proper mammoth entry

Bloody hell. I just checked, and I haven’t properly written this stupid thing since last Monday, and today is Wednesday. It’s not exactly been an uneventful week either. I’m at LSE writing this, as I’m once again on sick leave. Sometimes being a mentalist has its benefits- for example, being able to take days off. It does, of course, have drawbacks, such as waking up in a cold sweat almost every day and being physically sick when I get too worried. I’m a bit like Stan from South Park in that respect.

What I find the funniest (though not in a humorous way- more an ironic chuckle and a half hearted shrug kind of way) is that I spent the whole of my time at uni hating it beyond all belief. I mean seriously, I hated it more than I hate working. I was a complete and utter mess. People thought I’d moved out of halls at one point but I’d just locked myself in my room for a month. But now, not being at uni, I wish more than anything that I was back here. I should have deliberately failed a year and done repeats. I miss the life of getting up late and being intellectual and people not looking at you like you’re a silly child just because you don’t really give a toss about strategic planning. Which is what my experience of the working world seems to be like. Oh yeah, and being completely screwed over by the HR department and my apparently (well, according to everyone else) nice manager. I don’t honestly know why I’m still there. I get told “no, you can’t have a pay rise (despite doing loads and loads of extra work for them) because you DON’T DESERVE IT”. I was so angry I cried.

Speaking of crying, I said in a recent post that I hadn’t been crying all that much recently. I’ve now completely screwed that one. First of all, I cried for half of the ballet last Tuesday. It was so fucking beautiful that it was all I could do. In the interval I was practicing fouette pirouettes on the balcony and kicked myself in the leg. Serves me right for trying it wearing cowboy boots I suppose. Then I cried on the bus on the way home, because I’d finished my book and it really moved me. I’m such a moron, I always cry at books and films. But this time I was properly weeping. I think I was over emotional because of the ballet. On Wednesday I cried a little bit after talking to my manager. She could blatantly tell as well. No wonder they won’t promote me. On Saturday, while waiting for the bus home after going to pointless pointless afterskool, I cried a bit too. However, I haven’t cried since, so maybe I’m over it. I have been having insane mood swings though. One minute I’m sad. The next I’m bouncing along the road screaming “it’s snowing!” while one of the press officers drags me out of the way of oncoming buses. I dunno. Maybe I should start taking my medication again? Or cut down on the amount of sugar I eat as this would make me slightly more level headed and less hyper… right? Ah whatever, it builds character. As does my tasty sandwich I brought in with me today. I recently figured out (oh whatever, I can’t lie on here as you all fucking read it- S told me) that you can put pesto on bread. I seriously think that this is going to be one of the most important discoveries of 2006 for Miss Lamb. I’m obviously not counting whatever discoveries I make while travelling as I’m hoping to hell that Ulaan Bataar will provoke slightly deeper thoughts than food. Not necessarily of course, as I’m still pretty sure I have a tapeworm.

My god, I really do blame other people/things for everything… most people would just say “yeah, I’m a greedy bastard”. Me? No, I blame a tapeworm. How would I have even got a tapeworm? (if anyone leaves any oh-so-funny anonymous comments answering that one I will be, unsurprisingly, completely unimpressed by their maturity… so just don’t)

Enough pointless rambling and onto rambling with slightly more, well, point. On Friday it was announced that we were getting a new carpet in the office and everything had to go into boxes. Someone pilfered all the boxes and we were left with three for the four of us. I underestimated the task and only realised how impossible it would be once the others had gone home and it was just me climbing across tables and trying to put the printer in a box. All the time talking to myself, which is my normal state when in the office alone. Otherwise I get super freaked out. After I’d thrown lots of files on top of the cupboard (out of sight out of mind), I headed over to the Roebuck with K. I haven’t seen her properly in fucking ages, which is stupid as she works on the floor below me. She’s so cool. We’ve decided to go to Marrakech together sometime soon. She was meant to be going to Thailand with T but he’s pretty useless and hasn’t done anything about it (he’s actually so useless that he almost forgot to tell his housemate he was moving out).

Just a slight interruption to say- someone sitting near me has just done the nastiest fart ever. C120 is officially hell. Is this why I didn’t like uni? No- the reasons for that were far more complex and won’t be gone into here- this is going to be enough of a super long entry as it is!

