Woke up at sodding 5:30 with killer throat. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. On Sunday it's the memorial. On Monday I have new staff starting. On Wednesday I'm going to Morocco. I don't think I can actually speak today, which is a bit of an issue given that I'm supposed to be saying something at the service on Sunday. And I can't even go back to sleep because it just hurts. So I'm off to see the Wizard at the NHS drop-in centre. I would just like to point out that this is something Labour set up. They win.
I feel a bit funny.
I just wrote a very self-pitying entry about how rubbish I feel and how cross I am but it was boring and you might not want to be my friend anymore if you see how boring and petty I am so I've deleted it. Suffice it to say I am properly pissed off, am probably not even going to be able to speak tomorrow, and basically bored out of my skull. I'd go back to sleep, but oh, I can't, because it's difficult to sleep when there's glass in your throat and the world is spinning. Gosh, I should really stop writing, because I just can't help being boring and self-pitying. I really wnt to shout at someone, so it's lucky for my brothers that I can't actually talk this morning.
What pisses me off is that I went to bed full of childlike hope that I'd be better today, but nope, worse.
Now my own mother tells me that my face has swollen up and I look like a hamster. Hamster-face the croaky widow - coming soon to a Hawksmoor church near you!
Last night, after a week off work in which I have nearly died of boredom, I naughtily went out, but only for a night in with the girls. It was maybe a bit stupid to go out given that I fainted on the way there, but I don't really care because it was so good to see people I'm not genetically related to.
But I came away a bit disconcerted, and had nightmares of being attacked by evil babies. Why? Well one of my girls has a 4 year old daughter, so we hung out with her for a bit before she went to bed. That was really funny, because she's at that age where they say hysterical things, and all was fine. But then she went to bed, and we had a chat. The subject of babies and careers came up, and when I mentioned that if I have kids at all I probably won't take longer than 9 months maternity leave, they looked at me as though I'd just said I eat babies. I told them that I have lots of friends with mothers who'd worked, and one said 'yeah and I bet they're emotionally screwed up'. Well no, actually, they're not, and I know poeple who are emotionally crippled who had a parent at home so ha! Anyway I got all cross and also hurt and scared.
Why is it that it is totally fine for a man to take his one week paternity leave then head back to work? Why should the biological fact breastfeeding mean I'm supposed to take a decade out of work? Sacrifice is fine, but why is it still so gendered?
And now I feel all class-torn and traitorous, and I know that despite having come a long way since the seventies, we're really not there yet. When I was in primary school, my mum was ancient compared to the baby-mothers of my peers, and she'd had me at 27. I can't help but feel that it would be a lot easier to put your career on hold for your kids if you were 20, and didn't have one yet anyway. Not a single one of the women I work with has kids - they'll probably leave if they do. I love my job, and I love being back here, but I do feel like I've stepped back in time.
I feel that if I don't have kids, the Christians will disapprove. If I do, and stay at home to look after them, my university friends will disapprove, but if I don't, my oldest friends will think it's sad that Becky came back from Cambridge all hard-faced.
I can't sleep, so I have gotten up and done some work, but I'm still not mentally dead, so I thought I'd blog myself to sleep.
But now I can't think of anything boring to write.
Everything is too exciting at the moment.
I guess I could write about how I just trimmed my fringe. I just trimmed my fringe.
Or I could write for a while about how much I love to pluck my eyebrows, and how much I wish I was all Latino and hairy so that I would have lots of little hairs to pluck. It is very satisfying, particularly if you up the challenge stakes by using pin-point tweezers and no mirror. Satisfying yes, but exciting no.
Food poisoning is also boring. At first it was a bit of a new experience, but what excitement there was has worn off, and I am bored. I can't sleep because the bed-springs are hurting me where I used to have flesh that masked them. I am so hungry, and right now I want to eat a big steak pie, but I can't, and in any case there isn't one. My mouth is all sore like I have sub-scurvy again (though I don't), and I'm sure it's because of having a week off vitamins. I am also bored of being boring and thinking about food all the time. When I'm not thinking about food I am having unhealthy thoughts about how exciting it is to be skinny again, so that's not good either.
Another boring thing is women's magazines. Having had a long, mentally challenging day at work, I bought Glamour on my way home, and was just bored by it. Like bored to the point of not reading a single article, and just looking at pictures of clothes. OK so I did a quiz too, but that was only to break up the pictures. Why would anyone in the world want to read an interview with Beyonce? Or Lily Allen's diary from Paris? Boring, boring, boring, though I did like the clothes.
Something else that's boring is TV.
Well I'm still not bored enough to sleep, so that didn't really work. I'm sorry I had to share that with you.
Read this in the Guardian today. Basically the dude (from the airline industry) is saying that we should think twice before decrying the impact of flight on global warming. He makes some interesting points, and I really want to believe him.
Flying on budget airlines is one of my favourite things. I love...
finding a £3 flight to a random place in Europe, packing, walking through the beeping arch, seeing my bag x-rayed, coffee in the departure lounge, the last-minute trip to Boots. I love surreptitiously racing the other passengers onto the plane in order to get a window seat, bursting through England's dull grey clouds into glorious skies above, rifling through the in-flight magazine looking at all the horrific things I'd never buy. I love guessing what place lies below, what river winds beneath our wings. I love landing and stepping out into a new temperature, spotting our bags on the carousel. I like destinations too, but the getting there is a big part of it for me. About 9 months ago I signed a pledge to take no more than 4 short-haul flights this year. I would be ecstatic if someone could prove to me that it's ok to take more. I'd buy shares in Ryanair.
But the truth is that for all this man's statistics and comparisons, the fact remains that we cannot merely justify things because they are not as bad as other things. I want to live the kind of life that is free, and for me freedom involves removing the blinkers, and looking holistically. Flying might be better than a hybrid car, but the best use of my money might be to take a trip on public transport (lovely trains) to a rural area in Britain and to spend time appreciating what is there, loving nature again, and putting my disposable income into local economies. Being reconciled to nature means gaining a balanced understanding of what my impact is, and judging where to minimise that.
So I won't be renewing my pledge next year, because I don't think pledges are what it's about. I think I need to go further really and, in business-speak, carbon-audit my life, or in sociologist speak, confront my alienation from nature. I'm glad I did it this year though. It has saved me money, and mroe importantly, has made me reconsider my own attitude to using the world's resources. Growing up poor is dangerous in many ways, but for me the most dangerous aspect is the embedded belief that society owes me something for everything I missed - "we didn't have a car growing up, so I'm gonna claw back my carbon credits now". So it's about choosing to have less... and knowing that less truly is more.
I currently only have 29 contacts on my phone. It makes me feel like I'm 10 again. Except I didn't have a mobile when I was 10. Not like these youth of today. Pah!