September 6, 2007
Tomorrow is my birthday.
Yesterday, I got fired.
Today, I started writing again - but if you want to know where I’ve gone, you’d better ask.
June 25, 2007
NYC SUCCESSFULLY MARRIES LESBIAN FRIENDS IN THE BIG CITY; MEANWHILE, MORGAN CONTINUES BRAVELY ON HER PATH TO TRIUMPH (PROFESSIONALLY) IN PUBLIC RELATIONS.
MORGAN FINDS UNEXPECTED HAPPINESS IN THE CORPORATE WORLD OF MEETING ROOMS, PIVOT TABLES, PREMIERES AND LUNCHES WITH TELEGRAPH JOURNALISTS.
NYC RETURNS SAFELY FROM NEW YORK, BUT A COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN LEAVES FRAUGHT ROMANCE HANGING IN THE BALANCE.
LESBIAN LOVERS REPAIR DAMAGE OF DISTANCE AND COMMIT TO ‘MAKING IT WORK’, BUT NYC SEEMS MORE HOMESICK THAN EVER.
MORGAN SECURES NOT ONE BUT TWO BANK ACCOUNTS, AND A VALID PASSPORT — OFFICIALLY MAKING HER A ‘PROPER PERSON’ IN THE EYES OF SOCIETY.
WEEKEND BREAK TO MANCHESTER VIA ALTON TOWERS OFFERS OPTIMISTIC LIGHT AT END OF TUNNEL FOR CROSS-ATLANTIC PAIR.
NYC FINALLY BAGS CHARITY JOB AND FUTURE-ALTERING COFFEE APPOINTMENT WITH A LORD (AS IN, ‘HOUSE OF’).
MORGAN AND NYC MAKE PLANS TO MOVE INTO A PROPER NICE FLAT WITH THEIR DRIVING INSTRUCTOR FRIEND, GO ON HOLIDAY TO IRELAND AND GET TATTOOS (NOT MATCHING).
LOVERS FINALLY GET BT TOTAL BROADBAND, THEN DISCOVER THE JOY THAT IS PRISON BREAK.
May 21, 2007
Originally written 16th May:
NYC just landed in NYC. I know this because the Virgin Atlantic website tells me so.
I searched the wrong date first time round and came up with a ‘CANCELLED’ red herring. But upon calling her to check, the Virgin voice-mail lady also welcomed me.
NYC’s actual flight was early. Nice, if not a little unexpected. I’m assuming that she got on it because I spoke to her after she’d checked in at Heathrow. Funny story: she went to Gatwick at 7am, not noticing that the printed-off itinerary clearly stated HEATHROW. No, I didn’t notice either, but NYC has famously bad time problems, which are inherited, unfortunately. So weird because she’s such a well-ordered person.
Alas, inevitably missing the real Gatwick flight, she managed to blag herself a free transfer later in the afternoon and, after bidding a teary goodbye, I saw her again outside work mid-voyage to zone numero 6. Bon voyage.
So that’s it; she’s finally buggered off home to marry two lesbian friends in the internet vicar fashion and I am stuck here, small and alone, which isn’t quite so bad as I’d imagined yet. The internet is, if I manage to post this, miraculously working again and I have a landline phone. No TV, yet, but that means I at least get to ‘pen’ this little ditty. Tonight I actually turned down a film premiere to walk through Brixton. I got the scary bus. It was OK. This building is scarier than Brixton High Street; I almost garrotted myself fumbling my way upstairs in pitch dark. But it’s OK. It’s OK. I’m trying to get over my terrifying fear of being alone. And I’ve decided the best way to live London is to do it on foot and, armed with my (borrowed-from-a-bisexual-socialist) Biography of London, I might even walk to work across the bridge…
Only if I run out of money, though.
Okay, everything I said is total crap because some woman is screaming outside and the internet’s gone off. This sucks.
May 7, 2007
When one of my favourite bloggists sent me an e-mail saying that he’d nominated me for a “Thinking Blogger” award of some kind, I was thrust guiltily into the Bad Writers’ Circle of Shame, scuffing my feet and making feeble excuses about my New Serious Job and having to relocate to Elephant and Castle over a Bank Holiday but they fell on hair-clogged ears: “Thinking blogger? You must be joking, pet! Your head’s so full of gunk, you wouldn’t know an original thought if it slapped you in the mug!” (I don’t know why my inner consciousness is a scathing Northerner; it just is).
