Mosaic
Topic: Belle de Jour
Forewarning: I only just this week discovered how to do a < strike >
If you have two hours of sleep over a three day period, then you see a grey lady walking through the kitchen at the corner of your vision, sudden holographic large spiders scuttly up walls, and even indoors, it looks like a fine rain is falling.
Last Thursday, someone at work puked in technicolour down a stairwell, mananging to splatter three flights of stairs, vertically. I was the most senior person onsite, so of course I did the senior thing, and walked away, pretending not to have noticed the streaming puke shower behind me.
Yesterday I was sat researching something on the office pc at work when I fell off the chair. The whole thing tipped on its side.
There was nothing wrong with the chair. Some subconscious part of me simply decided to sink in a south westerly direction, and take the comfy wheelie chair with me.
I just about managed to quell a fit of sheer, futile pointless fury on Monday morning, on the grounds that it was stupid. Somehow I became incensed that most British blogs I've read this weekend (excepting four bloggers whom I've already thanked) didn't bother to abate their tales of deoderant and how supercilious they were when they went to Sheffield for even one millisecond to mention what happened in Madrid.
I swear, I was shaking with pent up rage about it - I was all set to delete every link apart from the four who mentioned there'd been a terrorist massacre, like, next door.
Dunno where that came from. I can't surely have pre- mid- post- and inter- menstrual ferociousness tension, can I?
When I don't sleep, my stomach bulges into this perfectly round, protruding pot belly very rapidly, until I do. I've been patting it and feeding it Snickers all day. Seriously, today I had to wear an old oversized gap skirt of Tybalt's, because not one single pair of jeans or trousers I owned (in a wide range of sizes!) would close over the pot. Me! In a skirt! With a bowling ball belly! What larks, Pip, what larks.
If I hide my sock drawer in the hallway, and sit in the space, I can pretend I have a very low very uncomfortable desk, and imagine the pain in my legs is because I'm not used to Japanese furniture.
I'm trying to resist the impulse to take my walkman on the morning / afternoon walk to and from work. It's not like the deep throaty rowrrr of traffic is particularly precious to me. I just want to hold off the wealthy isolation that music affords me as long as possible. This morning, not having a walkman as I walked to the area office, unsure of my way and stumbling slightly to make my deadlines, I heard:
A loon-grinned pretty older woman asking me if I'd like to share a tract about Jesus.
The morning chorus being shattered by a particularly resonant and hoarsely grouching crow.
My footsteps, which made me look at the mist hanging aroung the fountain in Mayow Park as I passed it.
The sound of a street sweeper on almost every single street corner of Lewisham. Come on, Mister Mayor, you blobby self congratulatory tosser (I met him last week, this is true) - six street sweepers in one mile of quiet side streets is more than entropy. No-one could chuck out empty crisp packets fast enough to keep them all employed, surely?
The three or four pairs of small boys wrestling.
It's obscene to have so much energy as small boys do.
The office workers who are quietly, insanely singing to themselves. But not quite quietly enough. I like to think of them as nascent Jeffrey Dahmers - I imagine that the tedium of their cubicle-centric environments have unhinged them six years ago, and today is the day they'll allow the other staff to notice; the day of becoming - of taking back their stapler and burning down the building.
(Well, you have to have some way of feeling superior of a morning.)
Someone in my building lobs half a loaf of mouldy bread into the communal garden outside my window every day, and I get to sit and watch Cyril and five wood pigeons (my most hated feathered foe) fight for it.
Cyril
Anyway, she swears she's dropped it, too.
Back on the coldest night of February, I ordered a large mink blanket (fake fur, though) online, to curb the shivers. It still hasn't arrived, and now every day I walk past the nasty nylon cyan navy and turquoise spattered fleece throws labelled "MINK!" in their plastic carry cases in the fifty pee shop window, and shiver a little inside.
Updated: Wednesday, 17 March 2004 4:34 PM GMT
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