Anyhow, back to the story. K and I had some wine and chatted to the lovely barmaid who works there. I’d sent round a big email to everyone at work telling them to come to the pub but apart from us, only two others came- neither of them are particularly my friends. In fact, one is R’s manager, which is not necessarily a good thing. The other used to share an office with T and they have quite a strange incestuous relationship. Quite sweet though in a way. They always played cricket together on the 4th floor on Friday afternoons. Anyway, me and him had a moment of social awkwardness as he was asking me what suit he should wear when he gets married later in the year, seemingly forgetting that I don’t think he should be getting married at all. I mean, obviously it’s not for me to judge (although I will anyway) but I really don’t think that he cares about her enough to marry her.

I just had to interrupt that entry to go and eat with S. I feel utterly sick. It wasn’t very nice food, and we smothered it in Tabasco in an attempt to make it more edible, but it just ended being totally rank. We tried a little lunchtime bulimia (ie. being sick afterwards) but fucked it up royally by not actually being sick. It’s like our bodies were playing an evil, twisted joke on us- making us feel rubbish but not being able to vomit. We’d make rubbish bulimics. Anyway, despite that it was nice to hang out with S and have a proper girlie chat. She stills thinks I am paranoia personified, which I think is a much nicer way of saying what others might simply describe as “mental”. Now we’re sitting in the disabled peoples part of the library, trying to resist our fairly frequent urges to a) vomit, or b) do some internet stalking. Back to the story…

For some reason we started talking about Brussels sprouts, and one of the boys said that one day he would create a celebrity chef persona called Russell and have a book called “Russell’s Sprouts”. Everyone sort of groaned, except T, who looked really puzzled, before saying, “Oh!! It’s like the joke, isn’t it?” He looked far more amused than the lame play on words really allowed for, so eventually we asked him what joke he was thinking of. His answer to this was, “well, it’s what you call a spastic in a bag, isn’t it?” I have no idea how he got to that. However, it made me laugh so much that I nearly fell off the sofa and had tears running down my face (that doesn’t count as me crying though). A little later, someone mentioned something that happened in 1983 as if I should remember it. I pointed out that I wasn’t born until the following year, which prompted the usual: “you’re so young!!” I really hate being the youngest person at my work sometimes. People seem to use my age as a filler for gaps in the conversation. Highly tedious. We had a little debate about which was cooler: astronauts or cosmonauts (unanimous- cosmonauts), then I decided I wanted to go home as I was feeling antisocial and had drunk too much white wine (a drink I despise).

On the way home, I remembered that I had a copy of F1 Racing in my bag, so I had a little read. I know it’s ultimately sad, but I find it really amusing, in a super-geeky-formula-1-fan kind of way. I actually find telemetry, aerodynamics and chassis development interesting. Not that I really understand them or anything. I’m just an F1 geek really. Anyway, at one point I actually laughed out loud and all the people on the bus turned to look at me. When I got home I decided to try to get the modem working, but promptly fell over in the hallway, trying to attach cables. I hit my head. It hurt.

As I was lying on the ground, swearing quietly (or what I thought was quietly anyway), #3’s boyfriend came out of her room and asked me to sign something. I felt a bit bad for waking them up so I agreed. Only after signing it did I think to ask what it was. I was told I was now officially a witness on their mortgage. Does anyone know about these things? I asked R and she said I’d signed my life away but I think she was winding me up because she knew I was hungover. I don’t know why they’d want me as a witness anyway. I’m practically insolvent.

I woke up on Saturday morning to find a letter from the bank saying they’d turned me down for my loan and my credit card. Does anyone know how long CCJ’s last for? I won’t write too much about finances, as those who read this regularly will know that it’s prone to make me vomit… and right now is not when I want to be thinking about things like that. I went back to bed for a bit, but thankfully woke up in time to watch the F1 season preview on ITV. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do this weekend (as in, where I’m going to watch it). But watch it I most definitely shall. So sad… I got a bit of a weird message from J saying that he was having a breakdown (ie. had taken too much coke or something) and that he couldn’t see me. I wasn’t too fussed, I’d been expecting that. After the experience with my ex, I don’t really want anything to do with druggie boys with stupid issues. That’s my prerogative (not the boy bit, but the other bits). I had a bit of a chat with the Wolf, who told me about nearly getting it on with some girl who chopped her finger off and is now suing him for negligence. He was walking his dog while on the phone, and he kept letting the dog off the lead so that it would fight other dogs. He’s such a liability (though I love him all the same- when he’s not molesting me or my friends).