To be honest I haven’t done much thinking of any kind over the British Bonk Holiday weekend. I have, however, been doing rather a lot of drinking, which sounds similar. It started on Thursday, following a three-hour business meeting with biscuits and a five-hour, four-glass-of-wine business “lunch” that ran into overtime.
NYC and I were supposed to move out of the Caretaker’s Cupboard that night with its owner on her way back from San Francisco, but I’d arranged to meet two college friends (mad actress and Cambridge-grad PR type) for a round of after-work beverages. This was clearly a huge misjudgement on my part, given that I was out of my wee tree before I even arrived. I eventually stumbled home at 10pm, completely hammered, only to pass out instantly - leaving poor NYC (who’d just lost her bar jobs due to, what else?, “financial troubles”) to pack, tidy, clean and move all on her own. I consequently spent two well-deserved days in the marital doghouse, until diplomatic negotiations were undertaken in the bedroom.
This weekend I have also drunk at bohemian barbeques in East London and at bar-closing parties in South London. I have drunk and filled my face for free at Soho restaurants and at our new flat - a love-nest attic in the pie-eyed sky, from which we can see Big Ben and the Millennium Wheel but the sirens blaze all night long (personally, I like the sounds of a wild-heart city after dark). Our neighbour is a portly white-haired gentlemen who offered us Drambuie, whisky, brandy and scotch out of a sock drawer and lives with a twentysomething Malaysian student in a Velvet Underground and Nico t-shirt - his “second boyfriend”. The local subway smells of homegrown weed, there’s a £3 Chinese takeaway next door and we witnessed a near-riot in Tesco Express. En route to Sevenoaks on Saturday, a disease-infested pigeon was a passenger on our carriage, flapping frantically over the screaming heads of the railroading weekenders before getting off in Tulse Hill.
Such is life on this side of the river.
May 2, 2007
I’m a bad, bad bloggist and I deserve to be punished.
Wait, that’s not strictly true; once, I was a wonderful, reliable bloggist - sculpting prosey entries out of everything from TFL adventures to my occupational and domestic dysfunction. I even have an entire category for those ‘just for the sake of it’ posts about not-a-lot, thus my beloved readers could always count on me for drivelly, feckless anti-updates.
But that was then, this is now, and rather a lot is different these days. Largely:
[1.] Then, I was working irregularly and unhappily, and I now have a proper job-type thing - in proper PR! For a proper, nice firm providing a proper, nice service! Not the kind of job where you are harrassed by alcoholic line managers, forced to bully people on the telephone (well, except other PR people and frankly, they deserve it) or generally crapped on by corporate sadists but a proper, nice, career-type job. I just hope I’m not shit at it.
[2.] I am trying to live more in the real world, less in the wwwworld because the livin’ is so good and easy.
[3. Okay, that’s a complete and utter lie. I just discovered the sweet, holy joy that is crackbook.
April 25, 2007
Something I’m working on; a snippet, a treatment:
Copyright me and my artistic license… oh, except the pictures in the imageboard, which I blatantly stole from Flickr for ‘effect’.
April 20, 2007
Breaking news: NYC’s visa application letter arrived at Ma and Pa’s house this morning… and it was APPROVED! Two year residency until 2009, bitches! She can “enter full-time employment” or even “start a business”.
Oh, it’s ON! It’s on.
And in answer to various questions, I don’t have a book deal (alas) but I may have a fanfuckingtastic job that doesn’t involve “media sales” (i.e.; cold-calling to sell advertising space)!
Wish me luck.
April 17, 2007
Sunday has always been God’s day for making us feel guilty, and yesterday was no exception.
NYC attended a whole circus of family-related fun to honour her wee cousin’s baptism and bought home some stew-filled Tupperware.
As for me, instead of falling habitually into my moping-lifelessly-on-the-couch act, I was pro-active! I cleaned and tidied the flat, went grocery shopping, organized stuff, prepared a potential dinner, laid out outfits and packed my bag for a VERY IMPORTANT interview, and wrote NYC a message inside an abstract gift card:
“This is me saying ‘I love you’ in your language”.
April 13, 2007
We’re okay.
Honestly.
Things are looking up, but I’ll write more when I have definitive news.
Love is a work in progress - and it’s not over ’til that fat Halifax ad hag sings in key*; not ’til Heather Mills-McCartney’s faux leg flies off and kills a nearby spectator during a swing routine in Dancing With The Stars.
