2004-02-09..4:23 p.m.

I have weird indie-boy rocker hair today. Not a bad thing when styled, sculpted even, intentionally, but as I only discovered quite by accident that I�ve gone three shades of cool overnight, it�s all rather disconcerting.

Right. It�s been nearly a month since I began this thing, and though I wouldn�t know how to gauge audience participation if I tried, do think it�s about time I did a bit of a profile. Please excuse the intense awkwardness I�m emitting, but this sort of thing makes me feel terribly self-conscious.

So. I�m 23.

I�ve a degree in English lit and philosophy and was the editor of a campus mag for two years. When I grow up I think I�m going to be a professor. I moved here (London, UK) in May last year in order to follow that pursuit, deferring for a year in order to dyke up the financial tides. I�ll be going to Goldsmiths come October and be once again most deliciously immersed in literary quandaries and critical mishaps.

It�s all very full circle this moving to England. My mum moved to Canada when she was 23; I�m working five streets north of where she was born; I live in the same part of North London my dad used to do a voluntary ambulance shift, and where he and mum used to get down get funky back in the 70s before they pioneered off.

And at the moment I am getting thoroughly annoyed with the people at my work thinking all of a sudden that I don�t know what I�m doing. I�ve been doing it for 6 months. It�s not rocket science, in fact it involves no science whatsoever. Possibly fibbing, a great deal of psychoanalysis comes up. There�s the occasional bout of physics and geometry when manoeuvring corridors with large trolleys of heavy boxes, maths when making sure there are enough stamps on envelopes. But apart from that, it�s piss easy and I resent being made to feel like a FUCKING MORON by people who don�t know their arse from their elbow.

I�ve more-red-than-brown hair when I catch the sun, chocolate brown eyes with a grey ring around the outside, an abundance of tiny freckles inherited from all distant ancestry where blue eyes faded out, and a millimetre of off-centre asymmetry in my nose. In all honesty, only my mum is consciously aware of this.

I�m 5�6�, which in Canada makes me quite average, but here practically renders me giantess.

I run with a crowd of feminist geeks and critical hooligans; am very vegetarian, rather hoopy and quite political. I�ve several dreams of grandiose proportions, like reading all of Dickens by March next year, and being on someone�s work cited list by the time I�m 36, and becoming the youngest Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian.

I�ve been in love once. That was last year. Was hung and quartered by the experience, and suffice to say, I�m quite keen to try it again. I�d always been rather afraid of giving your heart, whole and true, to someone else, and frankly thought I was far too selfish for such malarkey; however as it turns out, outside the removal of heart with wooden spoon bit that seems to happen at the end, I�m entirely suited to it.

So that�s me.

meep