Eventually I made my way into town to meet S, and after having a drink in her halls, we got a cab to afterskool. I was being really gobby in the cab, so by the time I got to afterskool I was a bit grumpy and had used up all my energy and didn’t want to talk to anyone. I only really wanted to talk to M. In the end I just left and cried at the bus stop for a bit and tried to decide if I really was crazy and felt a bit scared. I’m not very good at looking after myself- though I’m very good at looking after other people. I’ve never been ill so often as living in camp mansions, mainly because I am totally incapable of doing anything by halves and I do silly things like sleep with the windows open when it’s snowing. I’m so not 21. Except, of course, I am, and I’ll be 22 soon. I was getting really paranoid about the way I look too. I don’t want another eating disorder. That’s so emo.

On Sunday, however, I was up pretty bright and early and did some washing and cleaned the kitchen, etc. I went to Tesco in Brixton wearing enormous pink sunglasses and felt like a superstar. There’s something about those sunglasses that makes me feel so cool. I know it’s sad. But it was really sunny and UV damage in your eyes in very serious etc etc, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Then I went out for lunch with M and A and SH, which was very cool. We went to Bandidos despite there being a murder out the back the other day. I figured that as long as we didn’t go out the back we’d be fine. We tried to think of the best thing to graffiti on a dog, but although we agreed that dog graffiti was funny, we couldn’t think of anything. Banksy-esque we clearly are not. Afterwards we went for a walk in Brockwell Park. I can’t believe I hadn’t been there before, seeing as it’s right next to camp mansions. At the top of the hill (in the park) you can see for miles and miles- Canary Wharf, the city… it’s really cool. We walked in twos and I felt like I was in Pride and Prejudice, taking a turn after dinner. Now all I need is a suitably Jane Austen dress, instead of the fluorescent pink thing I’d chosen to wear. And Jane Austen heroines probably wouldn’t have laughed at the girl who fell over on her rollerblades, nor would they have laughed so much at jokes about paedophiles. I am a bad person.

Just as an aside, I just went to the loo in the LSE library. It freaks the hell out of me as it was scene of breakdown numero uno during the whole dissertation period. I don’t normally get negative associations with places (just as well really) but the library is pretty fucking awful. As well as going completely crazy trying to finish the stupid dissertation, I remember throwing a book at my ex in the 2nd year and trying to throw a chair at him when we were revising for our finals. Though I’ve got to say, for a library, I also have some good memories too- for example, meeting S.

Going back to where I left off- after they’d all gone I wandered around my room for a while and sat on my bed for an inordinately long amount of time instead of getting ready to go out. By the time I was ready and had got into town, everyone had already gone to Camden, so I went straight there, though thankfully M realised that I am a bit thick and wouldn’t find my way by myself so he met me at the tube station. We went to this bar or venue or whatever the fuck you call it, called Green Note, and heard the most diabolical racket you could ever imagine. Seriously. NOIZE or whatever wanky pretentious spelling. I still can’t get over how bad it sounded. SH pointed out that it sounded like the holocaust. Even worse, it was really packed and the beer was horrible and most of the people in the audience were stroking their chins and smoking their gauloises in the most sickening way. I stared at the ceiling for a while and tried to make my toes as flat as possible, to try and combat my fucked up feet. That didn’t take my mind off the godforsaken din so I resorted to thinking about smoking and how much I liked it.

And you know what?? Just as I get to the interesting part of the blog, I have run out of time… and I will have to write the rest tomorrow when I maybe maybe go back to work. I assure you that it is all very interesting though. Well, it is to me anyway, and that’s all that counts…right?? I can’t believe it’s taken me all day to write this bloody entry. I really should be a student. I don’t have time to have a job, what with all this blogging and stalking etc.

Oh yeah, and the stalking is not something that is going to be elaborated on. It’s something we all do but it’s probably best not talked about over the dinner table (a little like masturbation in a way- though that’s possibly slightly more accepatable… though intrinsically linked to stalking, really, if you think about it).

Much love from camp lamb