in Harriets room, obviously I don't look like her but it does make you think, how much of a person's personality is dictated by their possesions, can you replace or replicate them simply by dressing and looking like them, or immitating their characteristics.

I never liked shakespeare at school but this makes me want to read Hamlet!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zEVZGuU3BU

vitamin d

Ahhhhh!
Can't you just feel the sunshine through the window, soaking into your bones and filling you with light? It makes me want to run down the hill and roll around in the sand.
Deeee-liteful.
I washed my cardigan and now it's all long and baggy, but it smells good, better than the convergience of numerous owners dead skin cells and musty charity shops that was it's former scent.
Zaf and I made coffee today, from scratch, he roasted some beans in a frying pan and then I ground them up in the antique hand bean grinder I got in Morocco, the smell was exellent! Then we made espresso out of it which was delicious.

One day, when I have a nice apartment, I'll grind coffee for my guests. That apartment currently resides in my head, but I look at it all of the time, It's very pretty!
Oh New York, one day I'll come back for you!



Love is frickin' awesome!

Have a lovely day my devotchkas, don't waste it!

Heath Ledger

It's strange how much stuff can happen in a week, particularly if that week is the space between your last exam and the start of your lectures, Heath Ledger dies, you have more boys in your life than fingers (two of which are stalking you) and you spend three consecutive nights on the piss. Everything is going too fast at the moment, I need to slow down and get my head back into books and regular sleeping and eating patterns or I'm gonna burn out and fuck up.
It's so exiting though, living so decadently, not giving a fuck and generally being bad. I've been such a nice wholesome girl my whole life and I'm so sick of it.

I think that my crisis can be best explained by a woman who Orson Wells once described as 'the most exiting woman in the world'



I'm so sick of nicey nice nice sickly, small talky chit chatty middle class nicey niceness and most certainly don't want anyone like that to be stalking me.
I want to do something with my life, and that wont happen if I fall into the trappings of just being a nice girl, nice girls are boring! The only reason they are nice in the first place is because they are told to be and remain nice because they receive complements for being nice, it's a bit like those prostitutes who can't escape because their pimps made them addicted to a drug of some sort.
I feel trapped by niceness, I'm a rude, dirty bitch and I don't care if that doesn't get me a husband or whatever because he wouldn't take me seriously if I was submissive anyway. Don't nice girls ever get curious, don't they ever get wonderlust? Don't they ever want more? I different life, something different. I don't want to be a beauty queen or a trophy wife, I want to be an eccentric, I want to have depth and anger and mood swings, I want to swear and argue and for that to be ok.
I also want to love people, I do, but I want to keep them safe and look after them, I want to say the right things and give good advice. Be a good sister, daughter, friend, student etc.

I'm not complaining, my life is pretty sweet at the moment. I just feel like I'm changing and I want different things. I don't want a nice, polite, shy boy. I want someone witty and sharp and pissed off like me.
Screw the steady relationships and sensible haircuts
Shave my head and give me a terrace house full of punks any day, that's where I can really be myself.

...omg shoes




I am having serious doubts about my intelligence, I've watched this Eleven times today, Elelven! and I still find it funny, Harriet is getting bored of my constant impressions. she looks like she wants betchslap my shetbeg face everytime I mention it. I also left a pin on the floor that she stepped on, whoops!
I'm going to watch battle royale on youtube because I haven't seen it in years and then curl up in bed with a cup of tea and my Nick Hornby paper back.
Goodnight my devotchkas
(That's Russian for "Betch!")