But thank you for your notes of support. I apologise if I’ve been a neglectful blogger/commenter as of late.
Anyhoo, last night we decided to ditch the suffering routine temporarily and - despite our financial doom - ordered some take-out food, rented a movie (Stranger Than Fiction) and pledged to have a nice, normal, coupley night in. I am happy to report that this was a successful venture.
Earlier, I was describing us as being on two toothpick rafts in the middle of the Atlantic, pulled apart by two opposing currents but clinging together; neither coast looks all that good but you gotta pick one. And worse case scenario - Zoom Airlines will be offering £129 LD-NY flights from June.
* Okay, that’s a bit mean - it’s not her fault that the adverts are crap; as NYC said last night, “why are all the shoe-shiners in that commercial black?!”
April 11, 2007
Visa or no visa, NYC might be going back to NYC soon - and not just for the wedding.
It seems we both need to find ourselves… in different places.
***
Let me remind you of our particular shitpile:
Lacking the support of her crazy family (who know nothing about us, hence can’t quite understand why she’s still here) NYC desperately needs to get her foot in the academic door and pay off her Stateside debts before she ends up bankrupted, a la moi. But so far, the UK job market has shown no interest. Trapped in a cold, crap country, away from everything she knows, she is fading fast. She needs to remember herself, regain her strength and recoup, then create a safe space in which to begin her life. Only then, she says, will she be any good to me. You see, NYC shows love largely through actions, gestures and services (as opposed to me-style flouncy words and concepts) and without the autonomy to be a provider, she doesn’t know where to begin composing herself.
Meanwhile, I - messy and sad and lost and flighty - need to finish my education or find an occupation that doesn’t induce unpredictable fits of depression and self-delusion. It doesn’t help NYC’s anguish that we are always moving, always broke, and that I am always starting/quitting jobs because I’m on some reasonless voyage of self-discovery and experience. We cannot get credit, ghosts in the system, and nobody else is able to help us financially - the one Godforsaken thing that could actually ease our worrying somewhat.
Here, try a window into my current state of mind: “I’m so happy/I’m so depressed/This is what I want/I have nothing I want/I love my life/I hate myself”. I need to learn how not to fall apart at every hurdle and figure out why ordinary life overwhelms me so. Blaming my ‘only child’-hood only gets me so far.
And so, with no money, nowhere to live, no secure paycheck, me as the rent-paying breadwinner unable to hold down a job and NYC as the overqualified, cabin-fevered housewife - we are a right old mess. It appears that we were not adequately equipped for the challenges of same-sex bi-national twentysomething marriage (who is?).
Our intention to stay committed to each other is not in question, with various optimistic airport scenarios in play, but I’ve heard one too many cross-continental romantic tragedies. The idea of being so very apart after living, quite literally, in each others’ pockets for twelve months is soul-destroying.
But nothing has changed for us: she still needs to be there and I… I can’t be there. I looked into New York internships today but without addressing my various drawbacks as a potential candidate, it all costs money money money that I don’t have.
Could a long-distance arrangement benefit us? As it stands we are wasting each other, bickering and moping, when we should be loving and longing and learning. Would being apart reinforce those desires, if we were not stuffed together in a bad situation? I don’t know. I see only crying to Dusty Springfield records, getting horrendously drunk and dramatic on a fairly regular basis and expensive phonecall breakdowns/breakups. I mean, sure - I’m a drama queen, I’ve never had my heart broken, maybe it would be good for me… But I love her so fucking much; the cinematic quality of artistic, mentalistic, on-the-edge suffering does not compare to the good and true love of a good and true woman. I can’t bare to lose her because I’m not strong enough or responsible enough to support us… but I might.
I’m not good enough for her.
Until I met NYC, I was happy to let life do its thing. I was happy to be an aspiring everything accomplished nothing. I lived on hope, luck, imagination, buttons and my parents. And while she loves me for my impulsive, light-hearted Great Gatsbyishness, I cannot give her what she wants at this point in her life. We are not helping each other, only hurting.
I don’t know how we can change this, make sense of it, repair it. But I want to. She wants to. One belief I’ve definitively compounded through all this logistical questioning is how much we do love each other. Deeply, doubtlessly… But it seems that it’s not enough, as much as we want it to be.
I feel like my entire life is unravelling. The strains of trying to survive and provide are plunging me into anxiety-fuelled hell. I am completely incapable of being the rock, and I am losing it… if I ever had ‘it’ to begin with.
Dialogue is ongoing.
